Don't suppose anyone knows if anything Cthulhu related is happening at Essen this year?

You have missed nothing about Cthulhu LCG at the Essen Spiel fair, as official event. Worse than ever, the official distributor, Heidelberger, had only Core Sets at their big booth this year. In fact, I visit their booth for the past 3-4 years since FFG crew stopped coming in Essen with their own staff and booth.

After comments from my part, the Heidelberger guy told me that the sales about CoC Game in English in Germany are very poor compard to W:I LCG. Ok, I understand that, but then the guy told me about the fact that the local German community was angry when the CCG format collapsed... I was stunned! Man, i f you think only German players attend the Spiel, this is a big mistake. Secondly we are talking about the LCG format which is now there since early 2009!

Have they thought that not bringing any stuff at the biggest gaming fair in the world will increase the LCG game visibility? Of course not!. A poor strategic vision alas...

About next year Spiel, the best is to drop me a note or start a thread also on BGG or the French speaking Cenacle - I forgot to check this forum before my departure to Essen. I even met a very good Italian player without having scheduled any meeting - we were lucky as the fair is 'cyclopean' as would have said HPL ;-) (45,000 square meters - 150,000 people during the four days)

Yeah, checked out the Heidelberger booth and only spotted some core sets in Engels for € 35,-. Worst of all, the other core sets of LoR and WH:I were only € 20,- (german version though). A real shame that Heidelberger almost has no English copies for sale of any of their games.

When FFG was still at Spiel I could spend hours at their booth and demos. With only Heidelberg present I walk buy very quickly one or two times during my stay at Spiel.

It's a catch-22 situation in Germany:

The Heidelberger Spieleverlag doesn't publish a German version of CoC because there aren't enough players. There aren't enough players because there is no German version.

I found it impossible to interest players in giving the CoC LCG a try because it was in English. So, I bought a bunch of German black-bordered cards from the CCG era (published by Ulysses). Now, I have at least a couple of players using the German cards.

It's likely, though, that Ulysses stopped releasing the German cards because it didn't sell as well as some of the other CCGs they publish.