Spiel Essen 2019 – Holy Grail Games

Last year I had a very nice look at the Holy Grail Games booth to their upcoming game Titan. The publisher known from Museum and Downforce haven’t been sitting still and this year they brought a full functioning preproduction copy of the game with them to Spiel.

Titan is an expert Euro game created by first-time designer Matthieu Podevin and is coming with a massive game board and a big table presence. In the game, players mine Saturn’s largest moon Titan for its valuable recourses and expand their mining network.

While building pipes and extraction plants, you can also play around with your little drones to boost your plants or to transfer goods to places your pipes are not reaching. During all this mining action, there are also resources you don’t want and you have to keep an eye on that, because else way it could be it is going to cost you money.

I was excited about Titan, but times changes and although I really liked what I see, I knew this game was going to be a heavy Euro game and with two young boys I have less and less time for longer heavy games. So yes, I had really good fun and I see this game can be brain cracking, this one is not for us. But nevertheless, I haven’t lost my time at the Holy Grail Games booth, because the good people came with another great upcoming game to Essen: Roads to Rome.

In Roads to Rome you play a Roman family expanding their network all in favor of the Emperor. Each player start placing road sections from Rome to adjacent cities to further cities and the longer the roads the more victory points you get, but when someone else has a road section on that “Road to Rome” that player also scores points. A second way to score points it though its collecting goods on your player board system.

What I really like, and is ideal for my family and me, is that it plays in half an hour. That is included with Georgina from Holy Grail Games explaining the game to us. What I also liked, was the laughter at the table, it often happens that someone add a road and another player scores a lot of points, because of having a few road sections on the way back to Rome.

So, you may understand I left the Holy Grail Games booth quite happy. I played a lighter network building Euro which will hit straight to retail in the first quarter of 2020 and I played a good heavy Euro with an awesome theme and a fantastic massive game board, Titan. Which is by the way hitting Kickstarter at this moment, make sure you check it out if you are into heavy games!