Spiel Essen eyes record 220,000 attendance as world’s biggest board game fair expands into seventh huge hall

The world’s biggest board game fair, Spiel Essen, is planning for its biggest-ever attendance at next week’s show as it looks to outstrip the 209,000 visitor record it set just before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Spiel’s visitor numbers recovery since it canceled its 2020 show due to the coronavirus has been rapid, with the event growing from about 93,600 attendees in 2021 to 204,000 last year – the first time the show had completely sold out in its 41-year history.

The show might have broken its attendance record in 2024 were it not for a self-imposed visitor cap, which limited the number of attendees each day to about 50,000 – a measure introduced alongside wider aisles post-pandemic to help visitors move around the often crowded halls more easily.

But the record could finally fall this year after Spiel made the decision to expand into a seventh vast hall at the Messe Essen exhibition centre, boosting the show floor to 77,500 sq m – up 13% year-on-year, and almost 30% compared to 2023.

That expansion means the show now covers an area larger than 14 American football fields, and makes it almost 50% larger than the exhibitor space at Gen Con, North America’s biggest tabletop gaming convention – although its US peer also boasts a vast, separate expanse of gaming tables, tournaments and live events that Spiel Essen does not.

Saturday at this year’s Spiel Essen is already sold out a week ahead of the show opening, while 80% of tickets have been sold so far for the show’s first day on Thursday 23, more than 90% for the Friday and about 60% for the final day on Sunday.

Spiel Essen managing director Carol Rapp told BoardGameWire, “If everything goes well and we are really sold out, we are calculating with 220,000 people.

“We are still staying a little bit below state regulations here because we want to have people feeling happy and comfortable walking the aisles, even though we know some of them will be a bit more crowded than others depending on the day.”

Exhibitor numbers are also up at this year’s show at about 940 – a slight rise compared to both last year’s 923 and the 935 recorded in 2023, but still down on the roughly 1,200 who showed off games at Spiel Essen in 2019.

The small increase comes despite the assumption from Spiel Essen organisers earlier this year that the ongoing impact of US tariffs on board game publishers could see a fall in the number of companies heading across the Atlantic for the 2025 show.

That mirrors the performance of this year’s Gen Con in August, which scored another year of record attendance and exhibitor numbers despite fears that ongoing US tariff volatility would see publishers and visitors choosing to skip the show.

Rapp told BoardGameWire, “When we started in springtime with planning this year’s Spiel, it was, let’s say, the expectation that we will not see that many US publishers.

“But actually we have more US publishers around than last year. In fact, we have 11 more exhibitors coming from the US than last year, and that’s amazing, right?

“…I think the reason might be it’s easier to import stuff to Europe because there are no tariffs – goods that they import directly from China to Europe are not impacted by the US tariffs.

“So Europe is a quite easy place to sell their games for a decent price instead of shipping it over to the US, and have a huge price increase that they need to put on to sell the games. But that’s my personal take on that.”

Several industry professionals BoardGameWire spoke with in the run-up to this year’s Spiel Essen suggested more publishers would attempt to share booth space with other companies, rather than shell out for their own dedicated space, in an attempt to cut costs amid the uncertain tariffs environment. But Spiel Essen said there was “no measurable increase” in that taking place, with just a 1% rise compared to 2024.

The organisation added that some exhibitors had significantly grown the footprint of their booths for the 2025 event, singling out UK miniature giant Games Workshop and fledgling German publisher Elznir, which was created two years ago by former staff at Heidelberger Spieleverlag and Asmodee.

Spiel Essen’s expansion into a seventh hall has also given organisers the room to move its annual series of panel discussions and talks to the main show floor via a new 1,000 sq m stage in Hall 4.

This year’s Spiel Talks schedule features everything from professional discussions about crowdfunding and fulfillment to a bagpipe-playing workshop and cosplay craft showcase – and Rapp hopes its new home at the heart of the show will help more attendees discover the events on offer.

She said, “[We like] the idea of moving the panels, the talks, the keynotes, out of the conference area, because they are so hidden for normal visitors of the show that they won’t find it.

“That left us in the past with wonderful speeches, wonderful discussions, but only very, very few of all the people have realised we have it, or seen it on site.

“We have quite good view numbers afterwards on our YouTube channel, that’s also true, but we wanted to make it happen at the show and to provide it to a higher and bigger audience.”

Spiel Essen’s expansion into a new hall comes just a couple of years after the show implemented a shake-up of how its halls were organised – splitting the fair into separate segments for children’s, family and light-to-medium games, expert games, tabletop and miniature games, roleplaying games and trading card games, with a mix of small, medium and large booths in each zone.

BoardGameWire reported in June 2023 that the decision had not gone down universally well with all of the exhibitors, but the general response from booth organisers during both the subsequent fairs has been positivity about the changes.

Rapp said, “It’s been two years by now, and the first year was a bit rough because people were not so happy to be moved around and seeing themselves in different surroundings.

“But at the end of the show, more than 90% of the exhibitors and of the visitors were more than happy with the new layout. And last year it was really, really easy to talk to the exhibitors and say, hey, do you want to move? ‘No, I want to stay exactly where I was last year’, so it’s fine.

“With opening Hall 7, of course we had to shift around the areas a bit, that’s true. So family games, for example, is now Halls 7, 6 and 5 – but that gave some room to also extend the more core and hobby area from Hall 3, which was so crowded, that they now also overlap into Hall 4.

“And miniatures are growing, trading cards are growing, role-playing is growing. So every part of the hobby is gaining more space in the halls, because we opened Hall 7 – and that’s a good sign.”

Rapp added that one of the most asked questions of her was whether the show would now look to expand into the final hall at Messe Essen, Hall 8, which will be used this year as an area for people to queue while waiting for the show floor to open.

She said, “If I could, I want to stay having seven halls for at least two more years.

“But I was also saying that last year about the six halls, and then we had so many applications that were telling us ‘We want to grow. We are new, we want to be part of that’… ‘OK. But if we do that, we need to open another hall’.

“So who are we to decide for the market, if they want to grow, that we don’t do that – as long as we have the space for that.

“We want to make the best Spiel possible for everybody, so of course, if we are facing another year with so many applications, so many square metres booked that we should open another hall, we will think about it. But my personal wish is not to do it next year.”

One of the biggest challenges exhibitors and visitors alike are increasingly facing at Spiel is the soaring price of accommodation, which spikes each year across the week of the show, as well as a hard limit on available parking spaces at the event,

Rapp said Spiel Essen had been in conversation with the local council about attempting to bring in more accommodation and parking lots, but added that the financial pressures in the current economic climate made those kinds of projects hard to prioritise.

She said, “We are in an area that is not the richest of the country, so it’s quite hard for them to put money on the table to build parking lots, to build more hotels that might be fully booked for two events in a year.

“…They want to have it and they want to help us. But on the other hand, they also have to accommodate the citizens, right? And they are asking for more kindergartens, or better tables and chairs and digital stuff in schools, or better roads.

“There are so many topics and in the economic climate we have right now it’s extremely hard to ask them to build some more hotels or parking lots or whatever.”

She added, “The difficult thing is we can talk to many people at the City Council, at Messe Essen, at Essen marketing, and they are all open to help us. But as every hotel is an individual business partner, we must talk to each of them individually.

“It’s really difficult when you need to talk to about 200 hotels in Essen alone – they all will tell you exactly one thing and that is, ‘Yeah, we love Spiel. It’s a good time to sell hotel rooms’, right? And ‘As long as we can sell them, why should we change something?’

“That is so tough for us to navigate, and we hear every single person complaining about that. And you can believe me, we are complaining about the prices too.

“…On the other hand, I can tell you that booking a room in Cologne during GamesCom is far more expensive, booking a room for Toy Fair in Nuremberg – I mean OK, that’s  a B2B event, that’s a bit different – but still it’s far more expensive than to book a room in Essen or in the surrounding areas.”

Spiel Essen 2025 runs from October 23 to October 26.