All the Games We Played at Spiel Essen 2025 Ranked
Just for reference, the population of Klaipėda, the third largest city in Lithuania is approximately 161 000 people. The number of attendees in this year's Spiel Essen was 220 000 people, meaning they managed to cram the entirey of Klaipėda and much more into just eight convention halls and every one of those people were buying board games.
I appreciate that that is maybe not everybody's jam, and aspects of it are not our jam either. But getting our mitts into a jar of Bonne Maman filled with gooey new board game releases - put a bib on me and fire up the toaster!
In this special joint episode of No Pun Included and Talk Cardboard we cover 16 new releases from Spiel Essen 2025, which you can either listen to here or partake in the video version https://youtu.be/NHVLn-ZxVWs
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On to the timestamps:
0:00 Cold Open
2:46 Intro
5:42 Night Soil (Unranked)
9:11 Bouba Kiki
14:14 Nocturnis
17:56 Formidable Farm/Formidabel!
22:00 Tax the Rich
27:44 Echoes of Time
36:30 Fearless
41:30 National Economy
48:23 Thesauros
1:00:34 biD Coin
1:07:20 Kikai/Bricolage Heads
1:16:46 Tag Team
1:26:59 Recall
1:36:14 ???
1:56:10 ??
2:03:33 ?
2:14:53 Outro
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2:15:14
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2:15:14
Panda Spin, Primates, Tycoon: India 1981
Spinning pandas, evolving primates, and... Capitalism! We have all three for you in this episode - thankfully not all in the same game.
We could have had three games about mammals, but we didn't think this through.
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Onto the timestamps:
00:00 Cold open
02:09 Intro
03:45 Panda Spin
18:34 Primates
32:51 Tycoon: India 1981
48:25 Correspondence
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57:34
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57:34
Magical Athlete, Identity, Out of Sorts
Only three games this episode? What gives? Well, in the tried and true brand tradition, we decided to go back to our original formula. But no sad trombone noises please - we're really, definitely, honestly going to make it work this time...
On this episode, we have Identity - a trick taking game that promises personality, Out of Sorts - a game of inventing a cataloguing system for books in an alien library, and Magical Athlete - a game of racing a banana, a giant baby, and various other quirky things round a track.
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SHIRTS! Find them on https://no-pun-included-shop.fourthwall.com/
On to the timestamps:
00:00 Cold open & intro
05:50 Identity
14:16 Out of Sorts
28:57 Magical Athlete
42:03 Correspondence
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45:22
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45:22
Brink
There are episodes where we bring as much knowledge as we can about whatever board game we are talking about. And then there are episodes where we just want to share why something didn't click so much that we didn't want to go beyond game one. Apropos of nothing, today we'll be chatting about Brink, a "trading cubes in space" game that conceptually riffs on Catan but in execution whiffs on us.
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On to the time stamps:
00:00 Cold Open & Intro
Work in Progress:
2:08 Tenby
7:26 Railroad Tiles
10:42 Rumble Nation
18:53 Winter Rabbit
Audience Correspondence:
25:05 Vantage, Neurodivergence in Board Games
Main Feature:
31:23 Brink
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59:18
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59:18
Hot Streak
Well, Hot Dog! Do we have an episode for you! We peruse the lofty promises of Vantage, try to keep ourselves on track in Railroad Tiles, discuss whether selling doughnuts at night is really worth your time in Taiwan Night Market, and Efka tells us about angry dice you can chuck about in the bath, in Wroth.
But wait! That's not all! The main game on our podium is Hot Streak - which not only has a hot dog, but also a fish, a bear, and HM the Queen herself in a game of racing, falling down, getting back up again, and trying all over again. Phew.
If you’d like to check out our bonus episodes - become a patreon supporter on https://patreon.com/nopunincluded
SHIRTS! Find them on https://no-pun-included-shop.fourthwall.com/
On to the timestamps:
00:00 Cold Open & Intro
Work in Progress:
00:54 Vantage
19:14 Railroad Tiles
25:01 Taiwan Night Market
28:26 Wroth
Audience Correspondence:
36:19 Gaming Tables
Main Feature:
41:23 Hot Streak
Australia