The end of every day at aSpiel is met with cheers and applause by those working the event, but the celebratory outburst that erupts come 6:00 pm on the Sunday is particularly enthusiastic. Understandable. Every convention is a lot of work, but few more so than this one. It requires months of planning, international travel and the accompanying jet lag, a day or two of load-in, and four high-intensity 10-hour days, days during which you are either interacting with an endless onslaught of customers/consumers/enthusiasts as you teach them the same game over and over and over again in a Sisyphusean act of pedagogy, or you’re in meeting after meeting during which you are constantly “on” and seldom with a break. There’s a reason publishers ask people like me, people who spend those four days roaming the floor, what we’ve seen that’s exciting. Sure, it’s polite, but it also smacks of a soldier asking if there’s any news from home, desperate for a reminder of what all this is for.
6:00 pm hits, the barbaric yawp is released unto the world, a palpable feeling of joy and relief runs through the halls, and then everyone gets to work. For the attendees, 6:00 pm on Sunday is a called game; for the people working, there’s one final, frantic burst of activity. An event with more than two times the attendees of Los Angeles Comic Con, just shy of a thousand exhibitors, and covers an area the size of approximately 15 American football fields has to be unmade. This sprawling Metropol that popped up over the course of a Monday to Wednesday has to vanish in a single Sunday evening.
Load out is easy enough for the smaller booths. If you arrived with little more than a few hundred copies of your game and a dream, you pack up what’s left and go get a beer. For the big boys, though, for the Hachettes and Games Workshops and Asmodees, teardown and load out are major logistical operations. Their booths have hundreds of chairs, dozens of tables, bespoke decorations, enormous banners, lights, walls, offices, refrigerators, and hundreds or even thousands of left-over games. All of that needs to come down, get packed up, and taken out of Messe Essen as quickly as possible.
While the guidance sheet provided to every booth by Messe Essen this year read, in part,
Start of Dismantling
Dismantling may begin on 25th October at 6:00 p.m. within the exhibitor’s own stand area,
packing—legally distinct from “dismantling”—certainly doesn’t wait until then. Even an otherwise blissfully unaware attendee will notice the twitches all over Messe that preempt the mass spasm, particularly once 5:00 or 5:30 rolls around. Smaller booths are left empty early. Demo copies start disappearing into their boxes and tablecloths vanish from tables, hopefully in that order. These are the snow flakes. 6:00 pm brings the avalanche.
Immediately, the floor explodes into a frenzy. Chairs are collapsed, tables are deconstructed, signage is torn down. The exotic bits of decor that seemed like a good idea before the show, the replica Greco-Roman statues and other such novelties that attract attention on a crowded floor, are awkwardly loaded onto pallets like a museum reorganizing its exhibits. There’s shouting, there’s laughter, there’s a surprising amount of counting. You can tell who’s in charge by the harried look in their eyes. Everyone else is on cruise control.
Messe Essen itself is incredibly organized about the whole thing, in a way that would strike me as typically German were I not so familiar with the Deutsche Bahn. Those pallets appear right away. Trash pickup is quick. Vehicles, by which I mean full-on vans and cars, start materializing to cart things away. Turns out you don’t need a permit to drive on the show floor so long as your car is ready to roll between 6:15 and 6:45. The whole thing is so staggering in its ideal efficiency that witnessing it borders on the surreal.
After an hour or two, quiet starts to return. Some people sit in chairs in empty corners, drinking a beer while they wait for a forklift or an AWP. Most publishers take their booth teams out for dinner to celebrate what has hopefully been another great and productive Essen. It’s a ton of work to pack up a booth, even if you isolate that labor from the larger context of the show, but for the second time in two years, I chose to stick around and help some friends with their booth.
The decision is entirely selfish, I assure you. I enjoy a list of menial tasks to accomplish as quickly as possible. There’s catharsis in ripping a stapled vinyl banner off a wall, though it would have been nice to know we weren’t saving the banners before I spent five minutes carefully removing a matching number of staples. I enjoy the sense of camaraderie. The choices are to stay and help or to slink off to my hotel room, where I would be alone and vaguely sad about the whole thing ending.
The other nice thing about teardown: it gives Essen an ending. Spiel may be an extraordinary effort for the people who put it on for our enjoyment, but in exchange they are presented with an arc. There’s buildup, execution, and denouement. They don’t find themselves there one moment and gone the next. Given the choice between the two, I’d much rather be on the floor helping the other ants break down the carcass. It’s exhausting, but it’s a proper finale. Halfway through Sunday, it’s impossible to imagine you’ll make it to the end of the day. By the end of teardown, you find yourself relieved it’s over and looking forward to doing it all again.
