Games Festival (Vienna)

The Games Festival in Vienna is an annual event organized by the Games Interest Group, where visitors can experience and try out board and card games . It took place in November from 1984 to 2015, meanwhile over three days each in the Austria Center Vienna . There are offshoots of the games festival in Graz , Eisenstadt , on the Schallaburg and in Liezen .

In 2019 the Austria Center Vienna itself organized the Games Festival in Vienna.

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The focus of the Spielfest is the game library, where visitors can borrow from around 5000 current games and classics during the event and play them on site. Several hundred volunteer players help with this. In addition, almost all game publishers active on the German-speaking market are represented with exhibition stands. There are also manufacturers of dolls , plush figures , handicraft materials , toy building sets , model construction , model railways, etc. Austrian and international competitions take place regularly at the Spielefest.

With around 70,000 visitors (number from 2014), the game festival is one of the largest games related to games in German-speaking countries and worldwide. It is smaller than the Nuremberg Toy Fair and the International Game Days in Essen, but more important than the conceptually similar Spielwies'n in Munich. In contrast to all other game events, manufacturers are only allowed to advise at the game festival, there is no sale of toys.

The games interest group (IG Spiele) was founded in 1988 as a non-profit association to organize a formal organizer of the games festival. It is closely associated with the Vienna Games Academy , which awards the Game of Games award, and with the Austrian Games Museum. She also organizes game groups all over Austria and other events on the topic.

After the IG Spiele was unable to finance the costs of the festival in Vienna from 2016, seven smaller games took place in other cities in Austria in 2017 and 2018.

In 2019 the Austria Center Vienna itself took over and organized a game festival in Vienna together with Spielbox and Spiel Doch.