Pandasaurus Games has heavily downsized its Spiel Essen booth this year, after finding it can still sell similar numbers of its hit games through Asmodee arm EPN while slashing its overheads and logistical workload.

The US publisher has shifted to using European Player Network, Asmodee‘s specialist English-language sales and distribution operation in the region, to handle its stock and sales at the giant German show – removing the need for Pandasaurus to transport and store hundreds of games, staff its own retail operation and devote much of its booth to selling them.

Pandasaurus had run substantial booths at Spiel – the world’s biggest board game fair – for several years following the Covid-19 pandemic, but told BoardGameWire its experience using EPN last year persuaded it to heavily scale back its own footprint for the 2026 show in October.

CEO Nathan McNair said Pandasaurus previously spent more than €50,000 ($57,000) attending Spiel with its larger setup, compared to between $20,000 and $25,000 under its current model.

He said games Pandasaurus expects to be hits still sell similar numbers of copies – typically 300 to 500 – under the new setup – although added that Pandasaurus now receives roughly half as much revenue per sale.

“The revenue is lower because obviously EPN will get a portion of the proceeds, but our cost is so much lower that the overall cost to revenue ratio is very similar,” McNair said.

This year EPN will handle the company’s stock and sales operation and host three Pandasaurus demo tables within its booth, while the publisher’s own, smaller stand will be focused largely on meeting space and additional demos of upcoming games.

Titles being shown off by Pandasaurus this year include Alex Cutler design Sandcastles, Machi Koro: Life from Masao Suganuma and embroidery-focused card game Fadenfroh from Jordy Adan and Alexander Pfister.

McNair said, “The show is very expensive to get to and logistically trying to run a large booth half a world away is a lot. Running a show like GenCon is already a lot – but finding booth staff for the show when we need to staff 20 or more demo tables, stock games, sell games, figure out how to legally import/pay VAT/collect cash/deposit the cash in the US bank or get a correct license to take credit cards in Europe is a logistical nightmare.

“So, what we found is a way to more economically attend the show, get some marketing done, sell games to players, make sure we are demoing games and getting the meetings we need without having to spend €50,000 or more on the show itself.

“Our cost to attend with this model is roughly 1/3rd as much overhead, and while we make less per order when a game is sold our sales are actually just as strong, so players are still getting the games they want – we come close enough to ‘breaking even’ and it’s just a lot less work for us.”

McNair said US publishers “typically have a smaller footprint in continental Europe than we like to think”, and questioned the need for some English-language publishers to operate such large stands at Spiel.

“A lot of us run booths but I find it a bit strange given our limited sales in the region that so many have large booths,” he said.

“Some of course do sell and distribute in German (or other languages) themselves so that makes more sense – but for English only US publishers continental Europe isn’t our core market.

“If you look at US trade shows for the most part the only European companies with booths tend to be those that sell themselves in the US.”

He added, “I don’t want to tell other folks how to run their business and I’m a big believer that the folks with larger booths probably know more about their situation than me – so they may have found that this is really effective for them.

“I would absolutely prefer this model – it’s just a lot less work – besides the money difference I mentioned has taken the workload of prep and running the show to a fraction of what it was to try and run a larger booth in Germany.”

Pandasaurus’ decision to cut back on the size of its booth comes as Spiel itself continues to move in the opposite direction – with an expansion into all eight main halls at the Messe Essen exhibition centre for the first time expected to see the event challenge its record 220,000 attendance set last year.

Spiel said earlier this year that it had reached the reached the limits of its expansion at its long-time home after boosting floor space to 81,200 sq m – larger than 15 American football fields – amid what it called “overwhelming interest” from exhibitors.

Merz Verlag said demand for the additional space was coming both from existing exhibitors wanting significantly larger stands and an unusually high number of first-time exhibitors, with all available stands booked before the April 30 registration deadline.

And Pandasaurus’ smaller presence does not mean it sees less value in attending, according to McNair.

He said, “For me I really like to focus on meetings, seeing friends, trying to check out some games and building awareness of the new titles at the show – and I think the setup we have works really well for just that at a much lower lift,” he said.

“Essen is a much more international show in a lot of ways than most other board game conventions, so we know there are fans there who want to check out our new games really badly and I want to make sure they can – but if I can do it in a way that is less work and less risk for us I prefer that strongly.”

Spiel Essen 2026 takes place at Messe Essen from October 22 to 25.

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I never played Spyrium, William Attia’s 2013 game of steampunk factories, but I heard good things about its worker placement/removal system. Greylune, as near as I can tell, recaptures that title’s core appeal, while swapping the geared top hats for a more generic — but maybe more blandly appealing? — fantasy universe.

As expected, the best part has everything to do with the workers. The core system here is genuinely brilliant, a series of placements and eventual withdrawals that feel like direct assaults on one’s fellows at the table without ever laying a cross finger upon anyone’s shoulder.

The idea is that workers are placed into a marketplace to secure various goods. There are a few types of said goods: items and companions, both of which require purchasing, and amenities, which can be visited more than once. Their main commonality is that buying something from the market has two big restrictions. First, you can only purchase something by removing a worker — thus shifting yourself into the game’s second phase, which prevents you from placing any more workers until the next year — and second, the more workers there are surrounding something, the higher its cost.

The inverse is also true. Rather than pulling off a worker (teehee) to buy a card, their withdrawal can earn a pocketful of gold instead. This works by the same formula: you remove a worker, count how many other workers are next to the card in question, and then earn that many coins. They’re probably engaging in commerce or something. I preferred to pretend they were pickpockets.

As systems go, there’s no doubting its cleverness. Everything is wholly player-driven. It’s pretty rare that I’ll pay attention to how many coins a rival is holding, but here it’s common to tally someone’s holdings. Often, the placement of a single worker can drive up a price just beyond their reach, prompting them to first place another worker to earn the necessary cash, and thus providing a window to swoop in and nab whatever sword, horse, or buddy they were eyeing.

It’s a rather snitty game like that. Also a razor-taut one, every coin and card counted to its precise change.

The reason for all those fairly-gotten gains is to outfit your knight for adventure. Everything has its place: companions provide reactive abilities that make it easier to travel and survive encounters, while items generally serve to improve your skills or move your knight deeper into the wild. There are also two flavors of strength, cherry and blueberry, to represent swords and sorcery.

So you head out into the unknown to beat up a troll, help a hermit, or take part in a joust. You know. Hero stuff. But in my favorite twist, it isn’t enough to accomplish an objective. These encounters are tucked under your player board, where they then sit, doing nothing, until you get around to sending one of your followers to boast of your achievements in one of the local taverns. This requires more worker placement and removal, whether the following spring or because you’ve planned ahead.

It’s rather impressive to see in motion. Despite the removal of anything resembling steampunk, the game moves according to clockwork logic, everything feeding back into itself: workers outfit knights who bring back deeds for workers to boast about or resources for them to spend at the market, around and around, until you’ve exhausted everyone and it’s time to tuck in for the winter.

At the same time, it’s a game laden with regrets. It isn’t uncommon to move onto the next phase only to immediately see the gap in your plans. Or, more often, for another player to come along and do something that forces you to think more reactively. Encounters exist to be stolen; quests to be one-upped; jeweled idols to be purchased out from under another prospective client.

It feels good, though. Really good. Which makes me wish the game didn’t feel like it was left at eighty percent completion. There’s a big difference between replayability and variety, with lots of modern games leaning toward the latter. I would guess that Attia was designing for tightness of experience.

But also… Greylune needs some variety. Every session reveals nearly every card, both in the marketplace and the wild. There’s such a lovely sense of discovery to those first sessions that I found myself wishing I could go back and experience it again. Here, knowing what’s coming is much of the battle. On my second play, I knew I would buy the horse if it showed up. Then I knew I would try for a potion strategy. In the last round, which features no variance from play to play, it’s inevitable that a powerful tavern will appear, one that awards rather large quantities of points. So I planned from the very beginning to save most of my quests for the last moment and forego adventuring altogether. There were little hiccups, but the strategy worked well enough to lap most of my opponents. It felt good, to be sure. But it also felt sterile and mechanical.

Ultimately, Greylune both impressed me and left me chilly. Its core system is downright smart, and the set dressing around it feels good to handle. But it’s like handling a machine; a fidget toy, perhaps, or an orrery, spinning along its foreordained orbit. Pleasant but cold; beautiful but delicate. These days, I like my games to apply some force when they’re ramming their shield into my teeth, and Greylune’s touch is simply too dainty to cause so much as a wiggle.

 

A complimentary copy of Greylune was provided by the publisher.

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