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b'I don\'t even know how long I\'ve been doing this. My window-shopping the Essen lists predates this podcast of nine years. Who else fondly remembers Mik Svellov\'s Brett\'n\'Board], Ken Tidwell\'s Game Cabinet, or all the other places we learned about Essen before, during, and after the fair? Now, of course Eric Martin does an amazing job here at BGG with the annual Essen Preview. It has nearly six hundred items when I finally stopped looking on Friday. Wow! \\xa0 It took me two passes to get through these lists. For some reason, I found a LOT more games that interest me this year. Is that because there are more of the shorter, family strategy games that I like? That might be true. Not that there were a lot of the 45-minute "superfillers," but I think there were more filler/microgames at the low end--under 20 euros, under 30 minutes. The ones that are still Love Letter derivatives about bluffing & hidden identity don\'t interest me, but there several others. As before, we see more and more offerings from other countries, especially Japan, Korea, and Poland. \\xa0 My first pass through that megalist came up with 30 I was really excited/curious about, and another 50 that had something that sparked my interest. Though that\'s 80 games (waaaay too many to discuss on the podcast), that\'s culling out more than 80% of the titles in the full preview. Then I squeezed it down to ten I put in my companion geeklist, and discuss on this episode, plus several other titles that work their way into the discussion. Wow! \\xa0 Also, I can\'t resist some meta-analysis of the entire list, and how well my previous years\' anticipation lists matched what became my keepers from those years. \\xa0 Finally, this episode anticipates something else, too--my return to BGG.con! I\'m so excited about this. I went to the first BGG.con a decade ago, but it\'s grown & changed quite a bit since that time. I\'m coming up to speed with what to expect, doing some planning, but not TOO much. Hopefully I\'ll meet some listeners and play some games with them when I\'m there next month. \\xa0 -Mark'