Armageddon

Queen Games, 3-4 players, 90 mins, 12+

One of the most heavily publicized games of the show, Armageddon also had some of the best artwork, which is what drew us in. From the cover, you’d think this was an heir to the Fallout series, but while the rags’n’goggles aesthetic is there in full force, Armageddon is actually more of a settlement builder than an epic quest.

Queen Games tends to publish games that feel quite abstracted from their theme, and Armageddon is no different. The artwork might be evocative, but there’s not much about the meeple auction system or the often inscrutable chains of symbols that appear on its beautifully illustrated cards to link the theme to the action. However, there’s a decent amount of crunch if you have enough imagination to look at a blue or yellow, vaguely man-shaped wooden token and see either a military survivor or an engineer. But compare it with, say, Dead of Winter, and Armageddon starkly highlights the spiritual differences between American games and Euros.

Cottage Garden

Edition Spielwiese, 1-4 players, 45-60 mins, 8+

This is Uwe Rosenberg's other release of the show, and it couldn't be more different from his maximal pillage-simulator A Feast For Odin. For a start, Cottage Garden features sleepy cats as playing tokens. It's a lovely, short, gentle proposition, in which players try to build up pretty beds of flowers in a manner not dissimilar to Tetris.

The game is a rework of Rosenberg’s even gentler 2014 hit Patchwork, expanded to allow more or fewer players, bringing with it a mite more complexity and some absolutely gorgeous watercolor artwork from Andrea Boekhoff. It might be on the simple side, and the show printing came with an A4 sticker sheet to fix bugs with board components and the rulebook, but the whole package is so irrepressibly charming that it doesn't matter. This is something you could use to get your mom into boardgames, but we're looking forward to playing it with anyone and everyone.

Railroad Revolution

What’s Your Game?, 2-4 players, 45-90 mins, 12+

The golden age of steam is another rich furrow ploughed by game designers—and, if the ranks of tables demoing Railroad Revolution are any guide, by gamers, too. Railroad Revolution is a straight-up tale of competing train companies in 19th century America, building track and placing workers along the way (and for some reason encompassing shares in the telegraph company).

There’s definitely a solid game involving careful management of your worker pool hidden among some dreadfully uninspiring graphic design (a criticism that can be levied against too many games at Essen this year). To look at the dreary board with its unintuitive symbols and shapeless wooden tokens, you wouldn’t think it, but it’s possible that gamers on the continent simply aren’t so shallow...

Blood Bowl

Games Workshop, 1-4 players

The Games Workshop fantasy football simulator is back, baby, and it's good again. There's a whole new box arriving soon, 14 years after the last boxed version, with tweaked mechanics and all-new miniatures and art. Once again, you're getting a team of slow, armored orcs and a team of slightly nimbler, still-quite-armored humans with which to play the best ever version of hyper-violent fantasy gridiron. Except, since Games Workshop wiped out the Warhammer world and started from scratch, it's now set in a fantasy parody world in which racial differences are settled not by war but by murderous sports fans.

The classic formula is still very much in evidence, but the somewhat frustrating rule which ended your turn early if one of your players fumbled or missed a tackle has been removed. The rest of the package has been designed with traditional GW aplomb for its fifth edition; at least one expansion is coming, adding new teams and tournament rules, while rules will be made available for all your old teams.

Dark Souls

Steamforged games, 1-4 players

The biggest ever board game Kickstarter, Dark Souls brought in $4.5 million and gave its creators a headache just thinking up additional stretch goals. We played a short prototype with one of the designers, Alex, and had our ass handed back to us. We stayed alive just long enough to discover how smart the mechanics were before we were eviscerated by the Dancer of the Boreal Valley, who was controlled by nothing more than a malevolent deck of behavior cards, some smart design, and fiendish luck.

Steamforged Games has nailed the atmosphere and has definitely got the difficulty sorted, while the prototype miniatures were gorgeous. The game is due out in April, and while there's obviously a lot we haven't seen, backers can rest assured that it's in good hands so far.