Just for reference, the population of Klaipėda, the third largest city in Lithuania is approximately 161 000 people. The number of attendees in this year's Spiel Essen was 220 000 people, meaning they managed to cram the entirey of Klaipėda and much more into just eight convention halls and every one of those people were buying board games.

I appreciate that that is maybe not everybody's jam, and aspects of it are not our jam either. But getting our mitts into a jar of Bonne Maman filled with gooey new board game releases - put a bib on me and fire up the toaster!

In this special joint episode of No Pun Included and Talk Cardboard we cover 16 new releases from Spiel Essen 2025, which you can either listen to here or partake in the video version https://youtu.be/NHVLn-ZxVWs

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On to the timestamps:

0:00 Cold Open 2:46 Intro 5:42 Night Soil (Unranked) 9:11 Bouba Kiki 14:14 Nocturnis 17:56 Formidable Farm/Formidabel! 22:00 Tax the Rich 27:44 Echoes of Time 36:30 Fearless 41:30 National Economy 48:23 Thesauros 1:00:34 biD Coin 1:07:20 Kikai/Bricolage Heads 1:16:46 Tag Team 1:26:59 Recall 1:36:14 ??? 1:56:10 ?? 2:03:33 ? 2:14:53 Outro

Spinning pandas, evolving primates, and... Capitalism! We have all three for you in this episode - thankfully not all in the same game. We could have had three games about mammals, but we didn't think this through.

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SHIRTS! Find them on https://no-pun-included-shop.fourthwall.com/

Onto the timestamps:

00:00 Cold open 02:09 Intro 03:45 Panda Spin 18:34 Primates 32:51 Tycoon: India 1981 48:25 Correspondence

Only three games this episode? What gives? Well, in the tried and true brand tradition, we decided to go back to our original formula. But no sad trombone noises please - we're really, definitely, honestly going to make it work this time...

On this episode, we have Identity - a trick taking game that promises personality, Out of Sorts - a game of inventing a cataloguing system for books in an alien library, and Magical Athlete - a game of racing a banana, a giant baby, and various other quirky things round a track.

If you’d like to check out our bonus episodes - become a patreon supporter on https://patreon.com/nopunincluded

SHIRTS! Find them on https://no-pun-included-shop.fourthwall.com/

On to the timestamps:

00:00 Cold open & intro 05:50 Identity 14:16 Out of Sorts 28:57 Magical Athlete 42:03 Correspondence