For board gamers, heaven is a place on earth – located in Germany

For four days every year, Essen's Spiel exhibition is the centre of the board game world. Owen Duffy looks at the games that make it that way

On a drizzly Thursday morning in Germany's industrial Ruhr region, I seemed to have unwittingly walked in on a seance.

I found myself in a dimly gaslit room with grubby, wood-panelled walls and heavily cobwebbed corners that could have been lifted straight from the pages of a Victorian ghost story. The figures hunched around the table at the centre of the scene were concentrating intently on a collection of strangely-painted cards laid out before them.