Andrew Goes to Essen Spiel 2026
You know that old chestnut about the stars and wet paint, right? Tell a man there are a million stars in the sky and he’ll believe you, tell a man the paint on a bench is wet and he’ll have to touch it to know for sure. Or maybe the Eddie Izzard bit about the scale of murder? You murder one person, you go to jail. You kill six or seven people, we put you in a padded room with a window and observe you. You kill millions of people, we don’t know how to process that. “You must get up very early!”
The attendance numbers for Spiel are a bit like that. 230,000 attendees, 1,000 exhibitors, 15 football fields of space, it’s all so large that it’s rendered abstract. “Boy, that sure does sound like a lot” is about as close as you can get to a cogent response. If you happen to work in event planning, your response is likely something approaching the Wilhelm Scream. It is a lot, I assure you. The city of Essen is stretched to its limits; try finding a seat for dinner on that Saturday night. Messe Essen, home to Spiel, is itself at capacity. For the first time, this year saw nary an inch of unutilized conference space.
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