A Trip to Berlin

The origins of the eurogame movement are usually traced to two German innovations. The first is the Spiel des Jahres, a gaming award that began offering awards in 1979, and which honored its first homebrew German game, Scotland Yard (1983), just a few years later. The second is Essen Game Fair, which debuted that same year and quickly became the second major gear in the engine that would soon be propelling German games to success.

Of course it’s wrong to say that those early Euros were German games, because they were in truth West German games. At the time the country was still split, with East Germany then being a satellite of the USSR. So if you look at the maps you’ll find Essen, Prien am Chiemsee (the home of F.X. Schmid), Munich (the home of Schmidt Spiele), Ravensburg (the home of Ravensburger), and Stuttgart (the home of Kosmos) were all in West Germany. The Special K of early German designers — Reiner Knizia, Wolfgang Kramer, and Klaus Teuber — similarly all originated in West Germany.

Which all goes to say that if you want to make a pilgrimage to the German Game homeland, the western part of Germany is the place to go. Essen is the high holy spot, of course, but Munich would probably be a great alternative for really seeing German game culture in its native environment.

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