In August 2024, I previewed Richard Garfield's King of Tokyo: Duel, a two-player-only take on his 2011 game King of Tokyo, and just as _King of Tokyo_ saw a standalone sequel — King of Tokyo: Godzilla — released in 2026, a sequel to _Duel_ is hitting the market in Q4 2026: the less-than-elegantly-named King of Tokyo: Duel – Tokyo Bay. Guess you can't keep a popular (and well-selling) monster down. Art by Régis Torres, Markus Erdt, and Quentin Regnes x2 _Tokyo Bay_ mimics the format of _Duel_ , with two giant monsters bashing on one another repeatedly while playing tug-of-war over fame and destruction tokens, while _Duel_ mimics the gameplay of _King of Tokyo_ : Each turn, the active player rolls six dice up to three times, locking or re-rolling dice as they wish, then they carry out the results: * **Claws** damage the opponent. * **Hearts** heal you. * **Energy bolts** grant you energy cubes. * **Stars** advance the blue fame token. * **Wrecked buildings** advance the red destruction token. * **Exclamation marks** do something unique to your monster. One of the key features of _King of Tokyo_ is the dynamic tension of its dual victory conditions. If a monster is damaged enough to bring it to 0 health, it's out of the game, and if you're the last monster standing, you win. Alternatively, if you collect 20 points, you win. Those two victory conditions run perpendicular to one another, so you tend to focus on one, not both. If your dice rolls and the power cards you purchase with energy cubes give you points, you're probably not damaging opponents, and vice versa. Your "path to victory" each game depends on a double dose of chance and choice (via dice and power cards), as well as the actions of your opponents. King of Tokyo: Duel game board, with the fame track on top and the destruction track below The _King of Tokyo: Duel_ titles feature a similar dichotomy: You can win by damaging your opponent to death, or you can "pull" the fame or destruction tokens (or both!) close enough to you on their movement tracks that Tokyo residents acknowledge your superiority and your opponent slinks away in shame. That said, Garfield tied these two goals together more in _Duel_ than in _King of Tokyo_ as many power cards allow you to place "buzz tokens" on the tracks, sometimes shortening them, sometimes lengthening them, and almost always adding symbols to them. When you advance a token on a track and land on a symbol, you get that bonus, which might be additional damage to the opponent or hearts to heal yourself. Thus, one action can advance you toward both victory conditions. Gameplay example in __King of Tokyo: Duel – Tokyo Bay__ with mock-up, non-final components _Tokyo Bay_ ups this entwining of actions even further. Instead of having fixed fame and destruction tracks that you modify with buzz tokens, the tracks start with a floating platform in Tokyo Bay, then each time you would pull a token toward you, if that token would land in the water, you draw a wreckage tile, add it to the track, then move the token onto that tile and get that effect. Once a track has four tiles on it, that track is locked; if both tracks are locked and both tokens are at your end of the tracks — that is, in the yellow zone — you win, similar to _Duel_. But having only one token at the end of a track is still good for you. If you would advance that token again, you instead draw a wreckage tile, get its effect, then place the tile in front of you. If you capture three wreckage tiles, you win the game. On top of that third victory condition, Garfield has seeded additional victory conditions on power cards, one of which is visible above, with it giving you the win if you have less health than your opponent and two captured wreckage tiles. If you already hold one tile and purchase that card, your opponent needs to respond quickly with damage or token pulling, especially since a few power cards let you capture wreckage tiles regardless of where the fame and destruction tokens stand. Other power card-based victory conditions include: * Have 7 KEEP cards. * Have 20 health, with this card allowing you to gain more health than your starting value. * Have 18 energy cubes. * Capture one wreckage tile — but with a massive bonus/drawback: You must roll seven dice on your turn instead of six, and if you ever have a four-of-a-kind in your final dice result, you take 10 damage immediately. Another gameplay example of __King of Tokyo: Duel – Tokyo Bay__ with mock-up, non-final components In the game above, my opponent had that final power card and was carefully trying to balance his die results. With that 10-damage blast hanging over your head, the extra die forces you to do a little of this and a little of that instead of going all-in on one result, which is a mixed blessing. Why? Normally it takes three stars or three wrecked building icons on your dice to move the fame or destruction token, with each additional star or wrecked building moving that token an additional space, which is a "discount" after the initial "cost" — but now you can't take advantage of that discount unless you have a massive health cushion. (Eventually, my opponent blew himself up, with my Vampiric Gaze keeping my health at a decent level since he couldn't go all-in on claws either.) _Tokyo Bay_ includes six new monsters, each of which can be played in _Duel_ against any of the original six monsters. (_Tokyo Bay_ also includes four wreckage tiles for use by The King, whose original track-modifying tokens wouldn't work with this new game board.) Pagura, in the image above, lets you draw as many power cards as the number of exclamation marks you roll on a turn, then you get immediate effects from those cards based on the symbols on them. Maybe you'll whiff, and maybe you'll advance both the fame and destruction tokens two or three times. Kraken, in the second image above, gives you three tokens to distribute to either you or your opponent, with a token affecting that player's next turn. Either you get to re-roll all stars/hearts/claws, or your opponent cannot re-roll stars/hearts/claws. (My non-final rulebook states, "On your next turn, you may always reroll this results. [sic]" Maybe you're supposed to wait until after your third roll to re-roll that symbol, but we decided that you may re-roll the die immediately without it counting as a re-roll.) You need to make a judgment call each time you'd use one of these tokens because the board situation and your potential path(s) to victory are fluid. H.A.D.E.S., on the other hand, is as straightforward as can be: Get two ! on the dice, and the token advances one space on your special game board, giving you the listed bonus: an extra die token, a pull on the fame track, three damage to the opponent, an extra die token, a pull on the fame track, etc. It's a mixed bag of effects that just keeps rotating. I've played three games with Cyberbunny and have yet to make it work. (Admittedly one game was only three turns as my opponent rolled six stars to place four wreckage tokens on that track, then two turns later rolled five stars to claim three wreckage tokens and victory. BOOM!) With Cyberbunny, you're manipulating the cost of power cards as well as which cards are on the market, but I never felt like I had a good handle on what I was trying to do, so the effects felt random. I blame the monster's operator for that failure. More experience needed... In total, I've played _Tokyo Bay_ five times on a non-final review copy from publisher IELLO, and I don't yet know whether I have a preference for original _Duel_ or _Tokyo Bay_. At arm's length, the details of this game board or that one blur, so the games are effectively offering the same experience: Keep your monster's ability in mind as you evaluate the board over which dice to keep and which to re-roll. As in the original _Duel_ , you're going to be surprised in _Tokyo Bay_ by the power cards that pop up, whether they offer new victory conditions or "just" an overpowered effect. In one game, for example, my opponent spent 8 energy for "Empty the Bay", which allows you to gain the bonus effects on _all_ wreckage tiles not yet placed on the board. We had placed only one or two tiles, so he got 12-13 bonuses: SMASH, four damage; KAPOW, two extra dice tokens, ZZZAP, three energy. Needless to say, when that card showed up in a later game, one of us spent two energy to clear the board and turn up new cards so that the other player couldn't get it. (The card isn't broken. We just didn't realize how powerful it was until we carried out its effect the first time. You need play experience to get a handle on such extremes, then account for them in your choices in future playings.) One new feature in _Tokyo Bay_ I've yet to use is the "lost dice" mode. Each player starts with six tokens in front of them, each showing one of the die faces. Whenever you have a pair of dice you can't use, e.g., one star and one exclamation mark when you're Cyberbunny, you can choose one token now and add it to your die results next turn. Each token is single use, and they can whiff just like the dice depending on what you roll; after all, one star on a token is the same as one star on a die. This system offers a helping hand to someone who's bombing out on their rolls, but if you are bothered by extremes of luck in a Yahtzee-style game, you should be playing something else. ****Want more game previews like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking and no spam. Sign me up, coach!

I've met with Jade Yoo from Korean publisher BoardM at SPIEL multiple times, but always in a restaurant or another publisher's booth. BoardM releases Korean editions of games from publishers large and small — Cthulhu: Death May Die from CMON, Take Time from Libellud, the 2026 Spiel des Jahres winner JinxO from Tabletoys Games — but in past years it's been one of dozens of companies with a business presence in Essen, but not a public one. That changes in 2026, with BoardM having a public booth for the first time. What will you see there? These three titles among others: ## Flamenco Designer/artist Nutgoo.Lee self-published Flamenco in 2025, and now BoardM has a new edition with art by Sai Beppu. _Flamenco_ is a shedding game in which you can lead a set of one or more cards of the same value and others can beat that set with the same number of cards of a higher value. The twist of the game is that even numbers can be beaten by a "split" comprised of twice as many cards of half the value, e.g., a round might go 1 - 2 - 11 - 33 - 44 - 2222 - 5555. Two additional wrinkles in play: In a split, each lower pair of cards must not share a color with the higher card it beats. Additionally, a 7 can be beat by a 12 played together as long as the 12 differ in color from the 7. Thus, 777 could be beat by 111222 as long as you can pair the 1s and 2s the proper way. Players score points in the order that they empty their hand, and whoever has the most points after 3-5 rounds wins. ## P.I. In 2012, designer Martin Wallace published P.I. through his Treefrog Games brand, and now BoardM has released a second edition of P.I. with new art, a two-player mode (for this 2-5 player game) that introduces a new victory condition, and a companion app that allows for timed solo play. The game lasts three rounds, and in each round you need to guess the suspect, evidence, and location cards held by your left-hand neighbor, a.k.a., your target. The earlier you do it relative to others, the more points you score, as in _Flamenco_(and six thousand other games). On a turn, you do one of the following: * Place an investigator tile in a location, then your target places a rectangular spot marker on the investigator for each item in that location matching a card they hold as well as a trace marker for each item they hold that's in an adjacent location. You won't know whether a marker relates to the suspect, evidence, or location, but you can move them around on the board as you like as you learn more or make deductions. * Identify a clue card from the nine on display. Your target marks the matching tile with a spot marker if they hold the matching card or a trace marker if the item on the game board is adjacent to the item of the same type that they hold. If neither of these is the case, you keep the clue card as a reminder that nothing on the game board around this item matches what you're looking for. * Guess the target's cards. If you're wrong on any of the three cards, you lose 2 points; if not, score points, then sit out the rest of the round. When at most one person hasn't guessed at the end of a round, clear the board, then set up for the next round the same way, with the only difference being that correct guesses score more points and investigator tiles are limited to five per game. For the two-player game, when you guess, you either get the opponent's items right and win the round, or you lose the round. (If you're the round's first player, your opponent gets one chance to guess.) Whoever wins two rounds first wins the game. ## Memory Island Gary Kim's Memory Island appeared from Bloom Games, an imprint of BoardM, in 2022 in a card game format, and now it's being re-issued with tiles instead of cards. Memories, old and new (art by Lilia) _Memory Island_ gives young players a slightly harder memory challenge game. Lay out 48 tiles that show numbers from 1-10 face down. On a turn, flip over tiles one by one. If they sum to exactly 10, claim those tiles! If the sum is higher than 10, flip them face down again. If you flip a 10, claim it, then take another turn. If you have claimed ten tiles, you win — and you can never claim more than ten, so if you have eight tiles, you need to flip two tiles that add to 10 or claim two 10 tiles. Alternatively, when all seven 10s have been claimed, whoever has the most cards wins. ****Want more SPIEL Essen 26 coverage like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more

In January 2026, publisher Avalon Hill released Sanibel, a game from Elizabeth Hargrave in which you walk the beach, pick up shells and other items, and try to have picked up the most valuable collection of stuff at game's end. (For more details, check out my August 2025 preview.) The look and subject matter of the game differed from what Avalon Hill was best known for, but this Hasbro brand has been working to vary its offerings, and the next title it plans to release along these lines is **_Tideward_** , a 2-4 player game from Connie Vogelmann, designer of Wyrmspan and Apiary. __Tideward__ components laid out for a four-player game Here's the setting of this 2-4 player game aimed at players aged 10 and up: > Each year, thousands of baby sea turtles take their first steps toward the tide. They embark on a journey brimming with wonder – and danger! In Tideward, players can imagine guiding hatchlings to the shelter of the algae by plotting their path through the tides and avoiding predators. Each player starts with eight turtle eggs and two turtles on the beach far from the water, with the center of the board representing the distant ocean via one of four algal mats, each with different scoring conditions. On a turn, take three actions, repeating actions as you like: * Hatch an egg, getting a male turtle if you spend one food and a female turtle if you spend two. * Take one food from the supply. * Move a turtle up to two spaces either left, right, or forward. (Turtles have indomitable spirits and will not retreat, even in the face of death.) You can spend food to move further, and if you end your movement on a fish symbol, you get food. Alternatively, if you end your turn on a crab, you become food...for the crab. After all players have had a turn, spin the round "tide board" 90º. Riding the tide allows you to access different parts of the central algal mat as once you've plopped on that mat, you're just soaking in the algae and not moving again. To end the round, you undergo the "march of the turtles", with each turtle moving forward one space. Scoring takes place three ways, two of which are tied to the algal mat and third of which is losing 1 point for each of your turtles that gets crabbed. Four algal mats are included, and they score as follows: * The A mat visible in the topmost image has nine zones, and you score points based on the number of zones you're present in, with 3 bonus points for each region in which you have both a female and male turtle. * The B mat is all about finding future mates, with your male turtles scoring 1 point if at least one female is in the surrounding eight spaces and your female turtles score 4 points if at least four males are in the surrounding spaces. * The C mat is the party board, with you scoring points based on the size of orthogonally connected groups of your turtles. Have at least one female in a group of size two or larger for bonus points. (This mat is the only one that lets you move turtles on it.) * The D mat introduces new food types. Whenever you take fish from the supply, you flip it over to discover whether the other side features turtle grass, thimble jellyfish, or coral banded shrimp. (When you spend these tiles in the future, they remain fish side down.) When your turtle lands on a pink space on this algal mat, you can tuck a food tile underneath it to score bonus points, with females earning more points when fed rare food. Connie Vogelmann (photo by Kovray) Each algal mat has a set of six "tide quest" cards, and at the start of the game you receive a random (and secret) quest that you'll score at game's end. Maybe you'll want to place turtles in particular rows, tuck a specific type of food, make groups of exactly three turtles, place male or female turtles next to higher numbers of the opposite gender, or reach the far side of the algal mat. Some mats also reward you for leftover food. The game ends at the end of a round in which one player has moved their final turtle off the beach, whether into a crab's mouth or somewhere in the ocean. I received a brief overview of _Tideward_ at Gen Con 2026, where an Avalon Hill representative showed off the components and stressed the plastic-free production of this game because, duh, sea turtles. (For those curious about the "duh", you can check out this plastic pollution overview page from SWOT, a.k.a. The State of the World's Sea Turtles, a program led by the non-profit Oceanic Society.) Yes, I know many other Hasbro and Avalon Hill titles feature plastic components. Maybe in the future the company will realize that barbarians and vampires are also cool with using less plastic in games. _Tideward_ debuts at retailers on 16 January 2027. ****Want more game announcements like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Get the deets

In July 2026, I wrote an article titled "Why You Should Skip Amazon Prime Days" to coincide with Amazon's Prime Day "sales" event, and on 6-7 October 2026 Amazon is running another such bogus event: Prime Big Deal Days. I'm amused by Amazon apparently leaning into the 6-7 meme, but other than that, I invite you to revisit the earlier article to learn why to give purchases on Amazon a pass. The immediate answer is that many listed sale prices are not actually discounted; the long-term answer is that Amazon is a sales behemoth that destroys industries by forcing creators and companies to adhere to its policies to their own detriment. Again, please read the earlier article, then turn elsewhere to shop for games that interest you. ****Want more diatribes like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Yes, please!

In early August 2026, I wrote about how I culled 150 games at a library swap. In short, you didn't swap games directly with another person; no, you placed all the games you brought on a table, then you walked away, possibly taking with you games that someone else had brought. The swap was more on a community level than an individual one, and I enjoyed the experience of just letting the games go rather than negotiating for this or that. In that article, I wrote the following: > My approach to getting rid of games aligns with my approach to sleeving cards in games: If I'm not sure whether I want to keep a game or get rid of it — that is, if I would place it on a "maybe" pile — I consider the cost of replacing that game. If the game is a mainstream U.S. or European release and I could likely find a copy for $20 or less, then I should get rid of it. Most likely, I'll never think about that game again, but for the rare game that does haunt me and make me wish that I could replay it, copies will be available at some point. Little did I know what was coming one month down the road. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • My wife Linda and I have one child, who started his senior year at high school in August, and for years we had talked about downsizing once he was out of high school and off to college. We had a checklist for what we were looking for: * Within walking distance of a downtown, regardless of the size of that downtown * An older house, say, built prior to 1950, although we didn't have a fixed date * A smaller house that would be easier to keep clean and cheaper to own By chance, in late August 2026 we ran across the perfect house and decided to make an offer. Why wait?! That house wouldn't still be on the market come June 2027 and who knows how quickly we might find another suitable location at that time. The owner accepted our offer — then I was confronted with an immediate result of that decision: I needed to get rid of hundreds of games ASAP. I had planned to downsize over our son's senior year, although I hadn't thought in any detail about what that downsizing would look like, and now I needed to accelerate that process as quickly as I could. Here's what I did: ## Prepare for Another Library Swap I don't mean that literally as the library had no plans for such a thing, but mentally. I had culled 150 games using a simple metric, so let me attack more game shelves and see what else I can find. Thankfully, I've visited Origins, Gen Con, and SPIEL plenty of times, so I have some idea of which games publishers have deeply discounted in the past and therefore which games should be plentiful on the used market. Any game that fits that category should go, unless I have a particular attachment to it compared to everything else. More on that later. ## Bring Games to Give Away at Every Opportunity A twice-monthly game group was scheduled to meet at the end of the week, so I loaded the car with 100-ish games divided into two categories: • Recent unopened games that I could give to the group organizer. He hosts a weekend event twice a year during which he gives away dozens of games donated by publishers. Many of the games I brought had been sent to me by publishers as review copies (typically without me asking for them), so by the transitive property if I passed those games to the organizer, in effect the publishers were the ones donating those games, right? • Opened games, which I placed on a table next to handmade signs that said "FREE GAMES". Many people said, wait, really? Yes, really! Hopefully they found something they liked, while doing me the favor of emptying my shelves. ## Expand My Criteria I had initially put a blanket restriction on giving away games from Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, etc. creators because of the difficulty I might have in finding those games again. Many of those titles appear at a single Game Market event in Tokyo, then are never seen again. Others show up at a single SPIEL and might be impossible to find unless I traveled to the country in question. Yet I realized that giving away only "mainstream U.S. or European releases that I could find cheaply" wouldn't get me to my goal. What's more, I hadn't actually played many of those Japanese, Korean, etc. games, despite owning some of them for up to a decade. I could have a "cool collection of hard-to-find games", sure, but if I never played them, what was the point? Maybe I could part with at least a few of them? Strangely, as soon as I started moving those games off the shelf, I lost all inhibition and started pulling most of them down. It felt like one of those movie scenes in which a character wildly sweeps things onto the floor, except that I was neatly stacking everything into piles of similarly-sized games. Fifty-ish games up for grabs ## Invite Others to Take Games I hosted a semi-regular game group at the old house (which was then the current house), and I told everyone on the group mailing list that they were welcome to drop in over the weekend and take any of the games that I had pulled. Again, they were mostly review copies — some of which I had reviewed, some of which I had played, and some of which I had never opened — so I thought it best to give them away. I sent out three pics of 150-ish games, then at the last minute I pulled another 100-200 games and placed them on a separate table. I let folks call dibs on two titles they really wanted, but otherwise it was first come, first serve. Six people came on Saturday morning, some of whom I hadn't seen in a while, and it was great to catch up with people while seeing what they were taking. If someone seemed unsure about a title, I was like, what's the worst that happens? Take it home, then pass it on to someone else if you don't like it! After they left, I pulled even more games for a couple coming on Saturday evening and for another couple on Sunday. Sure, the first people who came on Saturday missed out on those new offerings, but them's the breaks. I had a deadline, so I needed to keep finding more to ditch. Wombat...rescued! (art by Mateusz Szulik) ## Be Open to Opportunities One of my Saturday visitors, designer Matt Wolfe, mentioned that his monthly game group was going to meet the following Saturday. Matt's a member of Game Designers of North Carolina, and he said he'd distribute donated games among designers in the group, many of whom would be at his event. I know one thing that can make you a better creator is exposure to and experience with the work of others, so I showed up at his house with a Mazda CX-5-sized load of games — somewhere between three and four hundred. We piled as much as we could on a folding table, then kept piling games on the floor around it, then invited the fifteen-or-so attendees to have at it. (Matt's Wombat Rescue was one game that found a new home. I had backed the crowdfunding project in 2015, played the game a couple of times and liked it...then never got back to it, which meant I didn't like it enough to keep it. Sorry, Matt!) Ahead of that event, one of the attendees had asked whether anyone could bring Australis, a game by Leo Colovini and Alessandro Zucchini that I had reviewed in 2024. I like the game, so I brought it with me and got it to the table again after not playing it since writing that review — a practice far too common during my BGG days. The person who had asked about _Australis_ turned out to be an aspiring designer in GDofNC whose mentor had suggested she play the game, presumably because she was working on a design with similar elements. Even though I enjoy _Australis_ , I saw a chance to do good two ways and offered it to her. She will ideally benefit from playing _Australis_ multiple times, and I had one fewer game to pack. (Plus, KOSMOS titles aren't usually in short supply, so I can get it again some year if desired.) Art by (l) Fiore GmbH and (r) Gjermund Bohne Similarly, someone in another group asked me to bring Gardlings by Kristian Amundsen Østby and Maria Østby to the next session as she had greatly enjoyed the game when I taught it to her at a convention. We played again, and she still loved it, so I offered the copy to her. (_Gardlings_ is a take-and-make design in which each player draws and assembles their tiles into a personal grid each round, then uses the gems they collect to buy a new tile. Whoever first makes a grid that contains twenty gems wins. It's a fine design, but I'm not a fan of most take-and-make games.) ## Sell Games...But Not Individually Not everything that I was getting rid of was a review copy, and not everything that I had offered to friends was taken, so I sent pics of yet more stacks to a local couple that deals games at flea markets, during conventions, and out of their garage and asked them to make an offer. They did, then they showed up the next day to cart everything away. Boom — one sale, lots of games gone. In the early 2010s, I had made the mistake of listing individual games for auction on BGG when preparing for a move. (Apparently that's what motivates me to get rid of stuff!) I had priced everything with a starting price of US$1 and figured that people would bid on multiple games since shipping multiple games in one box would cost only slightly more than shipping a single game. Indeed, many people did win auctions for multiple games, but I had thirteen auctions close with a winning bid of US$1. The winning bidders were paying the full price of shipping, so I wasn't losing money, but given how much time and effort it took to package those games and haul them to the post office, I was, in fact, losing money. It would have been easier and more efficient to give the games to a thrift shop. I've sold games a few times at a local store that runs a flea market-style event. A seller prices their games however they wish, and buyers buy scrip from the store equal to the cost of the games they want to buy, then give the scrip to the seller. When the seller is ready to leave, they bring the scrip to the store, which pays them 90% of the total value. Everybody wins! Whenever I've sold games at these events, I group games by price, but I also list a price for EVERYTHING on the table — a heavily discounted price that I drop every five minutes, partly because the lot is getting smaller via individual sales, but also as an incentive for a potential buyer. Near the end of the event, people who want to buy a couple of games see that they could pay double that amount to buy all that they see — and all but once I've found a buyer to take everything off my hands. The buyer gets a great deal, and I can pack up and leave without bringing anything home. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • I realize that I'm in an unusual situation. I've written about tabletop games on a full-time basis for nearly twenty years, with my editorship at BoardgameNews.com starting in late November 2026, so I'm in contact with hundreds of publishers and have received a large number of review copies over the years. I understand the calculus publishers operate under: The cost of sending out a game — or (even better) handing one over at a convention — is relatively small compared to the publicity a write-up or video could bring, so why not do it? While I appreciate the opportunities these games provide, they're also something of a burden. (I know — poor me.) I feel bad when I don't have time to get to a game, but that happens more and more frequently these days, so I rarely ask for review copies as I don't want to take on more than I can actually play. That said, I'm still at the mercy of other players being willing to play what I'm bringing to the table, so no matter how much I prepare, sometimes I can't get a game played in a reasonable amount of time. A group will play something once and say, nah, not for us, but since I want more than one play in order to get a feel for the experience, I'll have to find others...who are then playing for the first time...and who might not want a second game. This happens far more frequently than I would like, but unless I start paying others to play with me, that's what I'm stuck with. At least now I'm stuck with far fewer games than I had previously. The weight of those games — and the guilt I felt for not covering them — has now been dissipated throughout North Carolina, shared with dozens of others who will ideally...finally...bring those games to life on their tables. ****Want more articles like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up

While researching games that will be featured at SPIEL Essen 26, I was amused by the similarity between the two covers above. Side by side, they're less similar than they were at first glance, but the brown background/golden ring connection stood out at first glance. As for the games themselves... ## Fadenfroh The word "Fadenfroh" means something along the lines of "thread-filled" or "joyous threading", and in this game from Jordy Adan, Alexander Pfister, and 1 More Time Games, 1-4 players will be "stitching" cards together to create valuable tapestries. Cards are divided into halves, with each half featuring one of three colors and 0-2 symbols, with symbols being either fruit, animals, or flowers. Each player starts with three rows of cards, each seeded with a card entirely yellow, white, or purple. At the start of each round, you lay out as many "offers" as the number of players, with an offer consisting of 1-3 cards; threads, needles, and a thimble — collectively known as "material" — are also placed on the table. Starting with whoever had the thimble at the end of the previous round, players take turns drafting either one item from the material or one offer, but once you take an offer, you sit out the remainder of the draft. If you have three or more thread tokens, hand in three, then draw three cards and keep one. Repeat as needed, then take all of your cards and "stitch" them by adding each card to a row of your choice, covering at least one-half of a card already present — unless you spend a needle, which allows you to connect a card to the left or right end of a row without covering anything. At the end of rounds 2-5, you score points based on how well you meet two scoring cards, and the scoring card pairs rotate through the rounds: A&B, B&C, C&D, and D&A with your choice of B or C. Thus, you're all competing to score the same cards, yet you could focus entirely on B and D and ignore everything else. (Four scoring cards exist in four categories — berries, animals, flowers, and card color — and you use one card at random from each category.) I played _Fadenfroh_ once digitally in a mock-up version, and the draft format for this take-and-make game is more attractive for my tastes. You're not just taking one thing from a pool and stepping out, but playing chicken and trying to take more than your fair share, while also getting cards that will work well with what's in front of you without giving away too much to whoever outlasts everyone else. ## Blattwerk Like _Fadenfroh_ , Blattwerk ("Foliage") is a 1-4 player game, and in this design from Christian Heuser, Tim Hüwe, and ABACUSSPIELE you will be exploring the leaves of the forest in excruciating detail one by one. Gamers are obsessive that way. Each player takes a set of leaves in a single color, along with the matching fruit token, then you place two at random face up — that is, showing the insects and fruit — on the tree trunk to form the "undergrowth". All other leaves are then shuffled together face down and laid out in a grid. On a turn, you: * Turn one of your face-down leaves face up, then either score 1-3 mushrooms based on the more prevalent insect or place one of your seven "magnifier rings" on it. * Swap one of your face-down leaves with a leaf in the undergrowth, then turn your leaf face up. * Swap another player's face-down leaf that's orthogonally adjacent to one of your face-up leaves with a leaf in the undergrowth, then turn the swapped leaf face up. Thus, each turn one more leaf will be turned face up, and when all leaves have been revealed, you score what you've magnified, in addition to scoring 1 point for each mushroom. To score a magnifier leaf, look at the insects on it; each insect of the same type on orthogonally adjacent leaves is worth 1 point, so the green magnified leaf in the image above is scoring 3 points for the ants on the leaf below it. If your fruit is adjacent to a magnifier leaf, it's worth 2 points, and if you're also magnifying fruit, then adjacent fruit doubles to 4 points. Magnifier leaves don't score adjacent magnifiers, so the game is all about discovering and creating scoring opportunities, while trying to thwart others. ## Bärenstich ABACUSSPIELE will have a few other new games at SPIEL Essen 26, including Wolfgang Kramer's Bärenstich ("Bear Sting"), a climbing card game for 3-8 players that is his latest take on Das GROSSE und das kleine A, his 1996 card game later released in a revised form as Who's the Ass? Art by Florian Biege The deck consists of cards numbered 2-14, along with five jokers and one beehive, and each player starts with a hand of thirteen cards, with someone getting the beehive and leading the first trick. When you lead, play one or more cards of the same value (with jokers on their own equaling 15), then each player in turn has the chance to play the same number of cards of a higher value. All played cards are discarded, then whoever played last leads the next trick. When you hold the beehive, you can lead that card, after which each other player simultaneously reveals one card from their hand. Whoever reveals the highest card places the beehive in front of them, then adds one of the played cards to their hands and leads the next trick. (After this trick, they add the beehive to their hand, i.e., they can't play it immediately.) When a player runs out of cards, the round ends, and everyone scores points equal to the sum of the cards remaining in their hand, with the beehive worth 20 points. After four rounds, whoever has the lowest score wins. ## Other Games At SPIEL Essen 26, ABACUSSPIELE will also have **_Deckscape: Die magische Akademie_** ("The Academy of Magic"), the German edition of the latest Deckscape title from Martino Chiacchiera, Silvano Sorrentino, and DV Games, and What's Next?! Europäische Städte, a party/trivia game from Arno Steinwender and Ralf zur Linde in which you try to identify which of five European cities is closest to a sixth city. The closest chosen city is removed from play and replaced by the sixth city, after which a new city is revealed, taking you mentally across the European continent. Art by Alberto Bontempi and Simon Burmeister ****Want more SPIEL Essen 26 previews like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

Some day I will perhaps stop being surprised by how much support some crowdfunding projects receive, but today is not that day. Why? Dire Wolf's Kickstarter for a new Clank! expansion (The Forgotten Vault) and a tenth anniversary "Cube of Holding" closed on 1 October 2027 with more than US$2.4 million in backing, which includes 2,884 backers at the US$435 level for the "Dragon's Hoard" lot consisting of the new **_Master Thief_** edition base game, five expansions, two promo packs, 600 card sleeves, a neoprene map pack, an acrylic token upgrade kit, and the aforementioned Cube of Holding. Promotional image for the __Clank!__ Kickstarter campaign Amazingly, that's not even everything you could purchase. For an additional US$135, you could add on a set of metal cubes, a separate set of metal cubes, metal coins, a Kickstarter promo pack, and a Steam key in order to play the game digitally...which might be easier to handle than messing around with a cubic foot of physical components. In total, the campaign had 8,726 backers, which averages out to US$276 per backer. I'm not saying _Clank!_ is a bad game or folks shouldn't be spending their money as they like; it's more like I'm looking at these numbers and thinking: "In this economy?" Promotional image for __The Lord of the Rings: The King's Gambit__ Similarly, Restoration Games launched a Kickstarter campaign on 29 September 2026 for The Lord of the Rings: The King's Gambit, a co-production with Space Cowboys, and within two days that project has received more than US$1.4 million in backing, with the average amount spent per backer being US$336. _[Disclosure: Restoration Games has advertised on Board Game Beat.]_ Of course it doesn't hurt that the least expensive pledge is for the US$199 "Limited Edition" version of the game, aside from the US$5 "pledge manage access" level that has more than four hundred backers. If we set those backers aside, the average backer is spending US$373, which makes sense given that 40% of the backers have opted for the US$449 "Mithril Edition with playmat" option. Again, in _this_ economy? I've even been surprised by Monolith's Kickstarter campaign for its two Conan gaming lines, one of which is board games and one of which is RPGs. As with _Clank!_ , Frédéric Henry's _Conan_ board game is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and 93 backers have chosen the "board game all-in pledge" that runs for €699. All this said, I do recognize that (1) the world of gaming is always larger than we think it is, with millions of people quietly playing games and never making a big deal about it online like some of us do and (2) a decent percentage of these people have loads of money on hand for hobbies. In mid-2025, for example, 251 people backed the US$2,200 collector's edition of Ghost Galaxy's The Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation crowdfunding campaign. Why am I bringing this up? To highlight that the money is (probably) out there if you're a creator who has a special project they'd like to bring to market...at least on a small scale. A related story: In December 2025, my wife happened to run across someone on LinkedIn who had recently created a huge tabletop game and who had also recently moved to within a fifteen-minute drive of my house. I got in contact with Dan Winger, who had worked at LEGO for eighteen years, seven of those as a master designer. He had recently launched Unplugged Arcade, a company that would sell handcrafted tabletop games, and we met at a coffee shop to talk about his game Baseball Shuffle. Dan Winger, mid-shot in __Baseball Shuffle__ If you're familiar with Tumblin' Dice, a dexterity game from 2004, you'll see that _Baseball Shuffle_ shares the same basic structure: You have a playing area comprised of multiple levels, and you flick dice from the highest level onto lower ones. Beyond that, the games differ completely, with Winger simulating a baseball game via dice play, with teams alternating between batting and fielding each half inning. After nine innings, whichever team has scored more runs wins. Fielding is straightforward: Place eight dice on the black spots indicating the starting fielding positions, then wait to see what the batter does. When batting, you place a die on home plate, then flick it: * If the die doesn't leave the infield level, you receive a called strike, then take back the die and flick it again. Three strikes equals one out, and three outs ends your batting session in this inning. * If any portion of the die lands on one of the slightly raised gold tokens on the lowest level, you've hit a home run, and the batter and all runners score....but if you land anywhere else on that level, the batter is out on an easy pop fly. * If the die lands on the first, second, or third level below the infield, the batter and all runners possibly advance one, two, or three bases. To find out, check the value of the landed die. Does it show a 4 or 5? Then yes, they advance as described above. A 6 counts as a fielding error, and everyone moves one additional base. A 1 is an automatic out with no one advancing, and a 2 or 3 gives the opposing team a chance to stop you. The fielding team flicks any fielder at the batter, and the batter's final resting place (regardless of the die face) determines the outcome of the hit. I've played _Baseball Shuffle_ a couple of times, once one-on-one and a second time in teams of two, and the game does what it's trying to do. In general, you want to finesse your flicks to land on the green levels since you have a decent chance of advancing on base — but unlike in baseball, you can shoot your die directly into a fielder to knock them into the gutter (the lowest playing area), taking that fielder out of the inning and giving your opponent one fewer defender. As with _Tumblin' Dice_ , you feel like you can start with a certain die face on top of your batter and ease that die into a scoring area without having it flip over, but that almost never happens...at least not at my level of play. Doesn't everyone carry a baseball field in their trunk? Dan was making these boards in his garage and figuring they'd retail for US$1,500 — which seemed like a completely fair price given the work involved, while also being an outrageous price for a single game...yet look again at _The Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation_ above: 251 backers for a US$2,200 item. Hmm... I encouraged Dan to look into Kickstarter's "Make 100" program as he would not have to commit to making more than one hundred copies of the game, while giving it exposure on a national market, but he first wanted to see whether he could (1) find partners who could help produce the games and (2) market _Baseball Shuffle_ to pubs, which seemed like an ideal outlet. After all, plenty of bars feature games like darts and billiards, so if _Baseball Shuffle_ would encourage guests to stay longer and drink more, maybe it would be a good investment for those businesses. (In case you hadn't noticed, the gutter features six highlighted "drink zones" where you can place glasses, as we did with our coffee drinks. The glasses and cups become bumpers in the gutter, perhaps enticing you to shoot more directly for home runs given that less of the "out" area is exposed. Surely you'll land on a gold coin now, right??) I saw little of Dan over the next six months, with me launching this site and devoting a vast number of hours to it and with him marketing _Baseball Shuffle_ like crazy through placements in pubs and other businesses; featured events at sporting events, such as Durham Bulls baseball games; tables at a beer-related event in downtown Raleigh; and promotion via YouTube, Instagram and Tik Tok, with one video catching more than 900,000 views. But just the other day, he sent me a link to a Kickstarter page, with him saying, "I should have taken your advice on this months ago." I feel so honored! While looking at Dan's videos over the past months, I saw many, many comments lamenting the price of the game and wondering whether it could be made more affordably, and smartly he's done just that for the crowdfunding project, creating US$250 and US$500 versions that you assemble prior to each game. They lack the gloss and impact of the one-piece table-sized edition, but they appear to provide the same game experience, so this is a great business decision. Amazing to learn what he's been doing all this time! Promotional images for the least expensive "Sandlot" edition of __Baseball Shuffle__ Only three days after launching, Dan's project is already funded, with roughly half of the support coming via these less-expensive versions. I can understand wanting to stick with your ideal vision and not compromising, but if you want to make a living creating games, you probably want to market games that people will buy. Congrats to Dan, and I look forward to seeing what he does next! _[Disclosure: Board Game Beat has run banners a few times for Unplugged Arcade, including the week that this article was published, but these are not paid banners. I had empty slots on the advertising schedule, so I invited Dan to send me banners, something I've done a few times for independent creators.]_ ****Want more articles like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more

## Krakel Spektakel In March 2026, I covered two expansions for the 2025 Spiel des Jahres-nominated party game Krakel Orakel — game overview here — and mentioned a new standalone game: Krakel Spektakel. As with the expansions, _Krakel Spektakel_ from designers Die 7 Bazis and publisher TOPP features new word cards — 250 cards with 500 words, nearly twice what's in each expansion — that can be used with the original _Krakel Orakel_ , but it also features a new game mode. At the start of each round, flick the spinner to determine the rule twist. Perhaps you'll receive a prophecy card that tells you whether to draw the easier or harder word on your card, but since no one knows who has which prophecies, you'll have twice as many words to consider. You might need to flip the drawing boards to their geometric side where one has only circles, another only rectangles, still another only stars, and so on. You might use a timer that stops randomly after 40-90 seconds. ## Jurassic Zoo Another TOPP title that you can find at SPIEL Essen 26 is Jurassic Zoo from the design team of Matthew Dunstan and Phil Walker-Harding. This flip-and-write game has up to six players fencing off dinosaurs — and visitors! — on their own sheet of paper. In each of fifteen rounds, two number cards are revealed, then you must draw a rectangle of that size, e.g. 3x5 or 1x6, with the first rectangle abutting the left edge of the zoo and each subsequent one sharing a line with or overlapping a previous one. When a Triceratops or T Rex is fenced off on its own, you score 1 or 2 points. To score a visitor center, you must isolate it in a field that's the same size as the number on that center. If you're using the B-side of the player sheets, you can also score for fencing a pair of Brachiosaurs on their own. Three goal cards of eight are in play each game, with the first player who completes each scoring 5 points while everyone else will score 2. ## KRZ GRTN TOPP's new party game for 2026 is KRZ GRTN from Mads Fløe, with the title being short for "Kurz geraten", which means "briefly put" or "in a nutshell". Graphic design by Katrin Schindel In this co-operative game, you're trying to get one player each round to identify the proper image from several on display. To do this, everyone but this player looks at the target image, then creates a clue using two or more of their letter tiles, which feature only consonants (along with two starting blanks). You can stack letters or position them in whatever way you think might be helpful to the guesser. Once all the clues are ready, draw more image cards from the deck, then shuffle and reveal them, after which the guesser sees the clues and guesses. If they get it right, everyone but the guesser receives more letter tiles; if not, you lose a life...and receive no new tiles! You can give up a life for each player to receive two tiles, but if you run out of lives before completing six levels of play, y ls. ## Reflect: Das Spiegelduell Similarly puzzley, but in a different way, is Reflect: Das Spiegelduell ("The Mirror Duel"), a German-language edition of **_Reflect: Mirror Mazes_** , which Professor Puzzle Games released in 2021. In this two-player game, each player gets the same maze on a sheet of paper, then places the maze behind a screen so that they can see it only in a double-sided mirror that stands between the players. Whoever completes the maze first wins. ## Die Zwerge: Königswahl Designers Michael Palm and Lukas Zach have been creating games based on Markus Heitz' _Die Zwerge_ ("The Dwarves") novel series since 2012 when Pegasus Spiele released Die Zwerge. Art by Jarek Nocoń Their newest title in this fictional world is Die Zwerge: Königswahl ("Election of the King"). In this game, players play cards in front of themselves to affect their standing in the succession rankings or play cards and discard them for their immediate effect. The game ends when a player cannot play or players have met a game-ending condition on a card. ## Other Titles Three other games TOPP will have at SPIEL Essen 26 are: * Crime Files Adventskalender: Fallakte – Sherlocks Zeitungsarchiv from Lukas Setzke and Verena Wiechens, with this being an advent calendar featuring 24 (connected) cases in which you rustle through Sherlock Holmes' newspaper archives. * Dobro from Fel Barros, Lucas Castanho, and Pedro Vinicius, with this being a German edition of a climbing card game first released in Brazil in which you score points based on your position relative to others in terms of cards collected. The fewer, the better! * Geschickt Gefädelt from Cami Muñoz Villar, with this being a German edition of **_Warp & Weft_**, a game with up to five players drafting colored threads to weave them into valuable scoring patterns. Art by (name too small to read on the back of the box); Bibadash & Chris Borges; and Maya Hanisch ****Want more SPIEL Essen 26 previews like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

If you don't live in Korea, you might have a hard time checking out games from Happy Baobab, but this publisher attends the SPIEL convention annually, giving players worldwide a chance to check out their wares. Here's what Happy Baobab is bringing to SPIEL Essen 26: ## 해녀: Sea Divers of Jeju In 2017, Japanese designer Hisashi Hayashi released Rattaneer through the OKAZU Brand label he runs with his wife, artist Ryo Nyamo. In that game, you represented a crew of pirate mice that hunted for treasure each round by secretly selecting which parts of the land and ocean they wanted to visit. The catch is that after all pirates (and deck hands) have been placed, if you don't have a continuous chain to the starting point, you don't take your action. Happy Baobab has licensed this design, but changed the setting of 해녀: Sea Divers of Jeju to have a more meaningful connection to its (primarily Korean) audience. "해녀" is the Korean word "Haenyeo", which means "sea women", and that term refers to female divers in the Korean province of Jeju. From the rules: > [These women] dive without using oxygen tanks or other special equipment.With only simple tools such as a bitchang (iron bar), galgori (hook), or jeongge-homi (sickle), they collect conch, abalone, seaweed, and sea mustard. Sometimes they even catch fish with a spear. > A typical dive goes down about 5 meters, and they usually stay underwater for around 30 seconds before coming up. Skilled Haenyeo can dive as deep as 20 meters and hold their breath for over 2 minutes.When they return to the surface, they make a unique whistling breath sound called "sumbi sori", which has become a symbol of Jeju's ocean culture. > In 2016, Jeju Haenyeo culture was officially listed as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This 2016 video about Haenyeo from UNESCO is fascinating! Promotional image from Happy Baobab Now instead of moving across the water with pirate mice, you're diving deep into the water with haenyeo. You no longer have to mess with a separate supply of deck hands to extend the chain as each diver now covers two of the twelve zones numbered 0-11. Everyone chooses zones for their swimmers secretly, then they reveal their zones and place their heanyeo on the game board with the diver's head in the chosen zone. As long as the human chain goes from 1 to wherever your head's at, you get rewards from the zone to the right of your head — netting items one at a time if you share the zone with others and taking everything if you're alone. Reach the bottom, and you grab a pearl. You record goods collected and trash hauled from the ocean on your personal score sheet, with eggs giving you the chance to grab marine life of your choice or add a third diver to your team. The goods available change in each of the eight rounds, and you use one of eight scoring metrics each game. ## Metro Bingo Metro Bingo is the latest iteration of Yoshihisa Itsubaki's game Streams, which debuted in 2011 from publisher/game store Sugorokuya and which was first licensed in 2012 by French publisher Moonster Games. Here's my description from 2012: > _Streams_ consists of pens, score sheets, and bakelite tiles numbered 1-30, with two copies of #11-19 and one wild. Gameplay is similar to Bingo in that someone draws a tile, then everyone must mark that number on their score sheet. This sheet contains a line of 20 spaces to be marked, and while these spaces can be filled in any order, if you can place them in non-descending order — identical numbers placed side-by-side don't break a stream — you'll score points. The longer the stream of ascending numbers, the more points you'll score. > > Once twenty tiles have been drawn and the scoresheets filled, players tally their points for each stream of non-descending numbers, and the high score wins. _Streams_ has been licensed multiple times since 2011 — appearing as _20 Express_ , _Digit'y Do_ , _Numerama_ , _Schlingo Bingo_ , among other titles — and gameplay remains the same in _Metro Bingo_ , but with the box now containing four maps for increased variety of play. Promotional image for __Metro Bingo__ with an older cover design Instead of having twenty spaces to fill in a straight line, you can choose the circular Tokyo line (presumably representing the Yamanote line) or the Seoul or Paris lines, which have two and three crossing paths that comprise 28 spaces instead of 20. The tiles also include two new special effects: one that removes two randomly drawn tiles from play (letting you know that those numbers are out of play), and another that puts two numbers in play on the same turn, with each player choosing the one they want. I'm surprised that this game has gone through so many iterations without becoming an evergreen, but maybe "thoughtful bingo" isn't a thing that the market wants... ## Beasty Council Designers Gary Kim, Hope S. Hwang, and Yohan Goh work together frequently as GAT Game Studio, with their biggest success to date being Odin, which won the 2025 As d'Or, France's "game of the year" award. (Goh wrote a designer diary about _Odin_ in March 2025, and I reviewed their game This Bed Is Mine in July 2024.) Beasty Council is a card game for 2-4 players with dual-use cards that's played over four rounds. Cards come in three colors (red, blue, green) with three types of animals (lion, fox, elephant) with values ranging from 3-10 and with a scoring condition on each card. Players start with three cards in hand. At the start of each round, 6-10 cards are placed in the plaza, then players take turns either: * Taking a card from the plaza and adding it to their hand, or * Playing a card from their hand as a _representative_ in front of themselves, then optionally picking up a card from the plaza that matches the color or animal that they just played and adding it to their hand. As soon as only one animal remains in the plaza, that animal becomes the _Chair_ for the round, and each player scores points equal to the value of their representatives of the same animal type, e.g., if a lion is Chair, all lions score. After four rounds, you may play a card from hand as a representative, then for each representative, you see how well the cards that _remain in your hand_ meet that representative's scoring condition. From the rules: * The red fox scores you 3/6/9 points for having 1/2/3 different red animals, so you score 6 points. * If you have no green cards, which you don't, the blue fox earns you 6 points. * The green lion causes you to lose 2 points unless you have three foxes in hand. * However, those three foxes cost your 3 points from the red elephant, but you score 6 points from the two elephants in hand. In short, the representatives (potentially) score you points during the round, while setting up your endgame scoring conditions, and your turn options allow you to balance the number of representatives in play versus how many supporters you hold. Seems like a winner along the lines of Castle Combo, which I reviewed in September 2024. ## Travel Fold It ** _Travel Fold It_** is a new version of a Yohan Goh design that debuted in 2016: Fold-it. That game is a decade old?! Time rushes ever onward. The original __Fold-it__ and the new __Travel__ version; art by Agsty Im (left) and WEIRDOLLS (right) In the game, each player gets a cloth divided into sixteen squares in a 4x4 grid. At the start of each round, you reveal one card fewer than the number of players, then everyone races to fold their cloth so that only the images visible on one card show on your folded cloth. If you do this and the card is still available, grab that card. Once all the cards have been grabbed, everyone double-checks the work of everyone else, and if you folded correctly, you keep the card; if not, you discard it. In the Travel version of the game, which goes to six players instead of five, whoever didn't grab a card takes the "burst suitcase" necklace, and if they score a card next round, they take a bonus card from the deck. Once a player has at least six cards, the game ends, and players tally points on their collected cards. ## Hop Around To continue with another new edition while (sort of) ending back where we started on Jeju island, **_Hop Around_** is a new edition of Jeju Island, a game by Gary Kim, Yeon-Min Jung, and Jun-Hyup Kim that debuted in 2015 and that I reviewed in 2016. Art by Jeon Polong and WEIRDOLLS The game board features six (in _Jeju Island_) or seven (in _Hop Around_) stacks of tiles, with player tokens and neutral tokens being seeded next to these stacks. On a turn, mancala-style, you pick up all the tokens next to a stack — with at least one of your tokens being present — then drop them one by one in clockwise or counterclockwise order next to other stacks. After doing this, for all players, if your token is on the top of a pile, take the tile from the stack next to your token. Alternatively, instead of moving tokens on a turn, you can spend tiles you've collected to take one of the five score cards on display. Some cards are just worth a bunch of points, while others are worth a few points while also giving you a permanent tile to use when claiming score cards in the future. When enough stacks are empty or the final score card has been revealed, the game ends, and players tally their points. ****Want more SPIEL Essen 26 previews like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more

After landing on multiple "best of the year" lists in 2025 for the games Magical Athlete and Hot Streak — in addition to releasing a new edition of Quacks — U.S. publisher CMYK has been quiet so far in 2026...until now. On 29 September 2026, CMYK announced the availability through its website of Grabble, a new edition of Naoki Fukuda's game Nuts a GoGo!, which Japanese publisher itten released in 2022. Front covers of __Nuts a GoGo!__ (art by Yoshiaki Tomioka) and __Grabble__ (art by SMLXL) Gameplay is straightforward: Put the six types of bits in the game box. Give a signal, then everyone starts grabbing bits and placing them in a tiny personal cup. When a player has a full cup, they start counting down and whoever is last to stop collecting bits must give a bit of their choice to the player who stopped first. Starting with the player who stopped and going clockwise, a player reveals one bit from their cup, then everyone else must discard a bit of the same type; if they don't, they're out of the game. Keep going until only one person remains. The design is fairly silly, yet it still gives you moments to ponder during the lightning-fast play. Do you go for a variety of bits to try to counter every call? Do you want to hoard one type of bit, then call that each time your turn comes around? Three types of bits come in two sizes, so should you concentrate on grabbing the smaller bits to fit more in your cup, or will you be wasting time when you could be grabbing bits indiscriminately? Components in __Nuts a GoGo!__ and __Grabble__ _Grabble_ has small differences from _Nuts a GoGo!_ , starting with the rules, which fit neatly on the inside of the box, whereas _Nuts a GoGo!_ includes rules for four variant games, e.g., instead of dumping out your bits behind your hand so that you can access everything, you must grab bits from the cup as they're stacked, which might lead to you dropping bits and having them removed from play. A representative from CMYK told me that including only one ruleset seemed to make sense given that the game will be marketed in a wide variety of retail outlets. (While initially available only from CMYK, _Grabble_ will be available via retail in Q4 2026 / Q1 2027.) The change of components surprised me as the wood bits in _Nuts a GoGo!_ are both pleasing to the eye and a source of confusion when you're trying to grab a particular type of bit — and yet I can understand why CMYK went with something different. I mean, that's kind of its thing given its new look for Quacks and its Magenta card game line. Why copy another publisher's component design when we can make something new? If someone really wants the _Nuts_ version, that's still available on the market, but now players have a second choice, too. What's more, Nuts a GoGo! wasn't even the first release of this design as it previously appeared in 2021 as **_MADA HAiLE_** from Asobication Games — and I was lucky enough to play that edition at BGG.CON in 2023: That's wildly different from _Nuts a GoGo!_ , with translucent components such as plastic rings, bells, and cars in many colors, along with metal coins and gold bars. You can't just grab all the blue bits to horde an item because many types of bits are blue, so you need to poke around in the pile to find what you want. I dig it when publishers — and by extension artists — go out of their way to put their unique spin on a licensed game. The varied editions of Reiner Knizia's Circus Flohcati delight me in their unique takes on the design, for example, and Daniel Newman does something novel with each title he licenses for New Mill Industries. More of this, please! ## Olaf Mix-Up! In June 2026, I previewed KPop Demon Hunters: Battle for the Spotlight, a game based on Seiji Kanai's Love Letter with design by Waleed Ma'arouf, and before that game has even hit retail outlets in the U.S. on 2 October 2026, publisher Z-Man Games has already announced another spinoff of _Love Letter_ courtesy of Ma'arouf: Olaf Mix-Up! In this 2-5 player game, you follow the _Love Letter_ formula — on your turn, draw a card, then play one of the two cards in hand — but your goal is to use various _Frozen_ characters to re-assemble the snowman Olaf, with each player having their own seven-piece jigsaw puzzle. Some card effects let you place a piece immediately, while others take effect at the end of the round. Standard _Love Letter_ effects are in play — swap your hand, protection from attacks, guess the card an opponent holds — but your reward for holding the highest card is to add two pieces to your puzzle. The game lasts multiple rounds, ending as soon as someone puts Olaf together again...after which you can slap him apart and start over again. ## The LOOP In late 2020, French publisher Catch Up Games released The LOOP, a co-operative design from Maxime Rambourg and Théo Rivière in which up to four players use time-travel shenanigans to try to defeat Dr. Foo, who attempts to use clones to destroy eras of time. How time travel is implemented in this design is that you can spend energy to re-gain cards played on a turn so that you can play those cards again — and if you can afford the ever-increasing cost, you can loop multiple times. Art by Simon Caruso Publisher Pandasaurus Games released _The LOOP_ in English in 2021, with Dr. Foo becoming Dr. Faux, then followed up with English-language editions of The Revenge of Fauxzilla! and The Fur Brigade in 2022 — but those expansions were released in short supply, leading to copies selling for multiple times their suggested retail price. However, in late September 2026, Pandasaurus announced that it was reprinting the base game and both expansions, with copies due out in March 2027. Pre-orders are available for those in the U.S., and these copies will also be distributed in non-European, English-speaking locations due to licensing restrictions. ****Want more game announcements like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Ready to sign up?

Should you be short on reading material this weekend, I offer the following breadcrumbs toward coverage of games and the game industry elsewhere: ▪️ At the start of September 2026, Chris and Suzanne Zinsli published the 2026 edition of their "Board Game Licensing Contract Terms" survey on Cardboard Edison. (You can see a portion of those survey results above.) For this report, they surveyed game designers who had signed a licensing contract between 2000 and 2025, collecting data on 265 contracts, then compiling that information into three huge graphics that cover pre-publication contract terms; post-publication terms; and what might happen over a game's lifespan. For comparison, _Cardboard Edison_ includes previous surveys published in 2021 and 2015. ▪️ Merz Verlag has published hall plans and an exhibitor list for SPIEL Essen 26, in addition to releasing a 2026 update for its SPIEL Essen app. With all eight halls of Messe Essen being used for the fair this year, SPIEL Essen 26 will take up 81,200 m² of floor space, with the addition of Hall 8 allowing for more visitors — up to 230,000, with 75% of the tickets for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday already being sold. Currently 921 exhibitors from 53 countries are scheduled to be present. ▪️ Evie Lake at the BBC has profiled James Purcell and Andy Taeger, who she describes as "[t]wo friends from Newcastle [who] have set themselves the challenge of completing a board game which has never officially been completed", with that game being Richard H. Berg's The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43. They estimate they will need twenty years to complete the game, and they've already published 94 episodes of their "War with a Mate" podcast about their preparations and their eighteen-month-long, six-turn practice game. ▪️ On BoardGameGeek, Beth Heile posted a round-up of game-themed cakes presented at the 2026 Minnesota State Fair, with many images of cakes courtesy of Greg Sorenson. Sara Dauscher Sather won the "Game On!" cake competition with her presentation of Agricola in cake form: Image: Sara Dauscher Sather ▪️ On _Rascal_ , Khee Hoon Chan writes about UK Games Expo's new prohibition of "[i]tems and products that have been created or generated completely or in significant part by the use of AI tools and programmes". Writes Hoon Chan: > This notice follows a lack of response by UKGE on its generative AI stance during the event in June 2026, despite calls by several tabletop creators to prohibit the sale of products that utilizes AI-generated images and text, as reported by Wargamer. As such, games that contained material generated by LLMs and commercial AI tools, such as _Adventure Bears_ and _Blocks of Glory_ , were allowed to successfully exhibit alongside human-made games without any disclosures. ▪️ In July 2026, Lucca Crea and SAZ Italia named the five finalists for its Board Game Designer of the Year award, and it's now announced Paolo Mori as the winner, writing: > From 2024 to 2026, Mori moved with rare ease between widely differing styles. These ranged from historical wargames in both accessible and more traditional, simulation-driven forms, to family games with international reach, as well as a foray into narrative puzzles that took his distinctive design style into entirely new territory. In every case, the designer retained his signature approach, built on streamlined rules, consequential decisions and unfailing mechanical balance. Equally significant is the fidelity with which Mori treats his historical and cultural sources, whether wartime events reconstructed in meticulous detail or literary works adapted into game form with respect and precision. This makes the setting an integral part of the gameplay experience, never mere background. > This stylistic range is matched by a remarkable ability to speak to different audiences, from the most discerning historical simulation enthusiasts to casual players. This quality has made his games effective vehicles for promoting board game culture and expanding the audience for modern board games. ****Want more reading material like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

I've written about Korean publisher Playte, which started business as OPEN'N PLAY, for years — well, a decade really, as parent company Gameology Inc. was established in 2016. Time flies like a banana! Head of Gameology Junghee Choi seems fascinated with old-school German games, which you might think of as Eurogames minus all the multiplayer-solitaire designs, that is, games with simple rules and a high degree of interactivity, and he's brought many decade-old designs back to print, including one of my favorite games: Alex Randolph's Big Shot, which first appeared in 2001 and which I reviewed in 2025. _[Disclosure: Playte is an advertiser on Board Game Beat.]_ Choi has been fanatical about packaging games in the smallest boxes possible, with the company's Lboard format transforming the game's box into a game board, as with the aforementioned _Big Shot_ , which features a double-layered game box that unfolds into the game board depicted below, with miniature magnets on the edges of the game box layers so that the board stays together. The front cover of __Big Shot__ , with the box unfolding to become this game board; art by Wanjin Gill In May 2026, I posted an overview of the titles Playte was bringing to Game Market Spring 2026 in Tokyo, and ahead of SPIEL Essen 26 here's another round-up of new (old) titles from Playte that will be available at that show, whether via pre-order or directly on site: * The Birth of the Post is a new edition of **_Thurn & Taxis_**, a game by Karen and Andreas Seyfarth that won Germany's Spiel des Jahres award in 2006. In the game, players collect and play cards to create connected routes of cities in order to mark those cities as served, thereby earning points. Through smart (and fortunate) use of the four special abilities in the game, you'll ideally craft routes that help you work toward several goals at once. * Manila is a Franz-Benno Delonge design that first appeared from Zoch Verlag in 2005. You're trying to become the richest player with each round of the game starting with a bid for harbor master, who determines which three of four goods will be loaded onto boats that _might_ be delivered, thereby increasing the value of those goods. Everyone bets on the outcome of the boats, while also influencing their movement. * Leo Colovini's Carolus Magnus debuted in 2000, and it's a game in which you fight for control of paladins (which come in five colors), while the paladins (and, by extension, you) try to claim control of territories. By controlling territories, you place castles in the playing area, with adjacent territories that you control combining in order to strengthen your might — or make a more inviting target for takeover by someone else. Art by Wanjin Gill, Atelier198, and Benoît Billion * Forum Romanum dates to 1988, with this Wolfgang Kramer design crossing area control with tic-tac-toe. Each turn, you place one of your pieces on the board or move a piece already on the board, and every space on the board is part of a vertical line, a horizontal line, and a room (and sometimes a diagonal line). Whenever a line or area is filled for the first time, whoever has more pieces in it than anyone else scores points, while those with the fewest pieces (including zero) lose points. Ties aren't resolved until players move pieces, which you're often forced to do thanks the small number of pieces. * Walter Müller's Donkey Derby first appeared in 1989 as Favoriten before franjos Spieleverlag re-branded the game in 2016. This race consists of alternating betting and moving rounds; first, each player can place one bet on one of five donkeys, then the first better that round rolls a die five times, moving a different donkey after each roll. When three donkeys have finished, players score based on who they bet on and how early they placed those bets. * Peer Sylvester's The King Is Dead, which first appeared in 2007 as King of Siam, is a minimalist game in which you play cards to affect which of three factions — if any — controls regions in the UK, with you trying to pick up followers along the way to be in control of the winning faction — again, if any — at game's end. Art by Yeonhwa, Wanjin Gill, and Anuc Kim * Hepta from Alex Randolph dates to 1974, making it (I think) the oldest of Playte's reprints in this batch of titles. The 7x7 game board shows seven spots of seven colors, with one player taking the "I" tiles and the other the "L" tiles, with each tile covering three spaces. One player names a color, then players take turns placing a tile on the board that cannot cover the named color. Whoever can't place a tile loses. Alternatively, you can play this as a puzzle, placing all fourteen tiles on the board to leave revealed the seven spots of one color. * Playte continues to release new editions of Sid Sackson's Can't Stop, with the themed edition above featuring artwork that depicts Vinicunca, a multi-colored mountain in Peru. * Not all of Playte's releases are older games. As far as I know, Multi-Story Mansion, a.k.a. Many Stories Mansion, debuted at Game Market Spring 2026 from Korean publisher Jupiters Club, and now Playte is making the game available on a wider scale. In this climbing card game, cards come in five suits that correspond to a pattern, such as the aforementioned I and L tiles. As your played card combinations are beaten or as they win a round, you "drop" them into your mansion — which starts with only a multi-colored door — in order to create patterns that match what is on the cards, e.g., three pink cards in an L shape. Your score at game's end is the number of patterns you've built multiplied by the height of your mansion. * Finally (for this post), Playte has a new edition of Wolfgang Kramer's Dance of Ibexes, for which I did a video review in 2024. Why a new edition? Because Playte has figured out how to fit everything in smaller packaging, so it's done just that. ****Want more game announcements like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Hand over your email...

Designer Rikki Tahta launched La Mame Games in 2012 with Coup, a small design of his in which you can take any game character's action you wish — but other players can challenge that action, and if that character isn't one you have among your face-down cards, you're punished by losing one of your cards. Lose both of your cards, and you're out of the game. Tahta's La Mame Games has released a new title at the SPIEL convention in Essen, Germany most years since 2012, and while some of those games have been licensed by other publishers, others have been one-shot releases you're unlikely to ever see on the market again. For SPIEL Essen 26, La Mame Games is releasing a game in the latter category, at least for this particular production as Tahta notes that "the pieces are too expensive for a real publisher to produce". As in _Coup_ , this new design from Tahta — Buskers — will challenge you to bluff your fellow players and call out their bluffs. In the game, you are living out the "no honor among thieves" saying. You and 2-3 others have robbed a bank and are trying to reach the getaway car first in order to escape, without concern for the fate of those you leave behind. __Buskers__ game board (art by Andrew Higgins) Each turn, you either busk where you are in your disguise as a street musician or you place 1-3 coins in your hand, then challenge others to guess how many coins you're holding. They'll make a singular guess, and if they're wrong, you move as many spaces as the number of coins you hold; if they're right, you don't move. In either case, those coins are gone. The game board includes a few wrinkles to keep players guessing: Land at a bank, and you receive three coins immediately sans busking; stop at a taxi stand, and next turn you can hide 1-5 coins; reach a café, and you take another turn immediately; land on other players, and they must each give you one coin. Barriers cost you an additional coin after you finish moving, so count carefully as you make the final sprint for the pink van. Yes, Rikki knows his last name is spelled incorrectly in this image (art by Andrew Higgins) ****Want more game previews like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up

## Seven Prophecies In October 2026, Capstone Games will release a new edition of Hinata Origuchi's Seven Prophecies, which debuted in 2017 from the designer's own Blüte Spiele brand and which had a limited English-language release in 2024 from New Mill Industries, as well as a new Japanese edition in 2025 from SUNNY BIRD. The four __Seven Prophecies__ The deck features cards in four suits, and players receive ten cards in hand, with ten suit cards placed in a row at random to indicate the forced lead suit of each trick. Players then use seven tokens to predict in how many tricks they'll place first, second, third, and fourth (depending on whether you have three or four players in the game). Those are the seven prophecies of the title. You then play through the hand, playing the lead suit, if possible, and throwing off otherwise. Cards in a trick are ranked from high to low in the lead suit, then high to low in all of the off-suits — and if your played card lands in a position that you prophesized, then you remove the appropriate token from your prediction card and place it on your played card. (All played cards are placed in a grid so that you can track successful prophecies and what's still unplayed.) Art by Amelia Sales As soon as someone places their seventh token, the round ends, with them scoring points based on how quickly they did this: seven tricks out of ten? ten out of ten? Whoever has placed the secondmost tokens scores 1 point. If no one prophesizes correctly, no one scores. First to 7 points wins, or whoever has the most points after three or four rounds. ## Woo Fifty copies of Woo — a game by Taylor Reiner, Bert Trobaugh, and Dan Vieu — were given out to attendees of The Trick-Taking Extravaganza, an event allplay hosted during Gen Con 2026, and now the game is heading to retailers, specifically brick-and-mortar retailers as allplay is marketing this game to retailers as "a local game store exclusive, available only on your shelves and not online on our website or at other distributors". Art by Sai Beppu, who's been doing most of the art on allplay's "tiny" titles. _Woo_ is pitched as a two- or four-player game, but you really want four players, who compete in teams. The gist of the game is that one teammate will start a valid meld, then the other teammate will finish that meld, after which the other team can try to beat that meld. Played melds are discarded, and when one player sheds all of their cards, their team scores 1 point, with the first team to score 2 points winning. In more detail, the deck contains six copies of cards numbered 1-9, and each player receives a hand of thirteen or fourteen cards. Valid melds are sets of 2-3 cards, runs of 2-4 cards, consecutive pairs, and four-of-a-kind. One teammate leads 1-3 cards that could be part of a valid meld, e.g., 3-3 or 6-7-9, then the other teammate must complete the meld with 1-3 cards, perhaps playing 3 or 4-4 to go with the pair of 3s, whereas only an 8 would go with a 6-7-9 lead. If the teammate cannot complete the meld, the teammates return played cards to their hands one by one, thereby giving them info for future plays. The other team must then collaboratively play a higher-valued meld of the same type and size. ## Council of Serpents German publisher Wulfhorn Games crowdfunded Council of Serpents, a card game from Joeri Hessels and Wouter Moons, in July 2026 and plans to have the game available at SPIEL Essen 26. Art by Joost Das _Council of Serpents_ is for 1-4 players, with the four-player game being played in teams. During the game, players manipulate the strength, popularity, and treasury of three houses, attempting to make one house triumph — or collapse! — based on their hidden ambition cards. Each player has a hand of three influence cards, and on a turn you draft an influence card from the four-card "court", then play one, perhaps placing it between two houses to create conflict between them or escalate conflict to war — or placing it between them to quell a conflict and adjust both their stats. You can place an intrigue card face down by a house, with its effect being revealed only when the house goes to war with either of its neighbors. A guild card affects a house's stats as long as it's present, but you can play a matching one at another house to banish the first. Planning cards allow you to affect the "time track", removing a card there and replacing it with another or adding special effects to it. After each player's turn, the top card on the time track resolves. When the time track empties, each player secretly contributes a new card to the time track pool, with the first two cards in the court and a random card also being added; shuffle these cards, then lay them out to create the new track. The game ends immediately when one house collapses or triumphs, with war making it possible for both to happen at the same time. ****Want more game announcements like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more!

My family has been packing, stacking, and moving for the past three weeks, and because I'm cheap and we're not moving that far, we've been doing almost all of it ourselves. We hit crunch time this past week, so my online time has been limited to researching suicide pills and methods for stuffing boxes to 120% of their maximum volume. Along the way I got rid of more than nine hundred games — mostly by just giving them away, a process I came to appreciate thanks to a recent library swap event — and more games will go once I start excavating the storage unit, but for now the end of packing is in sight, so posts will resume in the near future...assuming those pills don't arrive in time.

Ten years after the debut of Asger Aleksandrov Granerud's bicycle racing game Flamme Rouge, publisher Lautapelit.fi has released Flamme Rouge: Champion Edition, which includes the base game, the Peloton and Meteo expansions released in 2017 and 2018, a new Challengers module, and related doodads. One category of doodad is scenery, some of which is decorative, some of which serve as reminders for track pieces with special rules, and some of which can make the track more challenging by narrowing it to a single lane. Another category is the storage system, which gives each racer a separate box for their game components, with room available for the (separately available) Grand Tour expansion from 2024. Still another doodad category is achievement stickers that might be ideal for those playing with the same group repeatedly: "The rulebook contains a list of achievements, how to earn them, and which award stickers you may glue to the deck box of your player color once earned. They are split between Rosettes, Medals, a Trophy, and finally Yellow Jersey & Sponsorship sticker. The Yellow Jersey are awarded through playing the Grand Tour, while all the others may be completed with just the Champion Edition." Lautapelit.fi will have Nordic, English, and Polish editions of _Flamme Rouge: Champion Edition_ , with the English edition anticipated to be available at SPIEL Essen 26. Pegasus Spiele should have the German edition available at that show ahead of its 30 October 2026 release date, and editions are also coming from Gigamic and Stronghold Games. Covering the game title's subhead with artwork is a bold choice... ****Want more game announcements like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

Ravensburger has announced its game line-up in Germany for the second half of 2026, and it will likely feel familiar to you for two reasons. First, Ravensburger's headline titles in this line-up have been known for more than a year: Carcassonne Labyrinth, a co-design by Labyrinth's Max J. Kobbert and** __** Carcassonne's Klaus-Jürgen Wrede that was announced during SPIEL Essen 25, and Labyrinth Chronicles, a co-design by Kobbert and Jan Truchanowicz that was featured at SPIEL Essen 25 and crowdfunded in early 2026. (_Labyrinth_ turns 40 in 2026, so the publisher is celebrating this game that's sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.) Art by Marcel Gröber _Carcassonne Labyrinth_ uses a scaled-down _Labyrinth_ -style game board, with a 5x5 grid of nine fixed tiles and sixteen tiles that can slide through two pairs of intersecting lines. On a turn, you look at one of the treasure tiles from your personal stack, draw a land tile from the common stack, push that land tile into the game board (pushing out one tile), then move your meeple through the maze, ideally landing on the treasure depicted on your personal tile. If you do, you place both the treasure tile and the pushed-out land tile into your personal city; otherwise, you place only the land tile. As you complete cities and roads in your personal layout, you gain shield and treasure tokens, and at game's end after ten turns, whoever has the tallest stack of tokens and placed treasure tiles wins. The game includes quest cards that reward you for specific aspects of building: most road loops, longest road, etc. _Labyrinth Chronicles_ initially plays like _Labyrinth_ , but it features a co-operative campaign that introduces new gameplay elements. Art by (Labyrinth) Jakub Dzikowski, Patryk Jędraszek, Ewa Labak, Pamela Łuniewska; (echoes) Ástor Alexander, Harnickell Design, Paola Andreatta, and (SY Duel) Studio Hive The second reason Ravensburger's titles will sound familiar is that most of them are spinoffs or sequels of long-running game series.**__** For example, echoes: Das grüne Grab is the newest audio mystery title from Dave Neale and Matthew Dunstan — the thirteenth title in the echoes series that started in 2021 — with players trying to find out what happened to a missing jungle expedition. Scotland Yard Duel is a two-player game by Matthias Prinz & Thorsten Schlotterbeck and the latest spinoff of the 1983 Spiel des Jahres-winning Scotland Yard. As you might expect, Mister X is once again being chased through a city by a detective, but now that city consists of 25 vertical tiles in a 5x5 grid. The detective starts in the central row, which includes three Scotland Yard tiles, by revealing one of the tiles in it. The transportation revealed on the tile determines how many spaces Mister X can move in the grid and how far apart the tiles are that Mister X can swap, after which the detective also moves based on the tile they revealed. If the detective reveals three sabotaged locations or cannot move on their turn, Mister X wins. Each turn in Jack and Andrew Lawson's 2004 game Make 'n' Break, a player reveals cards from a pile, then tries to recreate that image with ten colored blocks as quickly as possible, scoring for each image they re-create before time runs out. In this relaunch edition of the game, players now compete simultaneously to build structures out of eight blocks, scoring points based on the order in which they finished. Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons – Ravenloft from Peter Lee and Nick Tourville will see a German edition in November 2026, with this being the sixth standalone game since Horrified debuted in 2019. The English-language edition of the game includes the fabulous tagline "You will be mist" that refers to both the vampiric powers of the main villain and the notion that you'll probably be killed during play. The tagline of the German edition — "Der Nebel verschlingt alles" ("The fog devours everything") — lacks that pizazz, although my non-native self could be missing wordplay here. Bertram Kaes' **_Nobody Is Perfect: Music_** is the newest title in the Nobody Is Perfect game series that debuted in 1992. Gameplay is along the lines of _Balderdash_ or the "Dictionary" party game, with players being confronted with trivia or questions, then making up answers that will hopefully trick other players into believing their answers are the truth. **_Wer stiehlt mir die Show? Buzzer Edition_** can be used as an expansion for 2025's Wer stiehlt mir die Show? from Jens Merkl or played as a standalone game, with players once again playing a tabletop version of a German quiz game on TV. Minecraft: Digging Down, which is also from Jens Merkl, is the latest release in Ravensburger's line of _Minecraft_ -based games, which started with 2019's Minecraft: Builders & Biomes. In this co-operative game for 2-4 players, you're trying to use equipment to explore caves and complete objectives without running out of torches as that signals game loss. Tap 4 is a card-shedding game along the lines of Palace that Marilyn Dick and Dorene Mills self-published in 2019, with The Op Games picking it up for mainstream release in 2026. Finally, we come to what I think is the only original title in the lot: Last Lemming, a trick-taking game from Marco Teubner, who's probably best known for titles like My First Carcassonne, Safranito, and Dodo, and who has only one other trick-taking game on his BGG designer page — 2008's Ochsen Soxen. In this game for 3-6 players, you're trying to move your lemming as close to the edge of the cliff as possible without falling over...unless you have time to scoot to the front once again. Art by Cam Kendall The game lasts four rounds, and in each round you receive a hand of twelve cards, then discard four of your choice. One player will lead a card, and everyone else must follow suit, if possible, although you always have the option to play an X in your hand to bow out of a trick. Whoever played the highest card in the suit led wins the trick and will lead the next one. More importantly, they move ahead on the shared track as many spaces as the number they played. Whoever played the second highest card in the suit led also moves forward a number of spaces equal to their played card. If you land on someone, you push them forward one space. If you land in a hole, which is present on some of the double-sided track boards, you go back to start. Also, if you win a trick with a negative number, you move backwards instead! The game includes 22 rule cards, and you use a different one each round, with some wildly changing who moves and how far. One of the rule cards depicted below, for example, states that the winner of the trick moves as many spaces as the card first played in the trick, while anyone who played off-suit moves as many spaces as the highest card played in the suit led. Another rule card lets the winner move 1-6 spaces forward or backward as they choose, while anyone who played an X moves forward as many spaces as one of the played values. Why does moving matter? After eight tricks, the round ends and players score points based on their position among all the lemmings, with points escalating as the rounds continue. Whoever earns the most points wins and can push everyone else off a cliff to celebrate their victory. ****Want more game announcements like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up, buttercup!

## Wireless The headline title for German publisher Spielefaible at SPIEL Essen 26 will be Wireless, a 1-4 player game from the design team of Stefania Niccolini and Marco Canetta, best known for 2014's Zhanguo, which was re-released in 2023 as Zhanguo: The First Empire. Here's the publisher's pitch for this game: > At the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century, contemporary research primarily in the United States and Europe laid the foundation of modern telecommunications. > The game Wireless traces the history of those years in which experimental antennas were installed to transmit the radio signal over increasingly greater distances. Players play the role of scientists of the time (Marconi, Tesla, Edison, Braun). They must seek funds and support to develop new patents, install telecommunications systems, and create permanent links between different locations. So there's the setting and a general idea of what you need to do...and here's what the game board looks like: A handmade prototype in use at Berlin Brettspiel Con 2026 (image by Johan Jakobson at Spielefaible) Well, most of the main game board, that is, along with one player's pair of game boards. Yes, a pair! In this game, you will (going through the eight player columns from left to right) install radio stations, transmit signals, modulate connections, raise funds, replenish action tiles/acquire patents, collect contracts, reach new nations, and record your progress in four categories. Each player takes one action in a round, and over the course of play you want to do all of the above to grow your network, but your game life will be complicated by the need for money and action tiles. In the four left columns of your game boards, you can take an action in them only if you (1) pay the costs shown below the action you want to take and (2) remove a tile from the column. Each time you remove a tile, you reveal another cost, making the next action of this type more expensive. By developing technology, you gain new action tiles, allowing for cheaper actions and more of them. Art by Harald Lieske and Lukas Siegmon Patents add new actions to your game boards — see the tiles above the player's three leftmost columns in the image above — and contracts give you new ways to score. Columns are added to your sixth column from bottom to top, and to fulfill a contract you need to meet its conditions as many times as its height in that column: once for the bottommost tile, twice for the one above it, etc. You also want to have a presence in all countries listed on your personal objectives in order to score them. ## Bean to Bar Spielefaible will also release a German-language edition of Masaki Suga's Bean to Bar, which appeared in a Japanese edition from analog lunchbox in 2025. Here's an overview of the setting: > You are a chocolatier with a singular dream: to share truly delicious chocolate with the world. To this end, you have decided to build your very own chocolate brand. In order to grow your brand, you'll need to source quality cacao from cacao farmers; develop new confections to sell at events, local markets, and your own brick-and-mortar stores; recruit specialists to help with your operations; collaborate with local confectionery shops; and participate in an annual chocolate contest. Cover of analog lunchbox's version __Bean to Bar__ (art by Saori Shibata), and cover of Spielefaible's edition (art by Harald Lieske) The heart of the game involves a 3x3 action grid of nine action tiles. In each of the twelve rounds, you pay time to move clockwise around the grid, then players will spend time to take actions present in the row where they stand. As you acquire cacao and process it into chocolate bars, sometimes using special flavor chips, you'll have product to sell in department stores and your own shops, with 5 money always being convertible into 9 time that you'll ideally use to further increase your business, often via the hiring of experts that provide special bonuses and unique scoring opportunities. Spielefaible crowdfunded this new edition of Bean to Bar, with the game due out in retail at the end of October 2026. ## Other Releases Finally, Spielefaible has two six-card expansion packs for Thomas Spitzer's 2023 game Bier Pioniere — Freitrunk and Frederick Pabst — along with Chroniken von Brighthelm, a set of four expansion modules for Paul Stapleton's 2019 game Paupers' Ladder, which Spielefaible released in Germany in January 2026 as _Aufbruch in Brighthelm_("Departure from Brighthelm"). Art by Harald Lieske (x2) and Paul Stapleton ****Want more game announcements like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Take me away!

## Suppose Daniel Newman of New Mill Industries is taking pre-orders for two titles for release in Q4 2026, one of which is a new edition of Akinori Hagiwara's Suppose, which they originally self-published in 2023. In each round of this 3-4 player trick-taking game, you first arrange the hand of your left-hand neighbor with cards in each suit going from low to high and with the suits in the order of your choice. You place one or two bets on how many tricks that player will win, but they'll be playing most of their cards blind as only the leftmost, rightmost, and middle card will face them! Art by H.B. Tyson You score 1 point for each trick you win, but you don't have to follow suit, which is good since you don't always know which card you're playing. That said, you can guess what each card facing away from you is before you play it, winning a half-point chip if you guess correctly. ## Welcome Demons Welcome Demons is a three-player-only climbing and shedding game from Daniel Newman himself. Here's the background for why demons are welcome here: > _Noboribetsu, a popular onsen town in the south of Hokkaido, has a special relationship with Oni. Often depicted as malevolent demons, the Oni of Noboribetsu are instead protectors of this town built around a hot spring known as Jigokudani, or Hell Valley. They are tasked with warding off evil spirits from the medicinal baths and are even said to keep foolhardy visitors from falling into the naturally occuring boiling hot water that brings prosperity to the town._ Your job in this game is to rescue as many visitors as possible with the oni you've been dealt. Each player has their own visitor deck, with five cards at random face up in front of them and with each half of a visitor card showing grey, white, or one of the oni colors: red, blue, or green. Red oni are 7-9, blue oni are 4-6, and green oni are 1-3; even cards have grey borders, odd cards white. The lead player in a round chooses one visitor from their display and plays it along with an appropriate oni from their hand on each half of the visitor. With the visitor above, you'd play any blue oni on the left and any green oni on the right. The next player either passes or plays a combination that beats this arrangement, that is, a combination with the same number of visitors and with onis that collectively have a higher sum than the current play OR a combination with one more visitor and with onis that collectively have a lower sum. While doing this, you _must_ re-use one oni from the current play. Refill your visitor pool to five cards after each play. In case this is hard to picture, the rulebook gives this example: On the left, the play of one visitor/two oni has a sum of 11; the next player can re-use the 3 oni to play two visitors/three oni with a sum of 6 Wrap your head around that! If two players pass in succession, the last player to lay down a combination clears the board and leads. Except for when you lead, you play the same number of oni and visitor cards each turn. The game ends when someone has rescued all of their visitors, run out of oni, or cannot lead, at which point the player with the most visitors remaining loses. Into Hell Valley with you! ## Flounder Canadian publisher KTBG has announced a new card game that will debut at Gen Con 2027. Yes! Gen Con 2027! Start your want list! Envision the dizzying carpet awaiting you at the Indiana Convention Center! Flounder is a card game for 2-5 players from Jon Gilmour-Long and David Gordon that the publisher notes is inspired by hand shedding and trick taking. Here's its short description: > Follow suit and form schools of the same type of fish to help shed cards or play a new suit larger than the biggest fish to swallow up the entire school for points. Empty your hand to collect valuable flounder cards. They'll give you a boost in points, too, but you won’t know how big a boost until the end of the game. ## 5Pairs Croatian publisher Ummaramma debuted in 2024 with the card game Speculaas from Danijel Pošta, who has also designed its second release: 5Pairs, a light card game for 2-4 players. German publisher Brettspielloesung will release the game at SPIEL Essen 26, while Ummaramma is releasing a Croatian/English edition. Prototype game components (art by Deda Zak) The deck contains 60 cards numbered 3-7 in six colors, with each player having two cards in hand and a display starting with cards equal to the number of players. On a turn, either draw two cards, then discard one to the display, or make a pair by combining a card from your hand with one from the display, with those cards matching in color, number, or both. Each pair is worth points equal to the sum of its values, with those points doubling if the cards are identical. Claim a pair of 3s, and you play again immediately. Whoever claims four pairs first claims a bonus token, with the round ending after someone claims a fifth pair, possibly stealing that bonus token in the process. Play multiple rounds until a player's score tops 200 points. ****Want more game announcements like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more

German publisher Zoch Verlag has announced its late 2026 line-up, with three titles for players aged 8 and up and one for the youngsters at home. ## Pocket Pisa Zoch has a long history of balance and dexterity games — Bamboleo, Bausack, Villa Paletti, Menara, and more — and to that line it's adding Pocket Pisa, a relatively small game (thus, "pocket") from Christoph Cantzler and Anja Wrede for 2-4 players. Graphics: Oliver Richtberg The game is played on a circular base that's rounded on the bottom, duplicating the mistake used by those who constructed the Tower of Pisa. As for gameplay, the publisher writes: > Piece by piece, the tower rises higher and higher. Along the way, players must decide whether to cash out early and collect victory stars — or keep building for even greater rewards while risking a spectacular total collapse. With every new block, both the tower and its value grow. But the higher you aim, the harder it becomes to stay balanced. One wrong move…and down goes the tower — along with your hopes of claiming those stars. My interpretation of that description: Players bid for how high they think they can collectively build the tower, and if the tower reaches that height before it topples, you score that many points, with the qualification that once the tower reaches that height, you can no longer participate in building it. I'm curious to see whether I've come close to how the game actually plays... ## Nein! Doch! Ohh! Christoph Cantzler has a second title coming from Zoch in late 2026: Nein! Doch! Ohh!, which translates to something like "No! Really! Ohh!" and which is the second 2026 release that has you trying to guess when sand timers have run out after Jason Tremblay's Hummingbirds, which I covered in February 2026. Cue Dr. Doofenshmirtz! Graphics: Oliver Richtberg Four sand timers, each with a different duration, are hidden under cups, and on a turn, you roll the die, then decide whether the sand timer under the indicated cup has run out. If you don't think it has, say "No" and pass the turn to the next player — but someone can call out "Yes!" to challenge you, then pick up the cup to reveal who scores. Regardless of whether the timer has run out, flip it over to keep everyone on their toes. The die can also direct players to move the timers to different colors, challenging your memory in more ways than one. ## Der Turm The 2-5 player game Der Turm ("The Tower") is credited to BLOB Factory, a gaming studio consisting of Luca **B** ellini, Carlo Emanuele **L** anzavecchia, Walter **O** bert, and Luca **B** orsa, but the description from Zoch Verlag is more evocative than descriptive: > Ten tower floors are available in which players can hide their precious gems — but nothing stays on the same level. Every turn, the tower's modular floors are taken apart and rebuilt in a completely different order. What was once at the top may suddenly reappear near the bottom, turning memory and orientation into a constant challenge. Graphics: Oliver Richtberg > Players who can keep track of the shifting floors and follow the hidden flow of gems may stay one step ahead of their opponents as opening an overloaded compartment can backfire, sending your carefully planned progress right back to you. Victory goes to whoever manages to place all of their gems into the tower first...but this tower doesn’t accept just anything. ## Funkel Munkel We'll close with a very Zoch-sounding game title: Funkel Munkel, the meaning of which eludes me beyond "funkeln" being a verb that means "sparkle". As with _Der Turm_ , _Funkel Munkel_ comes from an Italian design team, with Cielo d'Oro's first design credit being the 2011 title Aquileia, also from Zoch Verlag. Art by Dennis Lohausen In this 2-4 player game, players will slide their mine carts between the layers of the game board, but once those carts go underground, you'll need to track which carts are going where on the intersecting tracks as you want to drop gems into the carts that you believe are yours so that you can assemble the most valuable gem collection once you carts pop out somewhere from the underground labyrinth. ****Want more game announcements like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

On 9 September 2026, U.S. publisher Maestro Media launched "Overture by Maestro Media", which it describes as "a new initiative that gives designers, publishers, licensors, and retail partners access to the publishing, licensing, manufacturing, and commercial infrastructure Maestro has built to bring products from concept to shelf". Here's the pitch that Maestro Media is making: > Maestro now operates across three businesses: **Games** , which develops and publishes titles under major entertainment licences; **Direct to Consumer Products** , which turns those worlds into physical goods fans live with; and **Digital** , which brings Maestro's tabletop titles into video game formats, beginning with a digital edition of Bridge Constructor: Breaking Point developed with Headup Games. > All three businesses draw on the same capabilities Maestro has developed across crowdfunding, direct-to-consumer, and retail. With Overture by Maestro Media™, the company is making those capabilities available to creators and partners globally. > "The hardest part of this industry has never been the ideas," says Javon Frazier, Founder and CEO of Maestro Media. "It is everything after them. Getting your design in front of a publisher, funding the development, entering distribution, landing it on a shelf. We built a machine to do that for our own titles alongside some of the largest licensors in the world. Overture by Maestro Media™ opens that machine to everybody else." > Overture by Maestro Media™ works three ways. It can **co-publish** a finished game, carrying it through licensing, manufacturing, and into retail. It can **partner** on development, production, and go-to-market. Or it can **acquire** a title outright and bring it to a wider audience. Through the platform, designers, publishers, inventors and IP holders bring a project to Maestro and get a seat at the table as it moves through development, manufacturing and onto shelves. That last sentence brought a lot of questions to my mind, and Javon Frazier answered them via email: **WEM:** How do you define a "project"? That is, what do creators need to bring to the platform? An idea? A rough design? A completed game design? A design with finished art? Mock-ups of physical products? **Frazier:** We take projects at almost any stage. The bar is not how finished it is — it's whether we can evaluate it. And for a game, that means we have to be able to play it. What that looks like depends on who you are. If you're a game designer, bring a one page pitch, a complete rules document, and a way for us to actually play. If you hold IP or a license, bring a brand one-sheet or style guide and the numbers behind your audience. If you're a publisher, bring the rulebook, the sell sheet, product photos, and your manufacturing numbers. If you're a creator, artist or inventor, bring a portfolio or a deck, plus images if it is a physical concept. We would rather see a rough game we can play than a beautiful deck we cannot. Image: Maestro Media **WEM:** What does "getting a seat at the table" mean? How is the original creator compensated for their work? How much control do they retain over the final form of a product? What does the license allow them to keep ownership of? How is Maestro Media compensated for its work? **Frazier:** A seat at the table means your work gets read by people who actually ship product, and you get a real answer. If it fits our catalogue, we take it forward ourselves. If it doesn't fit us but is still good, we point you toward a publisher we think it belongs with. Most designers never get either of those things, and that is the gap we are closing. Submitting is free. If we take a project forward, we do a normal industry deal with the creator — the same design agreement and compensation any publisher would offer, negotiated project by project. Designers keep their authorship and their credit, and the specific terms around ownership and control are settled in that agreement rather than by the platform. We are compensated the way a publisher is compensated. We put our own money and our own team into development, manufacturing, and distribution, and we make it back by selling the product. **WEM:** The phrase "moving through development, manufacturing, and onto shelves" hides a lot of details of how games get made. When Maestro Media decides to take on a project, does it assign developers, artists, etc. to that project? Does it recommend creators with whom to work? The dimensions and packaging of the final product? The manufacturing and distributing of said product? The placement of games in big-box retailers? **Frazier:** Yes, to all of it. When we take a project on, we run it the way we run our own titles. We assign the developers, artists, and production people, and where a creator has someone they want involved, we will look at that, too. We set the dimensions, the component spec, and the packaging. We choose the manufacturer and place the production, and we handle distribution and retail placement including mass market. That is the whole point. A designer with a great game and no supply chain cannot get to a shelf in mass retail alone. We already do this for our own catalogue, so we are not building anything new to do it for someone else. This is a submission platform rather than a full development platform, so the detail on any given project gets worked out with the creator once we take it on. **WEM:** How many projects do you envision Maestro Media taking on in a year? Do these projects become "Maestro Media" titles, and if so for how long? Or will these projects carry the branding of designer imprints, etc.? **Frazier:** We have not set a number, and we are not going to force one. If we see ten concepts that are right, we will take ten. If we see none, we will take none. We are not filling a slate for the sake of having a slate. Where a project fits our catalogue, it becomes a Maestro Media title. Where it is genuinely good but not right for us (a heavy campaign game for instance), we connect the creator with a publisher built for that. Both of those count as the platform working from our perspective. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Maestro's press release includes this line: "Overture by Maestro Media™ formalizes a role Maestro has already played in helping games and creators reach new audiences." One example of this role that Maestro Media gives is its announcement of a new edition of Jacques Zeimet's Ghost Blitz for release in the North American market in January 2027. _Ghost Blitz_ debuted in 2010 from German publisher Zoch Verlag, and it was available in North America solely through Lion Rampant Imports, a Canadian distributor that asmodee acquired in 2019. (Each round in _Ghost Blitz_ , a card shows two of the five objects, then players race to grab the proper object based on what they see. Here's a slightly longer description.) Ryan Lumax, who joined Maestro Media in January 2025 and was promoted to Vice President and Head of Games in August 2026, was previously head purchaser at Lion Rampant where he worked with the Zoch Verlag catalog. In the Overture press release, Lumax says, "I spent eight years on the buying side, and the games that didn't make it were almost never the bad ones. They were good games whose creators ran out of road somewhere between the prototype and the pallet. That is the gap Overture by Maestro Media™ closes." Maestro Media has also partnered with Nighthawk Interactive LLC, which debuted as a game publisher in 2020 with Richard Garfield and Ken Jennings' party game Half Truth. At Gen Con 2026, Maestro Media helped Nighthawk debut Half Truth: Second Guess, a standalone game that plays the same as the original, but with added team rules and a modified scoring system. (The gist of this trivia game is that you're repeatedly presented with a question and six answers, only three of which are true. Name as many of the correct answers as possible, scoring no points for the round if you include an incorrect one.) ****Want more articles like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up, yo!

Portuguese publisher PYTHAGORAS plans to feature two new titles at SPIEL Essen 26, the giant game convention taking place in Essen, Germany on 22-25 October 2026. Let's take a look at each of them: ## Caribe Caribe is a 1-4 player game from designer Orlando Sá, who is best known for the solitaire game Adamastor, as well as the games Porto, set in a Portuguese city best known for port wine, and Pessoa, based on the works of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. In _Caribe_ , players represent explorers who are visiting the Lesser Antilles, a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea, to explore the landscape and record the animals seen there. The Lesser Antilles are presented by four double-sided 4x4 tiles laid out in an 8x8 square, with the rows and columns being labeled A-H. Dolphin, turtle, and flamingo tokens fill most of the water spaces surrounding the islands, with the land spaces being marked as forest, shoreline, or volcano. Part of the back cover of __Caribe__ detailing the flow of play On a turn, you choose one of five action spaces, then discard a theory card from hand that shows a letter A-H. You then take the actions depicted in that space in the row and column matching the letter discarded; for each compass marker you discard, you can add one additional row or column to your exploration space. For sea observation actions, you pick up an animal in the water to represent you drawing and recording it; for land exploration actions, you place a scientist on a space with the matching icon. You can pay money to take bonus actions adjacent to the space you chose, after which you take a new theory card from the display: the card in the action space you chose, or (for the cost of a coin) a card adjacent to this one. Why are you doing all of this activity? Because in addition to determining where you can explore, the theory cards include scoring conditions you want to satisfy by the end of the third, sixth, and ninth rounds when scoring takes place. In the image above, you can see two types of scoring conditions. In one type, you need to remove the indicated number of scientists from forest, shoreline, or volcano spaces as indicated, after which you place them in your personal logbook, scoring points as you do. Another type of scoring requires you to remove (and log) the indicated number of scientists from depicted sections of the map. The third scoring type has you place collected animal tokens in your logbook. In addition to scoring points from placing tokens in your logbook, theory cards include bonuses such as coins; compass markers; the advancement of knowledge tokens (fauna, flora, and geology) in your logbook; and the promotion of scientists to university. Art by Lukas Siegmon In _Caribe_ , Sá has doubled up most game elements to intertwine choices and add the lottery feeling of a game like Wolfgang Warsch's That's Pretty Clever! As you place scientists and animals in your logbook, you'll surround bonus icons that give you coins, extra island placements, and knowledge advancement. You need to score scientists in order to move them to university, after which you can place new scientists and score points and bonuses again. Each time you place a scientist in a university, you receive an immediate bonus, while also boosting your endgame points. Theory cards determine where you can explore and what you need to score, but they additionally serve as left or right pages of a book, and ideally you can pair scored theory cards to complete knowledge icons, which will score based on how well you advance those knowledge tokens. Each university has different scoring metrics, so you might score points equal to the number of your scientists at that university multiplied by the number of dolphins you collected, by how many scientists you placed on the forest track, or by the value of your geology token. The solitaire mode pits you against an automated opponent or against a simplified algorithm that doesn't score but which will get in your way as you try to maximize your score. ## Delfos In Delfos, a design by Yaniv Kahana, 1-5 players will re-build the city of Delfos, a.k.a. Delphi, tile by tile over a fixed number of rounds. To set up, lay out sixty tiles in five colors on the game board to form the ruins of Delfos. Each player claims a character showing one of the colors and has two secret goal tiles that each show one of the five colors in the game. A public scoring card is revealed. A portion of the back cover of __Delfos__ On a turn, you move one of your architect tokens orthogonally in the ruins until you reach a tile, wrapping around the game board if needed. You place one of your colored tokens on this tile, then add it to the new layout of Delfos that the players are building collectively. This layout will be restricted to an 8x5 or 9x5 grid depending on the player count, and your goal when choosing and placing a tile is threefold: * The public scoring card highlights a region of the new city of Delfos, such as the top three rows or all tiles on the perimeter. For each tile you have placed in this region that matches one of your two secret goal colors, you score the points listed on the scoring card. * For the largest group of tiles of each color in the new city of Delfos, whoever has placed the most of these tiles scores points equal to the sum of the values on the tiles they placed. Players who have placed the second most and third most of these tiles also score points. * Finally, you score your character points. In the basic game, you score 3 points for each tile you placed in the new city of Delfos that is your color; in the advanced game, each character has a unique scoring rule, e.g., the yellow player scores 5 points for each yellow tile in the column with the most yellow tiles. The solitaire mode of the game includes "Khaos" cards that serve as an automated opponent, as well as campaign goal cards that you attempt to complete over a series of games. Art by Apolline Etienne ****Want more game preview like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Click me!

I've been a fan of game designs from Arve D. Fühler — TA-KE, AEOLOS, Pagoda, Glory Islands — so I look forward to seeing what he does next. For 2026, he has the trick-taking game All Mine!, which is a new edition of 2014's Scharfe Schoten, and Ährensache, a game for 3-5 players from German publisher Skelling Games. As with many German titles, "Ährensache" can apparently be read multiple ways, with "Ähren" meaning "ears of grain", a.k.a. "kernels", and "Sache" meaning "matter" or "thing", with the collective "Ährensache" taking on the meaning of "A Matter of Honor". I welcome corrections from native German speakers, as I'm interpreting from outside that language. Non-final cover; art by Christian Schaarschmidt _Ährensache_ is a bidding game in which each player builds their own farm, with the game playing out over eight rounds and with the bidding process coming across as the prime novelty in the game. Bidding cards come in three colors and in values 3-6, with the back of each card having a value of 2. When you place a bid, you can bid only cards of the same value or color, although you can play additional cards face down to add 2 to a bid. What's more, five bidding cards are placed on the central game board at the start of play, and any cards that match your bid by value or color (depending on the cards you played) add to your bid! If three of those five cards show a 4, then you could bid a 4 and have your actual bid be 16. At the end of each round, two of those five cards fall off and are replaced, so you can plan ahead a bit as to which cards to keep for future bids. In order of the bids, players claim offers: two pasture tiles; a random bid card and either a pasture tile or a farmer tile; a bid card, a pasture tile, and a grain token, etc. You can also collect apples, a token for the current round that's worth points, and a building tile that modifies the rules of the game for you. All tiles must connect Carcassonne-style with your starting farm tile, although tiles always have a fixed vertical orientation. When you connect two roads showing grain, you receive a grain token, and you can use such tokens for bidding or points, or you can trade them for apples or farmer tiles. Farmers come in five colors, and you can collect only one of each such farmer, with each farmer being linked to an endgame scoring card. This game the yellow farmer gives you points for apples and tractors, the latter of which come on pasture tiles, while next time it rewards you for having different animals, with these again being on pasture tiles. Each player also receives a random "building plan" card at the start of play, and if at game's end you have filled each spot of the plan with a tile, you'll score 15 points. As with many such designs, you can scale up the difficulty, using larger building plans worth 25 points, endgame cards that are more difficult to score, and bonus scoring cards based on the paths and areas you create on your farm. ****Want more game previews like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up

Many games never die; they just lie underground for a while before returning from the grave, which seems very on brand for the first title covered in this post. ## Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game U.S. publisher Renegade Game Studios has made a habit of returning older games to the market — HeroScape, Robo Rally, Acquire — and its newest title along these lines is Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game, a design by Rob Heinsoo, Peter Lee, Mike Mearls, and Bill Slavicsek that Wizards of the Coast released in 2010. Art by Anita Osburn Gameplay appears to be the same as in the original release, with 1-5 players coming together as fantasy heroes — cleric, ranger, rogue, warrior, or wizard — to explore a castle tile by tile in one of thirteen replayable scenarios. The publisher notes that the game features "updated illustrations and graphic design", and the game is due out in February 2027 in two versions: a US$100 version with 42 unpainted miniatures and a US$200 version with painted minis. Perhaps not coincidentally, Netflix is collaborating with Hasbro on _**Ravenloft** ,_ which _Deadline_ describes as "a live-action series based on the popular gothic horror setting of _Dungeons & Dragons_". (Of course, a live-action series based on _The Forgotten Realms_ started development at Netflix in early 2025, but has apparently been shelved, so _Ravenloft_ might go nowhere, too.) ## Clank! The Forgotten Vault Instead of exploring a castle with your hero, you could instead head deep underground, trying not to make too much noise that will attract unwanted attention from whatever is guarding the treasures you want to make off with. That's the premise of Paul Dennen's Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure, which debuted in 2016 from Dire Wolf and Renegade Game Studios, and which is published solely by Dire Wolf these days. For the game's tenth anniversary, Dire Wolf is re-releasing the base game in a "Master Thief Edition" that re-balances some cards, tweaks the endgame, and moves various game board elements to their own boards. Other _Clank!_ products will be Master Thief-ed in the same way as they go out of print, and Dire Wolf has prepared a "_Clank!_ Mastery Pack" that includes material needed to update the base game and five existing expansions. The "_Clank!_ Mastery Pack" is part of a crowdfunding campaign along with a new expansion — Clank! The Forgotten Vault, which features two new maps and accompanying new gameplay elements — and "The Cube of Holding", an enormous plastic storage device for _Clank!_ and its expansions, but not the various spinoff titles. "The Cube of Holding" (US$90) is only one of many "cosmetic" offerings in Dire Wolf's crowdfunding campaign, along with a neoprene map pack (US$90), a card sleeve bundle (US$65), acrylic token upgrades (US$55), metallic cubes (US$50), metallic coins (US$30), and more. Maybe I should be surprised that the average amount spent by each backer as of this writing is US$288. Apparently a decent number of _Clank!_ superfans exist, and they're quietly going all in. ## The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow: 25th Anniversary Edition Gothic horror of a different sort awaits in The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow: 25th Anniversary Edition, which is yet another edition of the Philippe des Pallières and Hervé Marly design that debuted in 2001 from French publisher Lui-même and that in 2026 is handled by asmodee studio Zygomatic. _Miller's Hollow_ is a branded take on the Werewolf/Mafia public domain party game in which each player receives a secret role that will determine their goal for the game. At its most basic, if you're a werewolf, you want to stay hidden among the villagers so that you can keep killing them, and if you're a villager, you want to find the werewolves and lynch them in order to save yourself. Art in the game is from Christine Deschamps, Mathieu Lidon, Naïade, and Alexios Tjoyas _The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow: 25th Anniversary Edition_ , which was released on 31 August 2026 _,_ features four scenarios and 28 character roles, with four being unique to this edition of the game: the Puppeteer, the Wise Monkey, the Colossus, and the Mighty Wolf-Mother. ## Die Kutschfahrt zur Teufelsburg Gamers of a certain age might recall publisher Adlung-Spiele, which was the Oink Games of its heyday from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. Every release was a deck of cards in a cardboard tuckbox barely bigger than the deck of cards. No one was demanding room to sleeve cards back then! Marcel-André Casasola Merkle's Verräter (1998) and Meuterer (2000), Alan R. Moon and Aaron Weissblum's Canal Grande (2002), Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's Die Fugger (2003), Günter Burkhardt's Vom Kap bis Kairo (2001) — these games were tiny treasures that you were usually willing to spend a few Euros (or Deutschmarks if you go back far enough) on because they took up so little room in your bag at SPIEL. Art by Eckhard Freytag To my surprise, Adlung-Spiele is still around, and it's partnered with Swiss publisher Carletto, which releases games under the brand Game Factory, to issue a new edition of the 2006 game Die Kutschfahrt zur Teufelsburg ("The Carriage Ride to Devil's Castle") from Michael Palm and Lukas Zach, with this edition also including the 2012 expansion Die dunkle Prophezeiung ("The Dark Prophecy"). In this 3-10 player game, players are secretly divided into two groups — The Order of Open Secrets and The Brotherhood of True Lies — and to win the game you need to be able to identify among your teammates those who hold the three specific objects your secret society is trying to collect. On a turn, you either propose to trade an object with another player, attack another player, pass, or attempt to declare victory. To trade, you give someone an object from your hand, then they either return it to you or give you something else; some objects have effects when traded. To attack, you declare who you're attacking, then other players indicate whether they're going to join the attack or defense, with the winner learning the loser's identity and stealing an object from them. The original boxes for these two titles _Die dunkle Prophezeiung_ gives players more objects, allows the coachman (a player role) to decide whether events take place (with you being able to become the coachman by defeating them), and with an odd player count a traitor role allowing one player to win on their own. ****Want more game news coverage like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more!

Roughly a month after Gen Con 2026 ended, it's time to wrap up my coverage of that show before getting too lost in the SPIEL Essen weeds, although thoughts of that show were ever-present in publisher's media presentations: Czech Games Editions, for example, had a full display copy of Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game, a 1-4 player game from Vlaada Chvátil and Tomáš Holek that CGE will debut at SPIEL Essen 26. [_Disclosure: Czech Games Edition has previously advertised on Board Game Beat]_ CGE announced this US$200/€150 game in July 2026, but even with that price tag and mock-up images, it was hard to get a handle on how sprawling this game is meant to be. Aside from the metal coins, the massive shop, and the horses with individual stats, you have the game board itself, along with the cards that be purchased in the display at back and the three storylines set up for this particular game: "Plague Infection", "Neuhof Slaughter", and "At Your Service, My Lady". Here's a close-up of the former one: And here are a couple of player game boards, which are massive so that you can track stats, points, equipment, tools, achievements, and so on. This seems like a highly ambitious project, and I wish CGE well in bringing it to the finish line. Asmodee hosted a media event prior to the opening of Gen Con 2026 to highlight both new releases and upcoming games, such as Adventurers Required from first-time designer/artist Bethany Linder and publisher Lookout Games. In each of four rounds, you see the power of the tower floor, which will affect conditions for gameplay or the distribution of treasure, then each of you drafts a hand of four adventurers...with you holding your hand of cards backwards. You can peek at a couple of cards in your hand, so you can draft (blind or not), take from the market, or draw from the deck. You want a low noise value, and cards with matching numbers cancel out, but you might also want certain roles (healers, slimes, mages, etc.) based on the floor. After four rounds, you receive a treasure bonus based on the collective noise of your four teams, but the game can end early if someone blasts past the 48-noise threshold, awakening the sleeping wizard to destroy those clunky characters. Only Colors is a co-operative game from designers Émilie and Jérôme Soleil and publisher Zygomatic that will debut in February 2027 for the FIJ show in Cannes, France. Each round, each player receives a card listing five things or concepts, then you receive an icon card showing what thing you must try to convey through the arrangement of _at most three colored sticks_! "Arrangement" specifically means the horizontal placement of sticks with no stacking or angling. If others guess your card correctly, great! If not, boo! In either case, those sticks are now out of play, with the team collectively trying to win as many cards as possible. Seems like a hang-out-and-chill game along the lines of Concept... Brady Peterson's Hundo from Moodbox Games is a party-style card game for 2-6 players in which you're trying not to make the center pile go over 100 — but you're playing cards by just flipping them from your deck, so your control over what happens seems limited. I didn't get a detailed description and rules aren't yet available, so that will be it for now. Reminds me of ye olde ONO 99, which my family played frequently. DuckTales: Lucky Dime Heist is one of six "REWIND" titles from publisher Maestro Media that were crowdfunded in November 2025 and are coming to market by the end of 2026. This two-player design by Nate Weisman pits Scrooge McDuck and his grandnephews Huey, Louie, and Dewey against Magica De Spell and Fintheart Glomgold. In each round, players play an inspiration card, take actions, then score trying to reach the victory conditions on a particular episode card first. All six REWIND titles use the same game system, so characters and episodes from various games can be combined. In January 2027, Maestro Media will re-introduce Jacques Zeimet's Ghost Blitz to the North American market. In this 2010 game, which has sold more than one million copies in 20+ languages, a card showing two of the five objects is revealed from the deck each turn, then players race to grab the proper object. What's proper? If a object is depicted in the right color (book=blue, chair=red, etc.), then grab that. If not, then see which color and object is not depicted and grab that. Collect the most cards to win. Each turn in the party game That Tracks from Matt Fantastic, Trisha Loter, Andrea Pincumbe, Blaise Sewell, and Bezzerwizzer Studio, players face twenty years of trend lines for four subjects and must try to identify which subject matches which line. I always wonder what the lifespan for games like these is. Right now, you're unlikely to know the exact answers, or else the game wouldn't be much of a game, but what will your memory retain by 2030? By 2036? Still, game lines like Scene It? and Trivial Pursuit have been hugely successful, so it's not like timelessness is a necessary element for sales success. Hypothetically is a party game for 3-6 players from Max Anderson, Zac Dixon, Austin Harrison, and Robert Hovakimyan that IV Studio released in July 2026. Each turn, the active player chooses one of two questions on a prompt card, e.g., "What is the diameter in inches of the largest marshmallow you could lift?", after which everyone peppers them with questions about the situation — "Are you pressing the marshmallow sides softly or digging your fingers into the goo?" — then writes their guesses, with you scoring if you're closest to the active player's answer. As with _Only Colors_ above, this design seems more like a framework for conversation than anything else. Interestingly, _Hypothetically_ seems like the game that I had wished Fun Facts would be... At Gen Con 2026, Brotherwise Games launched **_Shelfy_** , which it bills as "an all-new collectible product in partnership with 20 tabletop publishers, including Cephalofair, Van Ryder, AEG, and Restoration Games. Shelfy is a new blind bag collectible, featuring miniature board game boxes sized for display in a six-inch miniature shelf." I'm baffled by the appeal of such a thing, but I also cut up boxes to right-size them in regard to their included components, so I'm clearly not the target customer for this product line, especially given this detail: "There are 28 games to collect in Shelfy Season One, including four special alt chase foils!" Nope, not for me. I understand the appeal of blind boosters, the lottery feeling of not knowing whether a "big payoff" awaits you, but I'd rather save my money for games I could actually play. A sign on display in the media room during Gen Con 2026 I'm so glad that I don't mess with any of this stuff. I write posts here, then they're distributed automatically via the few social media channels I use, and that's that. Keeping it simple... I asked a passerby about this, and they said that the garage used to be open to all, but that wasn't the case during Gen Con. Gross. Had to a take a pic of this shirt to share with my wife, who speculated that one of those dumbass kids probably gave this T-shirt to their dad as a gift. I can see that happening. After all, pretty much all kids are dumbass kids at various points in their childhood and youth, and I can imagine one of them wanting to joke about that, ideally hoping to give themselves an out in the future when they once again engage in dumbass activities... My Gen Con 2026 coverage is now over. ****Want more game convention coverage like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more!

I've already covered the 2026 line-up of Swiss publisher Helvetiq in two posts, but it has one addition for SPIEL Essen 26, so I'll recap the list here: * Bandido Alcatraz, by Martin Nedergaard Andersen: Co-operatively build tunnels to help a bandit safely make his way out of Alcatraz. * Fugu, by Flavio and Riccardo Foches: Manipulate your hand of cards to build a valuable collection of sea life — axolotls in groups, blowfish on their lonesome, coral in three colors — while keeping your cards in numerical order, which seems to be a recurring theme for 2026. * Cosmo, by Kaya Miyano: Draw cards from six decks, playing the odds to build a valuable poker hand. * Panda Flip, by Carsten Rohlfs & Michael Diechtierow: Take turns flipping cards into discard piles, stopping to score a pile when you like at the risk of receiving nothing should your flip fail. * Top Drop, by Simona Greco and Marco Rava: Co-operatively discard all the numbered cards in the deck, using ability cards to change direction and otherwise get yourself out of binds. * Cat Trick, by Naigan: Take tricks in order to collect all five colors, but without collecting four of one color as you must then give those away to opponents. In its press materials, Helvetiq mentions that Nedergaard Andersen's two previous _Bandido_ titles — Bandido and Bandida — have collectively sold more than one million copies (880,000 for the original release and 180,000 for the spinoff). When seeing numbers like these, I'm always curious to see how many copies are listed as owned on BoardGameGeek. The _Bandido_ game page lists 14,955 owned copies, or 1.7% of the total sold. To repeat what I've said many times, BoardGameGeek is a central hub for gamers, but it hardly represents everyone who plays games. Art by Lucas Guidetti Perez, Odile Sageat, and Guidetti Perez and Ajša Zdravković Helvetiq bought abstract game publisher Steffen Spiele in 2023, and for 2026 it's releasing one new title in the line and updating another: * Alto, by Joel and Rafael Escalante: Take turns using the action of a tile in a 4x4 grid to move the topmost disc next to that tile (or all such stacked discs). Each tile can be used twice, then you score, with each of your discs being worth as many points as its height in a stack. * Kulami, by Andreas Kuhnekath-Häbler: Take turns placing a marble on a board composed of rectangular tiles with 2, 3, 4, or 6 holes. The marble you place determines the row or column where your opponent must place their marble, with the two most recently played-upon tiles being off-limits. (The rings help you track what's off-limits.) When someone can't play, score 2, 3, 4, or 6 points for the boards where you have a majority of marbles. Kuhnekath-Häbler's _Kulami_ debuted in 2011, and it's a brilliantly simple and challenging game. Nice to see it back on the market! ****Want more game news coverage like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

Portuguese publisher MEBO Games uses a blue-and-yellow color scheme on the two new titles it will feature at SPIEL Essen 26, and that's not the only similarity between these designs. Here's an overview of how to play each game: ## Crescendo I demoed Christwart Conrad's 2-6 player card game Crescendo at Origins Game Fair 2026 courtesy of licensee Arcane Wonders, which will release the game in North America in 2026. In case you missed that post, here's a recap: The deck contains cards numbered 1-100, and to set up you place nine cards in a row in the order they are dealt to you. Each card shows one of three number ranges on the back — 0-58, 45-84, and 74-100 — along with one of three symbols. Your goal is to get your row of cards in numerical order. Art: Vincent Dutrait On a turn, you can take the top card of the deck or discard pile, look at it, then either discard it or swap it for one card in your row, discarding the replaced card. Cards placed in your row this way stay face down, so you must (brace yourself) _remember which cards are where_. The number ranges give you an idea of whether a card might be roughly in the proper location, but the ranges overlap, so a 74-100 card might be lower than a 45-84 card. Whenever a player discards, if you think you have a card with a number at most two digits away — in the example above: 65, 66, 68, or 69 — then you can call "Number!" and flip that card in your row face up. If you're correct, you remove that card from your row, scoring 1 point for it at the end of the round, in addition to giving you less to organize; if you're wrong, you draw a card and stick it in your row without looking at it. More work for you! Instead of drawing, you can use the power of the deck's top card: peek at a card, swap one of your cards with an opponent's card, or turn one of your cards face up to lock it in place, which makes it ineligible for future swaps. If you feel everything is in order, instead of taking a turn you can call for the end of the round. Each other player takes one last turn, then you reveal your row. If all your cards ascend in numerical value, 6 points for you; if not, -3 points, plus -1 for each card that's out of place. Other players score 3 or -1 points, with bonus points for correct "Number!" calls. Play three rounds, then place the winner on a rocket...or perhaps the loser. Depends on whether you're rewarding them with a trip to space or banishing them from future games. Your call. ## Âmbar Putting numbers in order is also at the heart of Âmbar, a 2-4 player game from Nuno Santos, who debuted in 2024 as the co-designer of Floresta — also from MEBO Games, also licensed by Arcane Wonders — with Przemek Wojtkowiak. In _Âmbar_ , you're presented with four types (colors) of amber with values from 1-6 and with four copies of each tile. To set up, shuffle all the tiles face down, then each player creates a row of ten face-down tiles. Sound familiar? Yes, this is similar to _Crescendo_ , but gameplay differs and this game (pretty much) lacks a memory element since you'll be turning tiles face up during play. Art: Robin Lagofun On a turn, you can take a face-up tile from the excavation pool (as long as you don't have that tile already visible in your row), or you can reveal a face-down tile; if that revealed tile is already in your row, your turn ends, with the tile remaining face up, and otherwise you can take it. When you take a tile, you can do one of two things with it: * Replace a face-down tile in your row with the face-up tile, then reveal the face-down tile and place it in the excavation pool, or... * Place the face-up tile on top of another face-up tile in your row as long as the column in which it's placed will not be two tiles higher than _both_ adjacent columns (or the lone adjacent column). In either case, each tile in your row must be greater than or equal to the closest tile to its left that shows a number. (Face-down tiles are ignored when checking.) Image: MEBO Games When you place a tile, if it's one higher or lower than an adjacent tile of the same color, you take another turn. In the image above, for example, you could place a green-1 on the yellow-2 or a green-3 on the blue tile next to the green-2 to gain a free turn; if you had placed the green-3, you could now place a green-4 on the yellow-3...assuming that half visible green tile on the right edge isn't also a 4. Once all the tiles are face up in the pool, players keep taking turns until they all pass consecutively, then whoever has the most tiles on their row's second level wins. If players are tied, compare their third levels, their fourth levels, etc. Note: Dirt is not included in the box, so if you want to create a thematic excavation pool, you must supply your own. ****Want more game announcements like this?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Give us your email...please

On 31 August 2026, asmodee announced that it had acquired the "Welcome To… intellectual property and game range" from originating French publisher Blue Cocker. The original _Welcome To..._ design from Benoit Turpin debuted in 2018 — you can watch Turpin explain the game to me at FIJ 2018 in this video — and it was incredibly successful from launch, with licensing publisher Deep Water Games releasing ten expansions in 2019 as part of a crowdfunding campaign. In subsequent years, Blue Cocker released the spinoffs titles Welcome to New Las Vegas, Welcome to the Moon (both co-designed by Alexis Allard), and Welcome to La Petite Mort (co-designed by François Bachelart). The Welcome To...: Collector's Edition appeared in 2023, but that won't be the last title in this game line that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and averages three thousand players daily on Board Game Arena, with more than three million games played on that site to date. Art by Anne Heidsieck for all titles, with Davy Mourier as co-artist on __La Petite Mort__ _Welcome To..._ was, as far as I can recall, the first game to feature a "flip-and-write" system in which one or more cards are revealed at the start of a turn, presenting each player with the same information and leaving it up to them to choose which symbols or actions to use when marking a personal score sheet. Here's part of asmodee's press release announcing this acquisition: > With this acquisition, asmodee will continue to develop and support the _Welcome To…_ universe, ensuring the games remain widely available while exploring new opportunities for players to discover and enjoy the franchise in the years to come... > Blue Cocker founder Alain Balay added: "From the very beginning, our ambition was to create a game that would stand the test of time and bring people together around the table. We are incredibly proud of everything Welcome To… has achieved over the past years, and we are confident asmodee will now carry the brand forward and introduce it to even more players around the world." > Further information about upcoming releases for the _Welcome To…_ franchise will be shared at a later date. > "This acquisition goes beyond bringing a strong IP into our portfolio," added Mathieu Aubert, Head of Collections at asmodee. "We see huge potential to expand the Welcome To… universe, and the team already has plenty of ideas to bring it to life. I look forward to sharing more about our projects in the coming month." You and I both know what's coming: Welcome To The Shire, followed by **_Welcome To Tatooine_**. Any other guesses? ****Like this kind of coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

One of the biggest news items from Gen Con 2026 was related to RPGs, and since I don't normally cover RPGs, let me quote from Matt Bassil's article in _Wargamer_ (with some links added): > Dungeons & Dragons has officially adopted Magic: The Gathering's **Universes Beyond** model of IP crossovers, with Wizards of the Coast partnering with other franchises to release crossover products in 2026... > [T]he first installment in the Universes Beyond D&D line will be the World of Warcraft book dropping in November 2026, stuffed with loads of new DnD classes and species. Screenshot from the D&D Keynote, with Holly Longdale, Executive Producer of __World of Warcraft__ for Blizzard Entertainment, and Dan Ayoub, Head of __D &D__ for WotC > And, in the closing moments of Wizards' Gen Con 2026 D&D Keynote, it brought _literal Darth Vader_ to the stage to reveal possibly the most shocking crossover imaginable: **D &D x Star Wars** is a real thing, coming in 2027's "Season of Rebellion". > In an evening of almost constant thrills, positivity, and sheer relief — after two years of an _incredibly_ sparse D&D release schedule — the words "Dungeons & Dragons Universes Beyond" brought forth a distinct moment of groans and grumbles from an otherwise jubilant crowd. Shocking...or eye-rolling? In a 3 August 2026 article on _Rascal_ , Thomas Manuel wrote: > Ever since that infamous "under monetized" comment from a former Wizards of the Coast CEO, there's been widespread speculation around what steps will be taken to remedy that situation. Alongside microtransactions, D&D becoming a "platform" for licensed content like Magic the Gathering was probably the one bandied about the most. (For background on the "under monetized" comment, read this 9 December 2022 article by Chase Carter on _Dicebreaker_.) Thomas Manuel goes on to say: > [I]f _MTG_ is any indicator, [WotC and parent company Hasbro] will also make a lot of money in spite of opposition from enfranchised sections of the fanbase. > In some sense, it's exactly the same situation as the indie sphere, just with bigger numbers. TTRPG studios have been chasing licensed IPs in a big way the last five years because they need to stand out in a competitive market. They need big projects, not even to grow, but just to stay still and maintain teams of 5-10 employees. (This deserves its own article and will get one.) WotC are only really in competition with themselves, but that doesn't make the task easier: they're turning to licenses and nostalgia — law and chaos — to get big numbers on the table just like everybody else. ## Everything Old Is Old Again What's interesting, though, is that announcements like these _don't_ "stand out in a competitive market". They're just more of the same. For example, in an 11 August 2026 article on _Entertainment Weekly_ , Nick Romano wrote about a _Star Wars_ / Marvel crossover comic that will be released in 2027 to coincide with _Star Wars_ ' 50th anniversary: > Titled _Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles_ , the five-part limited comic book series will launch in January 2027, _Entertainment Weekly_ can exclusively reveal. Image: __Entertainment Weekly__ > Figures like Chewbacca, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia will join Earth-616 — the primary continuity in which most stories of Marvel Comics take place —and mingle with the likes of Captain America, Black Widow, Spider-Man, and the Hulk. Meanwhile, Doctor Doom and the Marvel rogue's gallery will join the likes of Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire. Because of course Doctor Doom. Also, Disney owns both _Star Wars_ and Marvel, so it's not like a deal between these two properties is mind-blowing in terms of its implausibility. And the name of the series: "Hope Assembles"?! It's better than "A New Avenger", I suppose, but it feels lazy and obvious. Will this story offer anything other than a chance to resolve whether a light saber will slice through Captain America's shield? I read many Marvel / DC crossovers in my youth, and those vaporous stories meant nothing and had no impact on any character or fictional world. To continue, on 26 August 2026, Upper Deck Entertainment and Hasbro agreed to "a multiyear global licensing partnership to produce trading cards and tabletop games around iconic IPs including Transformers, GI Joe, Power Rangers, M.A.S.K. and Jem and the Holograms", according to an article in _Forbes_ from Rob Salkowitz. From the article: > "We've been highly focused on the entertainment sector if you look at what we've done with Marvel, Disney, DC, Alien, Harry Potter, and videogame properties like Halo and Blizzard," President of Upper Deck [Jason] Masherah said in a phone interview earlier this week. "Hasbro is really like a crown jewel when you think of how many people grew up with Transformers, GI Joe, and Power Rangers." A crown jewel that others can have if they also pay the licensing fee, which cheapens the glamour associated with said jewel . After all, doesn't Renegade Game Studios already have multiple deck-building games based on Hasbro properties such Transformers, GI Joe, and Power Rangers? Yes, it does (along with My Little Pony)! Doesn't Renegade also have RPGs based on these same properties? Yes, it does! But apparently the tabletop games license for these titles was still unclaimed, so now Upper Deck will fill that hole in the market. Additionally, in August 2026, McDonald's announced a collaboration between _SpongeBob SquarePants_ and _One Piece_. From an article by Natalie Fear in _Creative Bloq_ : > McDonald's has had some iconic collaborations over the years, from Travis Scott to Crocs, but its latest move might be the strangest yet. Fusing the worlds of US cartoon royalty and Japanese anime, behold, the SpongeBob x One Piece Happy Meal... > Coming to McDonald's across the globe throughout August, the Happy Meal will include 1 of 12 collectable crossover toys, such as Patrick as Zoro, Mr Krabs as Jinbe, Squidward as Sanji, and, of course, SpongeBob as Luffy. Well, of course, who else would SpongeBob be? Until a few years from now when McDonald's releases a multiverse version of the SpongeBob x One Piece Happy Meal with each character in one series appearing as each character in the other series. Gotta collect 'em all! ## Everything's a Copy of a Copy of a Copy This might not be news to you, but _The Lord of the Rings_ is a hot property these days: * In November 2026, Office Dog will release The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict. * In Q4 2026, Ares Games will release Hope and Despair, the latest entry in its War of the Ring: The Card Game line, while Sieges of Middle-earth, the latest entry in its War of the Ring line, awaits a release date. * In August 2026, Grand Gamers Guild announced **_The Hobbit: Riddles in the Dark_**. * In May 2026, asmodee announced Play to Z, Sirius Dice, and Game Toppers as partner publishers that will release Middle-earth related items. * In April 2026, Stone Blade Entertainment announced The Lord of the Rings: Ascension. * In March 2026, Restoration Games announced The Lord of the Rings: The King's Gambit, with this being an updated version of the 2000 game Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit, thereby trading one license for another. * In January 2026, Office Dog released The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – Trick-Taking Game, one year after releasing The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – Trick-Taking Game. * In the second half of 2025, Zygomatic released Spot it! The Lord of the Rings. * In October 2025, Office Dog released The Hobbit: There and Back Again. * In August 2025, Z-Man Games released The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship. This is a non-exhaustive list, yet at the same time an extremely exhausting list. _The Lord of the Rings_ is a giant book, yes, but it's finite and complete. The same goes for _The Hobbit_. J.R.R. Tolkien has been dead for fifty years, but his work is being re-heated and served over and over again. (When I worked in a game store in the early 1990s, we sold the Middle-earth Role Playing line from Ice Crown Enterprises, along with the introductory Lord of the Rings Adventure Game.) I was really struck by this feeling of exhaustion while including Cryptozoic Entertainment's DC Deck-Building Game: Green Lantern Corps**__** in a round-up of licensed game designs. I searched on BoardGameGeek to find a link for that game, a link that did not exist at the time, but I did find links for two _Green Lantern_ -based CMON titles: DC Super Heroes United: Green Lantern Corps and DCeased: Green Lantern Corpse. ## Am I Being Hypocritical? In 2023, I published a video titled "Are Publishers Trying to Steal Your Money?", with the screenshot reading "In Defense of the Cash Grab": I still believe what I said in that video: Publishers are trying to sell items, so they release items that they think will sell. If you don't want to buy it, don't. Also from the video, I find it odd when people feel the need to comment "Not for me" on a game announcement without giving some context for the statement that might be beneficial to others, e.g., "The publisher releases games with terrible rulebooks." — and if you just don't care for, say, _Star Wars_ , then writing "Not for me" is meaningless to others regardless of an explanation. Let folks enjoy what they want to enjoy instead of implying they're wrong for enjoying it. Many of the Middle-earth titles listed above have been well-received and financial successes — and publishers are banking on more successes in the future. In 2025, I spoke with a publisher's representative about a then-unannounced _LotR_ licensed title and asked whether they thought the market was going to be too saturated, and they essentially said it didn't matter how many _LotR_ games were released. The buyers will be there. (Stone Blade's crowdfunding campaign for _The Lord of the Rings: Ascension_ received more than US$2 million in backing, for example, despite delivery of the game not being anticipated until December 2027.) So what's the problem? I should just ignore all of these _Lord of the Rings_ , Marvel, _Star Wars_ , etc. titles and focus on other game releases, yes? Yes, I should...yet I'm also in the position of someone who writes about new games for a living, so I cover many of these announcements since I know some segment of the audience will be excited about them. For me, these titles are falling into the bucket of "the king is dead and we need to find a successor", that is, game settings used so frequently that they feel like nondescript wallpaper, that feel generic instead of evocative because we've re-visited them so many times. Guess we're destroying The One Ring again? It's Monday, so we gotta go blow up another Death Star. We've seen it a hundred times, and now we're seeing it again. The funny thing is that the games I like tend to be equally repetitive — Collect these cards. Dominate this area. Reach the finish line before anyone else. — but I think the difference is that the theme and setting of these games tends to be vanishingly present, so I ignore it and focus solely on the gameplay. This exhaustion is definitely a "me" problem, and my solution has to be to focus on covering non-IP games and games with lesser known (to me) IPs. Mention licensed _Star Wars_ / Marvel / _LotR_ /etc. titles in passing since folks will want word of them, but spend more time researching and writing about novel settings — that is, novel to me. In that post with _DC Deck-Building Game: Green Lantern Corps,_ that's pretty much what I did. I knew of Jack Vance, Sarah Maas, and Dashiell Hammett, but I'd never read anything by them, so I researched them in order to have some idea what I was writing about and see what I might be missing. One thing I was def. missing was knowledge of Dashiell Hammett in this fab suit: Smokin'! (Image: Wikipedia) Now I'm more enlightened and feeling good about expanding my fictional horizons. Excited to see what comes next... ****Want to read more articles like this?**** Get Board Game Beat's free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more!

Here's a round-up of teaser items from publishers: ▪️ In his 27 August 2026 newsletter, Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games marvelled that Elizabeth Hargrave's Wingspan Pocket already has more than one thousand ratings on BoardGameGeek after being on the market for only six weeks. He listed attributes that might have contributed to the game being played so much, so quickly, then closed with this line: "...I'm looking to learn from this experience for our other games (including **_Wyrmspan Pocket_** , which Connie [Vogelmann] is actively working on)." If the dragons in Wyrmspan are too large for you, teensy dragons are on their way! ▪️The year 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's tile-laying game Carcassonne — well, the 25th anniversary of it winning Spiel des Jahres, so publisher Hans im Glück is touting "a limited-edition anniversary version" for release in October 2026. Given the blurry image, I presume this will be the **_Pixel Carcassonne_** game that Italian licensee Giochi Uniti revealed in May 2026. ▪️ On 21 August 2026, French website _Philibert_ posted pics from Sommet des jeux 2026 (Games Summit 2026), and among the games pictured is **_Concept Stories_** , which is labeled "Work in Progress". I got to sample this item at Origins Game Fair 2026, but pics weren't allowed at that time, so I'll share Philibert's pic now: Image: Philibert This work by Alain Rivollet, Gaëtan Beaujannot, and Repos Production features gameplay that will be familiar to anyone who has played 2013's Concept. In this _20 Questions_ -style game, you're trying to get someone to guess a secret concept by placing tokens on various spots of a game board that features colors, shapes, body parts, emotions, substances, directions, categories, and more. You've giving clues to lead guessers to the right answer. _Concept Stories_ transforms gameplay into a tiered challenge. You want to get players to guess something, then you want them to have that concept in mind and lead them to guess a concept related to that first something, then you'll build on that to have them guess something else, etc. Essentially, you are getting them to tell themselves a story by leading them through it bit by bit. Interesting to see so many game-adjacent creations along these lines coming to market, similar to Un Curieux Jardin and Le Petit Théâtre that I wrote about on 27 August 2026. They're not so much games as game-like activities in that you don't really care about scoring or winning, but just doing stuff with others and reaching some conclusive state. ▪️ I know that I just wrote about Oink Games' late 2026 line-up, but in case you're not having Oink overload, I thought I'd mention that two titles from Oink — Kei Kajino's SCOUT and Paul Schulz' DroPolter — have been released in the U.S. in larger, yet cheaper editions exclusively at Walmart. [SCOUT and DroPolter] _[Disclosure: Oink Games is an advertiser on Board Game Beat.]_ Congrats to Oink for landing those placements! Overnight mainstream success after sixteen years of hard work... ****Want more game write-ups like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more

For this post, I thought I'd serve up an indulgent dish of randomness in the form of games that use dice as their main component: ## Dicey Waters In 2012, AMIGO released the Haim Shafir design Piraten Kapern ("Pirates Boarding"), and more than a decade later an English-language edition is being released on the U.S. market by Hachette Boardgames USA under the title **_Dicey Waters_**. Art by Jose Pardo (Image: Hachette Boardgames USA) Each turn, you draw a fortune card, then roll the eight dice. You can re-roll dice as often as you like, except for skulls — and if you have three skulls face up, you bust and earn nothing for the round. If you stop before that, you score based on the gold, diamonds, and sets showing on the dice, with the fortune card impacting those results and (most likely) affecting how long you continue to re-roll: the captain doubles your score, the sorceress lets you re-roll one skull, a sea battle requires you to roll the indicated number of swords to score for the turn and earn the listed bonus. If you have at least four skulls on your first roll, instead of losing your turn, you head to the "Island of Skulls" for that turn, re-rolling until you don't get a skull, with each other player then losing 100 points per skull. As soon as a player hits 6,000 points, each other player has a final turn, but if someone overtakes the player who triggered the endgame, that player gets a final shot to end up on top. ## Robo Rally Dice In February 2026, Renegade Game Studios released a spin-off title of Richard Garfield's Robo Rally — which is now more than thirty years old! — with Kane Klenko's Robo Rally Dice featuring the same basic gameplay and goal as in the original game: Race your robot through a factory floor filled with dangerous obstacles in order to reach all the checkpoints in order, ideally reaching the final checkpoint first to win. Art by Gonçalo Lopes How _Robo Rally Dice_ differs from that earlier game is that your movement is now determined by rolling dice instead of by receiving a handful of movement cards and placing them in the order you want. At the start of a round, everyone rolls and re-rolls their dice simultaneously, locking them on their personal game board in whatever order seems best. You have four movement registers and four triggers that activate upgrade cards, but only five dice, so you must make choices. Once a player has locked their dice, they count down until everyone must stop, then players all resolve their first movement die in order, after which board elements take place, with conveyor belts moving robots on them, lasers causing damage if your robot stands in front of them, gears rotating your robot, batteries giving you upgrade cards, and so on. _Robo Rally Dice_ includes four factory game boards, which can be used in the _Robo Rally_ base game, just as the game boards in that game will work in this newer one. ## Jump Masters! At Gen Con 2026, Jeff Jacobson and Manny Trembley of Neon Knight Games, which is owned by Chip Theory Games, showed off their newest release: the 2-4 player game Jump Masters!, which uses dice to represent the energy value of your heroes as you work to smack down the opposing team(s). Art by Manny Trembley In more detail, each player drafts a team of four heroes with their associated dice, then sets them up in the deployment zone in a corner of the game board. On a turn, you choose one of your heroes to move (1-2 spaces) or jump, with this being what you want to do most. The game isn't called "Move Masters!", after all! Each hero has an energy value that you track with its six-sided die. When you jump one of your teammates, that hero's energy increases by one (although never over its maximum), and when you jump an opposing hero, both of your heroes lose energy equal to whoever has the lowest value — that is, at least one of the heroes goes to 0 and is removed from the board, with the opposing player gaining points equal to that defeated hero's maximum energy. That hero will then be re-deployed, and turns continue until someone has at least 20 points and wins. All heroes can perform multiple jumps on a turn, as in Checkers with a kinged piece or in Chinese Checkers, and each hero has a special ability, such as jumping over 1-2 spaces instead of only one, moving up to three spaces, dealing damage to a nearby hero after moving, and so on. One final bit: If on your turn, your heroes in the central four spaces — "the hill" — have the highest sum of energy, you earn 1 point in addition to whatever else you might earn that turn. That "king of the hill" aspect of play gives you an incentive to mix it up, but you're not playing randomly since the dice aren't rolled — only used to track current energy. ## Dicecream To end your game night, you might wish for a dessert, and designers Manfred Keller and Fabian Zimmermann have tried to satisfy this desire in Dicecream, a 2-4 player title from Skelling Games that hit the market in August 2026. Art by Christian Schaarschmidt During set-up, each player has their own player sheet (as shown on the left above) that shows four ice cream sundaes; the sundae cups are in four colors, and each cup holds ice "cube" scoops and toppings in the other three colors, along with space for two dollops of whipped cream. On a turn, you roll the five dice (in the colors of the four sundae cups, along with white), then you use these dice to "fill" your cups. You use a colored die to "unlock" a cup, then use other colors to add a scoop (scoring points for the die used) or tick a filling in this scoop, with white allowing you add a value in one of the dollops. You can unlock at most two cups on a turn, and the sum of the dice used in a cup can't exceed the die used to unlock the cup. On your turn, each other player can use one of the dice that you used for ice cream, whipped cream, or filling in a sundae of their own without needing to unlock the cup. After each player has had a turn, you reveal two bonus cards that allow you to mark spaces and choose one of them. After 3-5 rounds, you score your sundaes by tallying their points, with both whipped cream dollops earning a bonus 2 points and all three ticked fillings doubling that value. ****Want more game write-ups like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more!

Time to sample a few titles from French creators and publishers. Why? Because they make cool stuff. ## Letter Up French publisher Unfriendly Games came to prominence in 2023 with the dexterity game Nekojima from David Carmona and Karen Nguyen, and now that design duo has released a v. different style of game in Letter Up, which hit the French market on 24 July 2026. Art by Maïté Franchi, with the nails (by chance) serving as a memorial to Yayoi Kusama In this game, two players take turns placing letters on the 7x7 board to create words. You've probably seen such games before, yes? Roughly twenty years ago, a friend who competed in Scrabble tournaments told me that at high levels of play, the game becomes an area-control challenge, with you trying to make it difficult for your opponent to grab valuable spaces. _Letter Up_ is an area-control challenge from the get-go. When a created word touches the edge of the playing area with the first or last letter, you place a token next to that letter. As in Upwords, another classic word-building game, you can place letters on existing letters in order to create new words — and if that modified word touches the edge, you can replace your opponent's token with your own. In the picture above, you can imagine the green player playing VOIR ("to see") to change LIBRE ("free") to LIVRE ("book"), which allows them to replace that black token with their green one. Yoink! You can stack at most three tiles on a space, but if a word spans the board from edge to edge, the letters in that word are frozen, which means the player who created (or changed) that word will have locked two tokens in place. Whoever first gets their six tokens on the board wins. ## Un Curieux Jardin Un Curieux Jardin ("A Curious Garden") is the newest title in the "Fil Rouge" series by Julien and Tom Prothière that debuted in 2024 with Shadow of the Tiger and Dans leurs Regards ("In Their Eyes"). "Fil Rouge" literally translates to "red thread", but it also means "common thread", and in these games players need to reconstruct a story from the parts that they see. Art by Anne Heidsieck In a scenario by Germain Winzenschtark, _Un Curieux Jardin_ presents 2-4 players with four story chapters that they need to reconstruct. Each chapter features four "discovery" cards numbered I-IV, cards distributed as evenly as possible among players, and a card with a red ball of yarn, which is revealed to all; this card depicts a scene within the story. Players discuss the cards they hold to try to make sense of the order in which events took place, and whenever someone is ready to do so, they place a card from their hand face up at the beginning or end of all cards currently revealed. Someone then draws the next discovery card, and over the course of the game, you will place all of the cards in a timeline. You can spend tokens to change the order of up to three cards, then you reveal the A-B-C cards one by one to discover whether you've figured out what took place. The earlier _Fil Rouge_ titles were released by Lumberjacks Studio, but that studio now bears the name KODAMA. L'esprit joueur ("KODAMA. The playful spirit"), although it also bills itself as Kodama Games. ## Le Petit Théâtre KODAMA released another co-operative game earlier in 2026: Le Petit Théâtre ("The Little Theater"), a design by Gricha German and Quentin Guidotti in which 1-4 players attempt to re-create a play about a princess who is in love with a troll. Art by Olivier Derouetteau The game consists of a prologue, three acts (each with four scenes), and an epilogue. At the start of each part of the play, lay out cards in a specific arrangement, then deal each player 1-4 character cards and 1-2 "dramatic twist" cards, while placing two verb cards face up. The play set-up gives a bit of direction, along with what you want to make happen in the scene. Players can talk about what they have in hand, and to take an action, they play one or two character cards around a revealed verb in order to create a sentence, then they carry out the sentence. In the image above, the verbs allow character A to TIRE ("pull") character B or character A to ÉCHANGE AVEC ("exchange places with") character B. Once you carry out the sentence, you discard the verb and draw a new one. You can discard a dramatic twist to draw two characters or carry out its special action. Ideally you can resolve the scene properly before you all run out of cards, and you'll record the success of your production based on the audience's applause. ## LEDA In June 2026, publisher Sorry We Are French released LEDA, a design by Pierrick Libralesso, Renaud Libralesso, and Yoel Sayada that falls into the chic category of two-player games with asymmetric factions. In _LEDA_ , each player takes charge of an animal clan — cats, pandas, sharks, or scorpions — with each having a unique set of tiles and a personal victory condition. Art by David Sitbon On a turn, the active player reveals an action tile, which indicates a row, column, or grouping of four squares that they can activate in their grid, after which the opponent activates those same tiles in their grid. These tiles might give you food, military strength, additional clan cards, a clan effect, or some other ability. Some of these cards are permanent, while others flip to their desert side after use. Whoever has more military strength this turn draws a military tile, which rewards them with 1-2 victory symbols and possibly another reward. Starting with the active player, players can now either play a clan card from their hand by paying its cost and covering a tile in their grid or swapping two tiles in their grid and gaining a food. You win by collecting the indicated number of victory symbols or by completing your clan goal: Sharks want to place their nine tokens on their tiles, scorpions want to place a portal in each corner of the grid, cats must meet board conditions to place rings, and pandas must experience awakening. The _LEDA_ rulebook depicts more animal clans that are part of this world, and SWAF has already announced the Snake Expansion, with snakes coming onto the grid as face-down egg cards, then bursting from their shells — i.e., being turned over — when their tile is activated, surprising the opponent with mystery powers. ****Want more game write-ups like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

_This preview of_**Strange Creatures** _is for Beat members at the_ prototype level_and higher. Once I've played this game more and can do a proper preview, I'll post that publicly._ ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

With so much focus on Gen Con 2026 — and at least one more post about that show still to come — I haven't posted a round-up of game-related items in more than a month. Here's some of what I've seen in passing: ▪️ Designer Carla Horger passed away in January 2025, and in July 2026 her co-designer on many games, husband Jeff Horger, also passed away. I learned this news courtesy of Jay Tummelson at Rio Grande Games, who had published the couple's games 20th Century Limited in 2015 and Orient Express in 2017. ▪️ Designer Matthew Dunstan regularly talks about game design on YouTube, and in August 2026, he reflected on the past five years he's spent as an independent game designer. Interesting thoughts for anyone who has wondered what it takes to make this happen... ▪️ In "Play behind bars" on _Boundless Play_ , Keri Blakinger, an investigative journalist for The Marshall Project, writes about the games folks played during her ten months in jail. ▪️ On _Wirecutter_ , James Austin lists the five games from Gen Con 2026 "we're most excited to test", which is a weird way to express your enthusiasm about something. "Hey, let's out go out tonight and test some ice cream." Please, no. ▪️ Similarly, on _Polygon_ Sam Nelson wrote about "The 10 hottest board games you should play at Gen Con before they sell out", with that post going live on the Wednesday before Gen Con 2026 opened...so the "hottest" terminology feels like sales blather here. Why should I care what's hot? Why not instead write "The 10 board games you should play at Gen Con before they sell out?" That feels more personal, more direct. That framing would make me feel that the writer is suggesting games based on their taste and their observations, not parroting what everyone else is talking about, so perhaps they would be telling me about a game I would not have heard about otherwise, which makes the recommendation more meaningful in my eyes. This is my take, of course, based on personal experience that suggests the "wisdom of the crowds" would lead me to acquire games that I would never want to play. To wit... __Entropy__ , so hot right now...which seems contrary to the concept of "entropy" ▪️ The International Gamers Awards (IGA) has announced its longlist of nominees for 2026: ## Multiplayer * The Druids of Edora, by Stefan Feld and alea * The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, by Matt Leacock and Z-Man Games * Luthier, by Dave Beck, Abe Burson, and Paverson Games * Nippon: Zaibatsu, by Nuno Sentieiro, Paulo Soledade, and CrowD Games * Railway Boom, by Hisashi Hayashi and Arclight Games * Recall, by Kristian Ostby, Helge Meissner, Anna Wermlund, Kjetil Svendsen, and Alion – by Dr Ø * Sanctuary, by Mathias Wigge and Feuerland Spiele * Take Time, by Alexi Piovesan, Julien Prothiere, and Libellud * World Order, by Vangelis Bagiartakis, Varnavas Timotheou, and Hegemonic Project Games ## Two-Player * Duel for Cardia, by Faouzi Boughida, Mathieu Rivero, and Hans im Glück * Moytura, by Trevor Benjamin, David Thompson, and Bitewing Games * Star Wars: Battle of Hoth, by Richard Borg, Adrien Martinot, and Days of Wonder * Tag Team, by Corentin Lebrat, Gricha German, and Scorpion Masqué * Vantage, by Jamey Stegmaier and Stonemaier Games * The White Castle Duel, by Israel Cendrero, Sheila Santos, and Devir ## Solitaire * Ace of Spades, by Benjamin Amorin and Devir * Hercules and the 12 Labors, by Tyler Brown and Envy Born Games * The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, by Matt Leacock and Z-Man Games * Vantage, by Jamey Stegmaier and Stonemaier Games I'm a former IGA member who hasn't voted since (I believe) 2008, and the process works as follows: Each member submits a list of up to ten games for the multiplayer award, with up to five titles being starred, along with lists of up to five games for the other awards, with up to three of each being starred. Once the longlist is compiled, members have a month to play anything nominated that they hadn't played previously, then they submit a list from 1-x for each award, stopping whenever they don't want to list anything else. In each category, whichever game gets the fewest 1 votes is eliminated, with ties being broken by fewest nominations (with stars counting twice), then any votes toward that game are transferred to whichever game is ranked next on those voters' lists. In this way, ideally you are measuring the collective preferences of the voting pool. I stopped voting nearly twenty years ago because I could not possibly get and play all of the games that I had not played previously, whether due to lack of time or interest. Looking at the current multiplayer list, for example, I love _Take Time_ (review), enjoy _The Druids of Edora_ (write-up), have played _Sanctuary_ once (not for me), and have not played anything else, with _Railway Boom_ being the only title on the list in which I'm interested. Why would I knock myself out to play seven games, likely at most once, in order to rank them against one another when I'm currently indifferent to the batch? Better that I spend my time playing games that I'm more likely to enjoy. In the two-player category, I love _Tag Team_ (write-up) and have played nothing else. I'm 0-for-4 in the solitaire category. In short, the market has dozens, if not hundreds, of games for every taste, so play what you want to play and don't fret about playing only what's "best". ****Like this kind of coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign me up!

On 17 August 2026, I wrote about yet another tabletop adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's work — Jonathan Chaffer's **_The Hobbit: Riddles in the Dark_** from Grand Gamers Guild — but designers and publishers are exploring worlds outside Middle-earth as well. ▪️ Somewhat younger than Tolkien's writings, but not by much, is Jack Vance's _The Dirdir_ , the third novel from his "Planet of Adventure" tetralogy published from 1968 to 1970. Designer Joel Sparks is crowdfunding a game set in "the jewel-studded hunting ground" featured in this novel, describing The Carabas as "the first ever board game from the worlds of Jack Vance". Here's an overview: > Up to five players control crews of desperate humans striving to uncover precious gems and return with them to safety. Meanwhile, the vicious alien Dirdir stalk the landscape, hunting the humans tooth and claw. The more ground a crew covers, the more they attract deadly alien attention. Art by Cem Centintas and Augustinas Raginskis > Move your crews across the colorful map, draw sequin gems from the cloth bag, and roll special three-sided dice to find out how close the hunters come to you — or perhaps you can lure them to attack a rival crew along the way. Beware the Excellences, keenest hunters of all, and the eventual wave of aircars that will shut the whole terrain down! ▪️ What's more, for Pan Universal Galactic Worldwide, which to date has mostly released collectible items related to comics, Sparks has designed The Maltese Falcon, a card game based on Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel of the same name. An overview: > Up to five characters move among the noir locations of 1920s San Francisco, searching for the real version of the precious Maltese Falcon statue. Each turn, you use a movement card — which features both a location and a character — to go to that location or to where that character is located, then you take a single action: search, steal, or reveal a gun or a falcon. You can affect other characters only if you share a location. The player count is 2-5, 3-5, or 3-6 depending on which source you use, so...? > Meanwhile, the police are closing in, and someone is going to jail for murder. When the Fuzz card turns up, whoever is caught with the murder charge gets hauled away and can't win. If an unjailed character has the real Falcon statue, they win; otherwise, it's a matter of money and freedom. ▪️ Fitting in the timeline between Middle-earth and Carabas is Hal Jordan, a.k.a. the superhero Green Lantern, who first appeared in the 1959 comic _Showcase_ #22 in a story by writer John Broome and artist Gil Kane. Promotional image for __DC Deck-Building Game: Green Lantern Corps__ To coincide with the debut of the Lanterns TV series on HBO, which features Jordan and his successor John Stewart, Cryptozoic Entertainment is crowdfunding _**DC Deck-Building Game: Green Lantern Corps**_ since sixty-plus years of Lantern lore can now fill a standalone game in this publisher's _DC Deck-Building Game_ series, which features sixteen standalone titles and dozens of expansions and promos as of mid-2026. ▪️ In October 2026, Goliath Games will release _**A Court of Thorns and Roses: Fate & Favor Board Game**_, an adaptation of Sarah J. Maas' 2015 novel of the same name, with the sixth title in that eight-book series — _A Court of Splintered Harmony_ — __ also reaching stores in October 2026. The description of this 1-7(!) player game is minimal, with no designer being credited in the publicity materials I've seen: > Step into the magical world of Prythian as a High Lord or Lady, and represent one of the seven courts: Night, Day, Dawn, Winter, Summer, Spring, or Autumn. Build alliances with iconic characters, spread your influence across the courts, and navigate shifting loyalties as fate entangles every player at the table. Will you form powerful bonds, outmaneuver your rivals, or fall victim to dangerous intrigue? With strategic gameplay, evolving relationships, and immersive storytelling, only the player with the greatest influence will rise to power.

Just three weeks out from debuting Compress and The Frozen Passage in the U.S. at Gen Con 2026, Japanese publisher Oink Games has announced new titles for release at Game Market Autumn 2026 on October 17-18, with three of these titles also scheduled to be available at SPIEL Essen 26 and PAX Unplugged 2026. Let's look at those three titles first. _[Disclosure: Oink Games is an advertiser on Board Game Beat.]_ ## Loop 40 The gameriest design in the batch is probably Loop 40, a 3-5 player game from designer 6jizo, who debuted in 2024 with Ninjan from Swiss publisher Helvetiq. _Loop 40_ consists of cards numbered 1-40 and penalty point tokens, with you wanting to ditch the former to avoid the latter. The core concept for this game is that the numbers 1-40 loop, so if 1 leads the turn, then 40 is the strongest card — and if 27 leads the turn, then 26 is the strongest. A turn starts with a player leading one or more cards in sequence, after which players either (1) play at least the same number of cards in sequence of a stronger value or (2) pass. Once you pass, you're out of the turn, and once all but one player has passed, the turn ends, with that last player removing from the game what they most recently played, then _picking up all other played cards on that turn_. That player then leads the next turn. Art by Jun Sasaki Thus, winning a turn lets you ditch one or more cards at the cost of picking up many more...and yet you might have picked up many cards that allow you to create long sequences, and if no one else can play a sequence as long as yours, then you win the turn, discard those cards, and lead again. Looking at the gameplay example above, the player to your right has played 36-37-38. You can pass on this, or you can play 7-8-9-10. If that wins the turn, you'll ditch four cards to pick up five, with the 24-25 filling in a four cards sequence from 23 to 26. (Since the numbers loop, a sequence of 39-40-1-2 would also possible.) As soon as a player ditches their final cards, the round ends. The player who goes out ditches a penalty token of their choice, while everyone else scores points for cards in their hand, with each sequence of _n_ cards being worth _n_ ² points. Play as many rounds as the number of players. ## Eggsposed Social deduction fans can try their hand at Eggsposed, a game by first-time designer Ali Mussell. Each of the 3-8 players is either a "bright bird" or a "night bird", with night birds trying to get their eggs into the shared nest. Each player receives a secret role, and the nine egg tokenss in the game are shuffled, with six being placed in a circular nest — which starts with six feathers inside the circle — and three eggs set apart from the nest. Art by Rie Takahashi On a turn, you: * Secretly look at an unfeathered egg in the nest, then place a feather on it. * Return all feathers on eggs to the nest, then remove one feather from play, then (with everyone else covering their eyes) swap any two eggs without looking at their hidden faces. * If no feathers are on any eggs, reveal an egg in the nest; this egg can no longer be swapped. If three or four night birds are ever revealed in the nest, the night bird players win. If all eggs in the nest are revealed without this happening, the bright bird players win. ## Insider Magic In 2016, Oink Games released Insider from the design team of Akihiro Itoh, Kwaji, Daichi Okano, and Kito Shinma. In that 4-8 player game, one player is the Master who knows a word they want the other players to identify, and one player is the Insider who also knows this word and wants others to not identify it, but without their own identity being revealed. After selling 100,000+ copies of _Insider_ , in 2020 Oink released Insider Black, which plays the same as (and can be combined with) _Insider_ , but features more challenging themes, team rules, and a Follower role that tries to support the Insider in their deception. Art by Jun Sasaki and Rie Komatsuzaki With 300,000+ copies of _Insider_ titles now sold, Oink Games is releasing Insider Magic, which it describes as more casual and accessible than the original game. The game features a similar set-up, with a Warlock and an Insider both knowing the secret word or phrase, but the Insider is now in league with a team of Villagers and wants the Villagers to identify the word, while Team Villager wants to keep the identity of the Insider hidden. Team Villager has three minutes to ask yes-or-no questions to discover the secret word, with the Insider trying to subtly guide them to the answer, but to complicate things the Warlock has cast a spell on each player: You must speak like a robot, you speak only in whispers, you speak like a centagenarian, you must sound like you're panicking, and so on. ## The Other Three Games Starting in (I believe) 2020, Oink Games released new editions of existing games that feature licensed IP, with those games being available solely in Japan due to the licensing agreement. Examples include Hide and Seek in the Moomin Valley (based on Nine Tiles) and Toy Story: Toy Overload (based on Order Overload: Cafe). The newest such title along these lines is くまのプーさん ハチかミツか, which translates as "Winnie the Pooh: Bees or Honey", although the box includes the more succinct English-language title **_Bees or Hunny_**. This is a new version of Bruno Faidutti and Jun Sasaki's 2025 game Wriggle Roulette, which I reviewed in July 2025, with eels and snakes being replaced by hexagonal tiles bearing Pooh and bees. Otherwise, gameplay seems identical. _Bees or Hunny_ is available solely in Japan, whether at Game Market Autumn 2026, at Oink's retail store, or online. Art for all three titles by Rie Takahashi Souvenirs from Tokyo**__** features gameplay identical to 2024's Souvenirs from Venice by Jun and Goro Sasaki, with players traveling through a grid of tiles and collecting souvenirs to bring home. To maximize souvenir points, you want to collect three of the same type, but more importantly than that, you need to return to the train station before all the tiles have been revealed or else you automatically lose. Instead of sailing in gondolas to collect wine glasses and Venetian masks, you're now moving in taxis to collect origami, manekineko, kimono, and other Tokyo-based souvenirs. To complete the thematic immersion, this title can be purchased solely at Oink Games' retail store in Tokyo. Yes, this game is itself a souvenir — very clever marketing! Souvenirs from Beijing is another thematic remake of Souvenirs from Venice, now featuring panda plushes, Peking duck, tang suits, and more. (In real life, you should probably avoid choosing Peking duck for a souvenir. I've been in the customs room when inspectors find carefully wrapped meat in travelers' suitcases, and those inspectors are not forgiving.) In addition to being available at Oink Games' retail store, _Souvenirs from Beijing_ was available at DICE CON 2026, but that event ended a few hours before this post went live, so unless you can time travel that's not an option — and if you can time travel, you probably have better options available than picking up a limited edition game. ****Want more game write-ups like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

I posted a teaser for Matthias Cramer and Werner Schmitt's Secret Museum the other day, and now publisher Schmidt Spiele has revealed the entirety of its late 2026 line-up, so let's dig into it. ## Secret Museum _Secret Museum_ is in the vein of Markus Slawitscheck's Morty Sorty Magic Shop, Schmidt Spiele's early 2026 release that was nominated for the 2026 Spiel des Jahres. (You can learn more about _Morty Sorty_ in my overview.) In short, _Secret Museum_ is a light strategy game in which you collect items, arrange them beneficially, and attempt to satisfy goal cards. Art by Dennis Lohausen The gist of the game is that you're picking up exhibits on the black market, storing them in your reserve area for a while, then — _voilà_ — adding a selection of them to your public collection once their black market stink has faded. Exhibits come in six colors and types on double-sided tiles, with one side featuring the exhibit in storage and the other side in a display case; you start with one item on display in your collection and two exhibits in boxes in storage. On a turn, draft one of the dice, then either (1) get new exhibits, or (2) score collections. To get new exhibits, refer to the four exhibits on the "black market" board, then take all that match either the color or type and place these items in storage. Most exhibits have one or two half-symbols on them, and when you complete a symbol by placing two halves together, you get that bonus: 1 point, a job card (that can provide endgame scoring), or a random exhibit from the bag. If you've now placed three exhibits of the same color or type in a row, return one of them to the box, then flip another to its "display" side and add it to your collection. (You can move exhibits in your collection to match half-symbols.) To score collections, choose a die, then place it on either the color or type space of the museum, after which all players activate all exhibits in their collection of that color or type, once again receiving points, job cards, or random tiles, which might trigger another item moving to your collection. As soon as someone has eight or more tiles in their collection, you finish the round. For each space on a job card that you can fill with an exhibit in your collection, you score 1 point. ## Die Insel der unsichtbaren Tiere Speaking of Slawitscheck, he has a new title with co-designer Arno Steinwender, with whom he won the 2024 Kinderspiel des Jahres for Die Magischen Schlüssel. Die Insel der unsichtbaren Tier ("The Island of Invisible Animals") comes from Schmidt's Drei Magier Spiele imprint, and players are challenged to rescue all animals from the island before its volcano erupts. Art by Ralf Vogt On a turn, place the "magic viewfinder" over one or more squares on the island to see what's underneath: an animal, parts of animals (should you straddle more than one tile), plants, nothing? Next, flip over one of the tiles. If the tile shows food, leave it face up; if it shows the rescue boat, flip the boat face down, then flip any tile on the island face up. Is that animal's food tile visible? If so, you've lured the animal from the island onto your boat. If not, then you've...angered the gods(?) and add a lavastone to the volcano. If all the lavastones are in the volcano before all nine animals have been rescued, then you all perish, with your charred remains sure to become resources in some future game. To increase the game's difficulty, you can add tiles to the game that add a lavastone, keep you from talking, or rotate the game board so that you will likely have trouble remembering which animals are where. ## Kniffle 8 and HiLo PLUS Two game lines in the Schmidt Spiele catalog have new entries, with Reiner Knizia's Kniffel 8 featuring a gameplay twist on ye olde Kniffel, a.k.a. _Yahtzee_. The starting point of the twist: Instead of a 6, the eight six-sided dice feature an 8. On a turn, you roll the dice up to three times, keeping and re-rolling whatever you wish — except that all 8s _must_ be kept. After you stop rolling, you score one of the fields on your scoresheet: What's the sum of the 1s you rolled? The 2s? The 8s? If you scored 2+ dice in each of those number fields, you earn a bonus. You can create four- and five-of-a-kind to score as in _Kniffel_ , but your score is the sum of your dice other than 8s, so not being able to re-roll 8s can be a curse as much as a benefit. Other scoring options are familiar, but modified based on you rolling eight dice instead of six: two sets of three, a five-die straight (both with and without a pair of 8s), and a six-of-a-kind. If you can't score on a turn, mark out one field, scoring no points for it. (The scoresheet includes a "reserve" field you can mark out so that you can still try to score all other fields, with that reserve being worth 10 points itself if you don't use it.) HiLo PLUS is a card game in the golf family from Johann Rüttinger and Kathi Kappler, who had released the golf game ALLEGRA Grande through their own Drei Hasen in der Abendsonne company in 2024. Your goal in HiLo PLUS is the same as in all golf games: Score as few points as possible. You start with fifteen random face-down number cards in a 3x5 array, then turn any two face up. You also have a hand of five action cards. On a turn, you do one of three things: * Take the top card of the discard pile and swap it with a card in your array. * Draw the top card of the deck and either swap it with a card in your array or discard it, after which you flip a face-down card face up. * Use an action card to swap any two cards in your array or peek at a face-down card in your array. (A played action card blocks the discard pile for the next player.) If at any time you have three or more cards of the same color in a row, discard these cards, then slide all cards in your array to the left to close gaps. Whenever all cards in an array are face up, each other player takes one final turn, then you score points equal to the sum of your cards. Play multiple rounds, or have the lowest score when someone passes a point threshold. ## Perfect Tour The only other family game on Schmidt's schedule is Günter Burkhardt's Perfect Tour, which continues the pattern of German publishers using English for their game titles, as with _Secret Museum_ and _Morty Sorty Magic Shop_. Art by Olivier Danchin Each player has their own game board, which shows 21 spaces that are grouped by location and colored airline routes. Take a random photo tile, and place it above your game board. Everyone plays simultaneously. On a turn, take a photo and place it above your game board, then take one of the photos above your board and place it on an empty space. If you have now filled all the empty spaces in a location or on a route, check to see whether all of these photos feature the same color, value, or image; if so, you score! If you're the first person to score this location or route, take a silver camera token, which is worth 4 points. If someone else has scored this before you, take a black camera, which is worth 3 points — unless the sum of your photos is higher than whoever holds the silver camera for this location/route, in which case you take a 5-point gold camera. You can reject one photo on a turn, but at a cost of sorts. Place the newly drawn photo face down to your left, then draw another. At the end of that turn, your left-hand neighbor adds this photo to their pool, giving them more options from now on, along with a 1 point bonus at game's end. Each player holds an endgame bonus card, and two such cards are public. If you have the lowest sum of photos in the region depicted on your private card or the public ones, you score 4 points. The double-sided game boards feature a map with more connections on the reverse side. ## Topp das Törtchen! Designer Wolfgang Warsch won the 2025 Kinderspiel des Jahres with Topp die Torte!, which was published by Schmidt, so the two have now partnered on a spinoff title that features similar gameplay. Art by Michel Verdu In Topp das Törtchen! ("Top the Little Cake"), each player will build a seven-layer cake one layer at a time on top of the starting layer shown at the bottom of the cake-in-progress in the upper right of the image above. Each turn, you consider two layers, flipping them as you wish to decide which one you want and which you'll place face down on your left. (Next turn, you draw a layer from your personal stack and the one your neighbor rejected.) When you place a layer, you want to create or add to existing columns of a color...which makes the example cake above odd given that no color in the first layer matches the starting layer. Why show bad gameplay in an example?! Anyway, the second layer of that example cake extends the pink and light blue colors. Count how many sugar cubes are shown in those layers — one pink and two light blue — then color one sugar cube on your player sheet pink and two light blue. Note that you cannot repeat a color in a scoring field, so once again the example image leads us astray since the upper left "bronze" space features two green sugar cubes. (Someone at Schmidt HQ will probably get a dressing down once these problems are pointed out.) You must complete fields from the top down, so if you have a pink cube in all fields in progress, then additional pink cubes go in the exchange box on your player sheet, which can be cashed in at a 3:1 ratio for another color. Boo, don't do this. Vary the cake colors for multicolored sweetness. When you complete a field, circle the stars next to it — and when you complete a gold field with all five colors, you name two colors, then flip a cake layer from the reserve. Score bonus stars equal to the number of sugar cubes in one of the named color fields. After the seventh round, use three golden joker cubes to ideally fill nearly completed fields, then sum your stars. P.S. German side note: Interesting to think about _torte_ (cake) being feminine and _törtchen_ (little cake) being neuter, as if the little cake hasn't hit puberty yet, so its gender is currently unknown or not yet explicit, despite all "adult" cakes being feminine. (I'm sure someone knowledgeable of the history of German could tell me why my joke is lame, similar to how my wife's study of Old Church Slavonic gave her some understanding of how Russian ended up as it did.) ****Want more game write-ups like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

I'm a big proponent of co-designing and even triple-co-designing. (Co-co-designing?) Having a design partner comes with many benefits, including ideation through conversation and additional playtesting opportunities — especially with two-player games! Having a partner helps you work through challenges from different perspectives with a wider range of skills and with greater experience. Plus, it’s fun to collaborate! I've had the great fortune to co-design with about thirty incredibly talented and professional designers. I have respect and admiration for all of these design partners and feel honored to have had the opportunity to work with them. I often say that I like to work with different people because I learn from each of them, so I thought it might be interesting and worthwhile to write about what I've learned from each individual. It should go without saying that these are all super-talented people who are wonderful to work with and from whom I've learned many lessons. It would take too long to give a full character study of each one, so I will focus on just one lesson, one salient takeaway, from each designer. I send a heartfelt **thank you** to them all! ## TAM TAM and I have worked on over fifty games together. Eleven of our games have been released (including LEGO Monkey Palace, Crafting The Cosmos, Floristry, and Scurry Up!), and many more will be released soon (including **_Clash Royale_** , Pressure, **_The Shining_** , and **_Inle_**). TAM is very good at finding multiple ways to use components, which is tremendously helpful for heavy games where you need to limit the number of components to have a viable product. That said, this skill is also useful in lighter, family games. For example, in _Scurry Up!_ each player has a d6 they set to determine their location. They use that same die to roll for draft order. Because of TAM, I always look for a secondary use of each piece in a game. Art by Sandara Tang and Ammon Anderson And I'm already going to break the "one lesson" rule I mentioned above and discuss another lesson I learned from TAM, which in itself is a lesson: Don't be afraid to break rules. I like to say "never say never...except sometimes". One more lesson I'd like to mention has to do with co-designing. TAM and I have given several panels at conventions on co-designing, and there's a lot to cover, but a really important point is to not be afraid to argue. It's important to check your ego at the door and remember to be respectful, but there's a lot to be gained from positive friction. Defending ideas in passionate, yet cordial arguments with TAM trained me to articulate my reasoning more clearly and concisely. ## Jonathan Gilmour-Long Jon played an important role as mentor to me when I was starting out. I first approached him during the COVID shutdown for help developing my games, and after one or two sessions, I was honored that he asked me to co-design something with him. We went on to meet several times a week for several years. Probably half the things I learned about game design were from those sessions with him. We have worked on about thirty games, seven of which have been signed and five of which have been released, including Making Monsters, Pinched!, and (soon) FluentSea. Jon is a veritable encyclopedia of games. When he appeared on a board game trivia podcast, the things he knew blew my mind. Having such a wealth of knowledge is hugely valuable because he knows how other games solve just about any problem we run into. If I want a twist on endgame scoring, Jon will know several games that have interesting systems. One of the bigger lessons I learned from Jon is how to expand, modify, and build on the great catalog of existing games, that is, how to use your experience with all the games you've played to find new, fresh solutions and directions. I also had the wonderful opportunity to work with Jon and his wife Tara Gilmour-Long making a game as a wedding favor for all of their guests, which was delightful and memorable. Thank you, Jon and Tara! Art by Kaylee Gilmour and Niko Pope ## Yuval Grinspun Yuval and I have worked on about a dozen games, including two that have been signed and are expected to release in 2027 (including **_Top That!_**). Yuval is always willing to try anything. He's a true pro who doesn't hold onto ideas when we find better ones. He doesn't just let go willy-nilly, which is also important (remember the arguing lesson above), but when there's an issue with a mechanism or when we find a better solution, he's always willing to explore the new direction without attachment to something that worked in the past. I have found this flexibility to be critical in moving designs forward. ## Christopher Ryan Chan Chris and I have worked on nearly ten games together, including Push Push Penguin, which was released in 2025. Working with Chris is a delight for many reasons, but if I had to take one lesson away it would be his insistence on marrying the things you're doing to the theme/setting you're in. Chris relentlessly asks how this mechanism makes sense in the world we're making. That might sound easy or obvious, but in my experience, it's one of the most difficult — and important — lessons to learn. ## Ryan Rodriguez Ryan and I have worked on nearly ten games together, several of which were adaptations of (Clash Royale) or inspired by (popular poker-based) video games, with both of those games due for release in 2027. Ryan has a wonderful knack for creating cardboard adaptations of video games. He understands that you can't translate a video game directly, that there must be some abstraction because the tabletop experience is inherently different from the video game experience. The most important part of adapting video to tabletop is capturing the **_feeling_** you get playing the video game and translating that into cardboard — and that's not easy! ## Danielle Reynolds I've had the opportunity to work with Danielle on nearly ten games, including Coloroo which debuted at Gen Con 2026 by Lioness Games, along with two others that were offered contracts but that never ended up getting signed. Danielle is an expert in mass products, but she also has experienced success in hobby, including her hit HerStory, a wonderful game. Working with Danielle is super-efficient and no nonsense. She and Jamey Stegmaier are the only two people who respond to emails at least as quickly as I do! When you want to knock out content for fifty cards, Danielle is a machine. I've learned so much about quick iteration of content by watching her work. Danielle is a great role model for people who want to get things done — and always reply to your messages! ## Serena Fadlun Serena and I have worked on several games together, including **_Ghost Party_** , which is currently scheduled for release in Q4 2027. All the games we've worked on together target a mass audience, which means they have to be focused on a single mechanism, and the rules have to be easy to understand; you essentially need to be able to play after watching a few turns. Serena has a keen eye for table presence and building a mechanism around a centerpiece. She thinks very out of the box and comes up with wild ideas, and she is super focused on tying everything to a single goal. We've had a lot of fun boiling down gameplay to interact with a tightrope, quicksand, and feathers, among other unusual game components. ## Ammon Anderson Ammon and I have worked on half a dozen games, three of which have been offered contracts or signed, including Pressure, **_Top That!_** , and **_Catnip Chaos_**. Ammon has a great knack for finding fun, and he also is a super talented artist and graphic designer, as evidenced by his hit releases Gnome Hollow and Twinkle Twinkle. He doesn't force art onto prototypes prematurely, and he's perfectly happy testing my ugly prototypes, but when we need a bit of flair to communicate our vision, he knows just how much art and color to add. Great prototype graphic design should go unnoticed, but is essential to allowing the core fun of a game to shine through. ## Whitney Loraine I've had the pleasure to work with Whitney on a few designs, including a design that Fireside Games plans to release in 2027 and **_Banana Split_** , which we're currently pitching to publishers. Whitney and I have had a lot of fun exploring various directions for the mechanism she used to great success in her hit game Charcuterie. I've always been fascinated by Reiner Knizia's exploration of auctions, finding all the different iterations you can make around a single mechanism. Whitney and I learned a great deal about "I split, you choose" when we went down that rabbit hole. We learned subtle ways to integrate arc, fairness, turn order, and incentives. My takeaway from Whitney is to not be afraid to see what happens when you use the same mechanism in subtly different ways across several games. Art by Matthieu Martin ## Jonas Resting-Jeppesen I worked with Jonas with him as a developer on **_LEGO Monkey Palace_** and as a designer on an unannounced game to be released in 2027. Jonas knows and understands each game's audience really well and relentlessly considers them in every design choice, especially to streamline. What will the average player think when they face this decision or try to use that component? Can we consolidate their choice and focus it, while keeping it interesting? I've learned so much about designing for an audience from Jonas and think about it as much as I can with every new design. Who will be playing your game, and how will they perceive it? ## Michael O'Connor Michael and I co-designed Finspan for Stonemaier Games. _Finspan_ is a spinoff of the massive hit _Wingspan_ , and Michael knows _Wingspan_ incredibly well. His knowledge of the game and its fanbase was critical in our work on _Finspan_. We needed to both extend and expand from the original design, while also keeping everything in context and knowing what might be too far for a fan of the original. I now try to remember Michael whenever I'm working on an extension to an existing title; the more you know and understand the original, the better your sequel will be. Art by Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Catalina Martinez, and Mesa Schumacher ## Daryl Andrews Daryl and I have worked on several games together, all tied to large IPs. It's been wonderful to learn so much about how these IPs function and what a board game needs to do to fit them. I had already worked on a few big IPs myself (LEGO, _Clash Royale_ , _Wingspan_ , etc.), but my experience with Daryl has taught me how to go one step further — or from the other direction, if you will, starting with the IP and finding a publisher. I didn't even know this was possible. This is super difficult to do, but if you are passionate about the IP and know which publishers might be open to the idea, it can be done. Because you're looking for a publisher after you form the relationship with the IP and sketch game ideas, you need to keep those ideas and designs flexible and in their early stages. Each publisher might pull the game in a different direction, so you have to know where to pause before you pitch and be able to pitch more of the concept than the completed game, which is the norm. ## Jen, Ben, and Ari Gordon My design career started with a co-design with my family, when we spent a family vacation making maps, spreadsheets, and prototypes. My son Ben really got into it, and we had a lot of fun doing this. Over the next few months, my daughter and I worked on a game called **_Unicorns & Puppies_** and tested it with her elementary school friends. On a long drive back from a convention, Jen and I came up with the idea for a sequel to **_Don't Swallow Me_** that we called **_Don't Swallow Me Too_**. Both of these games ended up getting signed, so Jen will have her first byline soon! I couldn’t ask for better partners and playtesters than Jen, Ben, and Ari. They are always honest and on point with their feedback, and it's always actionable. Yes, be polite and cognizant that the designer is a human being, but the more clear you are about how you felt during your test, the better the designer will be able to address it in their next iteration. I also learned how not to burn out your family — they are happy to test games, so don't make them sick of it! ## All the Rest I've had the privilege to work on one game with each of the following designers, but have learned something from each of them regardless. I won't write as much about them because we've had limited experience, but I value my time with each of them. * Bobby West — I learned a lot about tying mechanisms to a theme as we honed the 1-5 player co-operative game **_You're The Ocean_**. * Rocco Privitera — My work with Rocco on our hobby party game **_Kingmaker_** reminded me that no matter how simple you think something is, it can be simpler. * **Byron M. Huang** — Byron and I have had a lot of fun working on our thinky party game **_One Rule_**. I learned a great deal about iterating on a theme in my work with Byron. * Gil Hova — I feel like I've co-designed with Gil for years and years because his mentorship and feedback has been so meaningful and influential to me, but he and I have had only a few meetings working together on a sports game, and it was super fun. Gil is so great at seeing the vision of a game and making sure everything in it points toward that vision. * **Muzzy** — Muzzy and I briefly worked on a concept as we thought it would be funny if we were a bunch of bad weather forecasters. I learned from Muzzy both on that design and on his development of "Spelloo", a game from TAM and me that we're now pitching again, just how important lightning quick iteration and testing is. No matter how much you think/talk through something, it will never show you as much as it will in its next playtest. * Dávid Turczi — I'm currently learning to assimilate a highly active and knowledgeable fanbase's comments into our work on a module for the great game and system Nature from NorthStar Game Studio. * Marni Abramowitz — Working with Marni taught me about co-ordinating long-distance testing with a prototype that doesn't work online, and Marni is especially good at this. She has some great games coming to market soon! * Lincoln Hoppe — I've had the joy to work with Lincoln on his quirky fun game **_Flavor Burst_** and learned a great deal about delving into a bright idea and following the fun. * Travis Magrum — I worked with Travis briefly on **_FluentSea_** , which is going to Kickstarter in Q4 2026. It was great to work with Travis and learn more about bringing a game over the finish line. * **Elene Fengometidis** — Elene, TAM, and I made a game called **_3-2-1-Goby!_** on a car ride to Origins a few years ago, with me learning from this just how hard it is to make a super simple game. It's so easy to add something to solve a problem, but you have to resist doing that and try to find a way to remove something instead. * Greg May — Greg is one of my partners in UP Games, so we've worked on the product side of games quite a bit. As a board game café proprietor, Greg has a keen eye for what makes a product a product, and he brought that consideration to Pressure, which he, TAM, Ammon, and I co-designed for UP. _Pressure_ will be available in stores near you, including Barnes & Noble, in Q2 2027! * Caitlyn Brynn Greene — Caitlyn was one of the first publishers I worked with while she helped develop **_The Last Tide_** over several years. Caitlyn and I did so much work together that even though she never conceded it, I always considered her a co-designer. * I've also briefly worked on a game with Scott Brady, Lucas Kohn, and Cici Ogden. Art by Nathanael Mortensen I enjoy working with these different minds, and I look forward to getting to work with more talented designers in the future. I've just started projects with Ben Ng, Ellie Dix, and potentially Rikki Tahta — co-designer of one of my favorite games, Senators, and of course the massive hit Coup — and I'm looking forward to learning from them, too! I hope this provides some inspiration to my fellow designers. Please don't hesitate to come up to me at a convention and share your co-designing experiences. _By_ David Gordon ****Want to read more articles like this?**** Get Board Game Beat's free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

Publishers sometimes release a bit of information about upcoming games before they officially announce said games. Here are four such titles: ## Magical Athlete: Second Wind In mid-August 2026, CMYK creative director Alex Hague uploaded an updated rulebook for Takashi Ishida and Richard Garfield's Magical Athlete on BoardGameGeek, and included in that rulebook is this page about the unannounced standalone sequel **_Magical Athlete: Second Wind_**. A CMYK rep tells me that _Second Wind_ will be the same format as the company's original _Magical Athlete_ — same number of racers, a double-sided game board, six dice — with you being able to mix racers and game boards as you like. Production has started, but CMYK hasn't announced the game because the company would prefer the game be closer to release before publicizing it. (Stonemaier Games acts similarly, typically announcing a new game only when it has reached the company warehouse, thereby guaranteeing the company can hit whatever release dates it announces.) Speaking of _Magical Athlete_ , in August Sugar Throw Theatre in Minnesota ran a live event called Magical Athlete: Stadium Showdown. Organizer Minnesota Fringe posted the opening of that event on YouTube: ## Dixit: Disney Edition expansions Libellud has revealed two expansion packs for Jean-Louis Roubira's Dixit: Disney Edition (or any Dixit base game), with **_Dixit Signature: Adventure & Mystery_** and **_Dixit Signature: Villains_** due out in Q4 2026. Not sure what's up with the wording of that image on the right... ## Secret Museum In advertisements with the SPIEL Essen organization, Schmidt Spiele has revealed a new Matthias Cramer title that will be available at SPIEL Essen 26: **_Secret Museum_**. Here's the briefest of descriptions of this 2-4 player, 45-minute game: > The secret museum where the secret society meets is where you showcase rare artefacts, acquire new exhibits, and expand your collections. Simple rules and a high level of interaction through shared scoring ensure excitement in every game. Promo images for __Secret Museum__ from Schmidt Spiele ## Heat: Narrow Streets On a Twitch stream with _Un Monde de Jeux_ , starting at 1:43 Franck Lefebvre of Days of Wonder showed the next expansion for Asger Aleksandrov Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen's Heat: Pedal to the Metal, with **_Heat: Narrow Streets_** featuring racing tracks in Australia and Canada. _Heat: Narrow Streets_ will debut in February 2027 during the FIJ event in Cannes, France, similar to earlier _Heat_ expansions. A mock-up of the cover of __Heat: Narrow Streets__ A mock-up of the Australia track for __Heat: Narrow Streets__ ****Like this kind of coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

I'm still not through with coverage of Gen Con 2026, so let me chip away at that boulder and try to move toward completion before the end of August. One month should be plenty of time to cover everything, yes? __Starlines__ art by Jacqui Davis Starlines is a deck-building game of sorts from Dominic Crapuchettes of NorthStar Game Studio, with this 1-4 player game being crowdfunded ahead of a planned release in mid-2027. The game lasts six rounds, and in each round you use the "starlines" that you've acquired to gain and use resources. To do this, you arrange cards in the order of your choice next to your starbase, with you initially being able to place only three cards. You then "activate" each starline that extends from the base by summing up the numbers on that line: * **Recruit** (green) — Take X astronauts from your reserve and place them on your starbase. * **Explore** (orange) — Take X astronauts from your starbase and place them on the four "space stations" that provide action bonuses. * **Charge** (blue) — Move the "charge" marker X spaces in your starbase, thereby allowing you to place more cards on a turn and giving you a bonus "connector" every fifth movement. Move far enough, and you receive 6 or 10 money as bonuses. * **Buy (yellow) — Gain X coins to spend on new cards or connectors.** Cards cost 1, 2, 3, 6, or 10 money, and you can buy only the top card of any pile. The connectors have a solid line on one side (at a cost of 1) and a (1) number on the other (at a cost of 2). Each connector is a one-shot ability to extend a line that would otherwise end. In the image above, for example, if I had a connector, I could connect the yellow line on card #1 to the yellow line on card #3...but doing that would be pointless since the yellow line on card #3 doesn't boost how much I can buy. In the image above, which was during the rules explanation and not a sample turn, you can see that I have values of recruit 0, explore 1, charge 2, and buy 5. My final holdings in a demo game of __Starlines__ , with 50 points from cards purchased. You can think of _Starlines_ as akin to Splendor as you'll build an engine of sorts that gives you more purchasing power in later rounds, but you can arrange the cards as you like at the start of each round, which means you're not locked in to using specific cards that you've acquired — but since your starbase sets a building limit, you also can't use _all_ of the cards you've acquired. You want connectors to extend lines and cover gaps. Yes, they're single-use items, but ideally you can use them to boost your lines, thereby giving you more gas in the tank for your engine. The space stations work similarly to boost your engine. Here, I've placed five astronauts on the "+1 charge" station, which meant that each turn I'd move at least five spaces on my starbase, thereby allowing me to play one more card next turn, while also giving me a connector. Five astronauts on a station also gave me 10 bonus points, with your cards being the main way you earn points. Even if you never use a purchased card on a turn, you still score its points at game's end. Obviously the game is still being developed at this point, but different space stations will be included, allowing for variability in the bonus effects each game. Hobby Japan featured an unusually large game compared to what it normally releases, with Party-Taro's Strange Slot Simulator being just what the title says: a simulation of strange slot machines. Your goal is not to win money at these machines, which are represented by 20-card decks, but to determine which machine is which. Each of the six machines has different odds for what will appear in its windows, and in a round you're typically going to pull three cards from the deck of cards that represents a machine, shuffle those three back in, then draw another three cards, repeat. Alternatively, you can swap your machine for another machine that was unchosen. Bonus symbols can let you draw more cards, giving you a better sense of the card distribution in a machine. After four minutes, you take notes, then everyone returns all of the machines before you draft again, and after four rounds, you try to deduce which machines are which. Sounds weird and unlike anything else, so I bought a copy, but haven't yet played... Dale Yu gives me the stinkeye while playing __Not Alone__ Luma Imports is distributing a "remastered edition" of Ghislain Masson's Not Alone from Geek Attitude Games, which debuted a decade ago(!) in 2016. The game pits one player — the Creature — against up to six other players, who are all being hunted and trying to avoid being assimilated before they can be rescued. (For more details on gameplay, head to Dale Yu's write-up on _Opinionated Gamers_.) This new edition contains a "Frozen Lands" module for 4-7 players that changes the victory condition for the Creature as hunted players can now be contaminated, and if anyone in that party is contaminated, then they all perish upon being rescued. One side note about Gen Con 2026: The convention organizers were cracking down on lines at booths more than in past years, and since the Luma Imports booth was being swarmed by customers on Thursday morning, the employees threaded that line between the tables in its booth to try to keep the aisles clear. Luma failed at that task due to the volume of potential buyers, but I'm not sure what the solution is for this problem. Publisher Cardboard Alchemy has had consistent crowdfunding success with Flamecraft, Andromeda's Edge, and Critter Kitchen, and at Gen Con 2026 it showed off a mock-up of Whisperwood, a 1-4 player design from Brad Brooks, Erin McDonald, and Christian Strain that is being crowdfunded through the end of August 2026 in anticipation of an April 2028(!) delivery date. Here's an overview of the game from the publisher: > In the generations since the war with the Dark Sorcerer, the forest of Whisperwood has stood silent, mired in corruption and lifeless. A council of Druids has taken on the task of cleansing the forest, awakening its Guardian Golems and restoring the flora and fauna. The druid who accomplishes the most in this endeavor will ascend to become the Primus of the Council. > _Whisperwood_ is a bag-building game for player druids who harness the power of the elements and the natural world to restore a forest. Each round, players simultaneously summon magical energy in the form of tokens and plan the incantations they will perform. The players then perform their incantations in turn order, restoring air, water, and earth; partnering with wildlife; inscribing runes; and awakening the Guardian Golems to perform magical tasks. The land is strewn with corruption and the druids must absorb and purify this corruption to heal the forest — but take on too much corruption, and your magical abilities will be compromised! Everybody loves giant versions of games, right?! The Hachette Boardgames USA playing room outside the exhibit hall featured an enormous version of Fabrice Puleo's Qomet, the newest title in Gigamic's abstract Q-labeled game line. On a turn, add one of your stars to an empty space on the playing board or move one of your stars already on the board by pushing it along a line to the next space, pushing at most one star onto the next space (or off the board). Whoever first places four of their pieces in a square that's in the same orientation as the game board wins. Philippe Ville's Mighty Shot! is the debut title of French publisher THIS IS A GAME, which seems odd written in ALL CAPS, but that's the way it appears on the publisher's page, so let's go with that. _Mighty Shot!_ was crowdfunded in June 2025, and in this two- or four-player game you control a champion and various minions and must knock out the opposing champion to win. You have champion cards and counter cards at your disposal, along with powers specific to your champion, but the main draw of the draw appears to be a dexterity element in which, curling style, you flick discs down a board, with different targets requiring you to land in red, black, or white zones. Ah, yes, here's ye old T-shirt stand that features tons of geek callouts that people use to identify one another as geeks while out in the wild. I like looking at these shirts, but I also dislike wearing shirts with stuff on them, so I'd never buy one. But wait, what's that sign say on the wall? "This business for sale — inquire at register"?! I've never had a desire to own a T-shirt business, but I sure considered it for a few minutes as that would be the absolute strangest thing to bring home from a convention. Boy, would my wife have been surprised! ****Like this kind of convention coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Give us your deets!

Through 27 August 2026, crowdfunding site BackerKit is running "GameFiesta!", a special campaign that focuses on games developed in South America, Central America, and Spain (along with one game from Thailand for unexplained reasons), so I thought I'd highlight a few of these titles for folks who live outside of those regions. ## Dungeon Crawlers One fun way to create dad jokes — I mean, game ideas — is to treat metaphorical terms literally, thus Juan Esteban López Lozano's Dungeon Crawlers puts 2-5 players not in the position of adventurers wandering through a dungeon, but instead of snakes wandering — I mean, crawling — through a dungeon. (BackerKit link) _Dungeon Crawlers_ , which comes from Colombian publisher Bogotá Board Game, is a take on the Snake video game genre in which each player controls a snake that continually grows as it moves, with you trying not to run into yourself or others. In this game, you: You have a hand of four translucent snake cards, and when growing you want to pass over treasures to pick them up (by wriggling underneath them, I suppose). Cards sometimes add new treasures to the board, along with tokens that provide special effects, and if you manage to squeeze your head into an exit, you claim the treasures you hold, which are worth 1 or 2 points, then you place your tail in a new entryway to start crawling again. Crash into any snake or the wall, and you lose three cards from the head-end of your snake. Whoever first scores their 10th point wins. ## The Path of the Priest Gabriel Faure's The Path of the Priest is a solitaire game from Mexican publisher Jalapeño Lab in which you want to move your apprentice next to the deity in order to complete your training. (BackerKit link) To start, shuffle the eight true masters and six false masters, then lay them out in a row, with the apprentice at the left end and the deity on the right. On a turn, choose a true master in the line, then use one of its two powers, after which you must resolve the powers of all of the false masters. These powers will move cards, swap cards, remove cards, place a card in a specific position, and so on. If you can't choose a true master because they've all been removed, or the apprentice moves past the deity, you lose. To win, at the end of your turn, the apprentice must be to the immediate left of the deity. Art by (from left) Ivan Escalante, Kao Grimaldo, and María Luz Cantisani Rovasio ## Sunflowers Argentinian publisher Colorido Juegos released Girasoles ("Sunflowers") in 2025, and now it's bringing out this 2-4 player tile-laying game in English. (BackerKit link) Each player has a 6x6 game board, and each turn you'll place a tile of a single square or two connected squares onto your board. As you create and add to color groups, you'll move ahead on the sunflower path based on their presence in those groups, and whoever is farthest on this path at the end of the first three rounds chooses one of two new objective cards. These three objectives will join three fixed objectives, and you'll all six of these objectives at game's end, along with bees, ladybugs, and leaves, each of which has its own scoring criteria. ## Monster Nursery Mexican publisher NAAYAAN debuted in 2025 with Reyes de la Rosca ("Kings of the Rosca"), a set-collection card game in which you're all eating Three Kings Bread on Epiphany and trying to end up with the fewest baby Jesus cards. NAAYAAN's second title is Monster Nursery, a 2-6 player dexterity game from Manuel Garza Lopez that will have you balancing little sleeping monsters on various body parts where they find it most comfortable to nap (your head, your shoulder, the back of your hand, etc.), while also trying to take care of the monsters' needs by touching various objects in the playpen without dropping (and waking) those who sleep. (BackerKit link) Art by (from left) Ivan Escalante and Denilson Silva ## Quartz: The Card Game Brazilian publisher Grok Games released Sérgio Halaban's Quartz: The Card Game in Portuguese in 2023, and now the game is being released in English and Spanish. (BackerKit link) In this press-your-luck game, 2-4 players go digging for gems in a mine, trying to end up with the most valuable collection. On a turn either protect all gems of one type in your collection (keeping them safe from theft) or dig for gems, revealing cards one by one from the deck until you stop and take what's been revealed or have a cave in after revealing cards with a cave-in symbol in the same location. Players start with five assistant cards in hand and can gain more during play. With these cards, players can force an opponent's turn to end immediately, take gems from the mine during an opponent's turn, steal gems from a collection, and more, with defense cards being able to nullify attacks or bounce them back on the original player. At game's end, tally the value of your gems, scoring additional points for a set of four gems of the same type. ## Pintó Argentinian publishers Pulga Escapista and Araña Curiosa describe Fernando Marecos' 4-8 player game Pintó in terms that will be immediately clear to many gamers: Think Dixit, but with images that you draw. (BackerKit link) More specifically, in each of three rounds a category is revealed, then each player chooses to draw something that fits in that category, writing the thing to be guessed on the back of their drawing. Everyone secretly guesses what everyone else drew, then you reveal the answers: * If no one guesses what you drew, you lose -1 point. * If everyone guesses what you drew, everyone else scores 1 point. * If only some of the players guess what you drew, then you and each of those correct guessers score 1 point for each person who guessed _incorrectly_. I think the scoring method is what will make this an ideal play experience as you want to draw as incoherently as possible so that ideally only one person identifies your drawing — which should make the guesses wilder than you might otherwise expect. Everyone is drawing something of their choice from the same category though, so it seems like a "fair" system in that you do have some boundaries on what the object could be. _[Disclosure: I have backed this title, which is less than 30% fulfilled at this point, so I might have to end up waiting for a licensing partner to pick this up.]_ Art by (from left) Panchopepe and Julián Tunni ## Bariloche The 2-4 player game Bariloche comes from designer Martín Oddino, developer Julián Vecchione, and artist Julián Tunni — an Argentinian design team known as Del Sur — with Mexican publisher Detestable Games producing this item. (BackerKit link) The game has you build a box of chocolates bit by bit by tearing apart bonbon sheets and assembling the treats in a bizarrely-shaped container. To start, you lay out one of the two scoring boards, then give each player a 7x10 paper sheet depicting various treats, with some of the spaces being empty. On a turn, a player chooses the shape that all players must tear from their sheet — 1x1, 1x2, 2x2, or 2x3 — then you each add that shape to your "box" and pass your sheet clockwise. If you tear the sheet into multiple parts, you keep the smallest piece as negative points. If a player cannot tear out the proper shape or only one type of shape remains to be chosen (as a limited number of each are available), the game ends, then you tally scores. Image: Julián Vecchione ****Like this kind of coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Learn more...

Artist Kwanchai Moriya has a standout style that's popped up on two recently announced games, so let's talk about them. ## The Hobbit: Riddles in the Dark In May 2026, in its new role as "exclusive provider of category management services to Middle-earth", asmodee announced several partner publishers for Middle-earth licenses, with one of those being Grand Gamers Guild. Now in mid-August 2026, GGG has revealed that by the end of 2026 it will debut **_The Hobbit: Riddles in the Dark_** , a new title in its 18Escape game line of tiny, narrative-driven puzzle adventure games that consist of only 18 cards. Art by Kwanchai Moriya _The Hobbit: Riddles in the Dark_ is by designer Jonathan Chaffer, who has created most of the Holiday Hijinks titles in GGG's _18Escape_ line, and in the publisher's words, it "re-imagines the iconic riddle contest between Bilbo Baggins and Gollum as an escape room-style experience". _The Hobbit: Riddles in the Dark_ is for one or more players, plays in an hour, and will debut at PAXU in early December 2026, with a retail release to follow. ## Rebels Against Rebellion Rebels Against Rebellion is a 1-2 player game from David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, who are best known together for the Undaunted line from Osprey Games. Art and graphic design by Kwanchai Moriya and Jina Rueter This game is being crowdfunded by Flying Pig Games, with 24 hours remaining on the campaign at the time of this post's publication, with the game reaching backers in December 2026 or early 2027. Flying Pig's description of gameplay in _Rebels Against Rebellion_ is minimal: "The cards in your deck represent the units and locations under your control. Each turn you will play cards to perform actions on the board and to add, remove, and improve the cards in your deck." What's really fascinating is the history behind this game design. From Flying Pig: > Tennessee's role in the American Civil War and the Secession Crisis was marked by significant internal divisions between its eastern, middle, and western regions. In early 1861, when South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union, Tennessee's legislature resisted the idea. However, following the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Tennessee was forced to readdress its position. On June 8, 1861, a state referendum resulted in a decisive vote to secede. Sample cards from __Rebels Against Rebellion__ > Despite this formal decision, Tennessee remained divided. In the eastern part of the state, loyalist sentiment was strong. East Tennessee had overwhelmingly voted against secession in the 1861 referendum, while West and Middle Tennessee overwhelmingly supported secession. > As tensions escalated, residents of East Tennessee found themselves forced to take sides, often leading to violent confrontations. Loyalist- and secessionist-aligned partisans and outlaws engaged in raids on farms, stealing livestock, and destroying property. The establishment of local militia groups known as the home guard sought to defend loyalists. These small militias acted in secret, launching surprise attacks on Confederate soldiers and secessionist raiders, but they also faced constant threats from the Confederate army and local secessionist groups. Sample cards from __Rebels Against Rebellion__ > Of the thirty-one counties in East Tennessee, none voted against succession by a higher margin than Scott County. With a vote of 521 to 19 in favor of rejecting secession, the county's stance was clear. Local residents so opposed the Confederacy that later in 1861, the county court approved a protest resolution declaring the county's secession from the State of Tennessee and the creation of a "Free and Independent State of Scott". > This is the story of the Free and Independent State of Scott during the Civil War. ****Like this kind of coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

In February 2026, I posted an overview of a few games coming from French publisher IELLO. A couple of those titles — King of Tokyo: Duel – Tokyo Bay and King of Tokyo: Godzilla — are new entries in existing game lines, so you'll generally know what to expect when playing them, i.e., monsters smash...but in new ways with new monsters! Two other titles — Fragments: Solara and Fragments: Fungataï — present players with a novel experience, so I thought I'd give a teaser of what to expect should you try them. These games both come from Yohan Servais, who has previously designed Unlock! challenges and IELLO's Guilty game line. If you're familiar with those titles, you'll have some idea of what to expect when playing _Fragments_ : You're placed in an unusual situation and must use tools at your disposal to...do something. As I wrote earlier, _Fragments_ is akin to an escape room-style, point-and-click adventure — except that instead of clicking, you'll "unlock" puzzle pieces from cardboard "sleeves" as you make your way through the story, then use these pieces to construct a scene or take actions, learning new information that will further the story and introduce new puzzle elements. Each _Fragments_ title includes a tutorial to teach you the game system. The tutorial's adventure book presents you with a situation, then instructs you to "open" an indicated piece. You'll find that piece's icon on a cardboard tab sticking out of a sleeve, then pull out just that one sleeve from the "wallet" and punch out the piece. The three puzzle pieces in the __Fragments__ tutorial A piece might have an icon on it that sends you to a new page in the adventure book, with the book then telling you something about what you're looking at — or the piece might feature a lightning bolt next to an icon, which means you should pull out another piece. How do those pieces fit together? The piece might have a hooked arrow on it indicating that you can flip it to the reverse side whenever you choose to do so. When should you do that? These choices are up to you to determine by using the imagery on the pieces, along with elements from the story. _Fragments: Solara_ is a self-contained adventure that plays in 90-120 minutes, whereas _Fragments: Fungatai_ is a four-adventure campaign that will collectively take 6-7 hours to finish. _Fragments: Fungatai_ will debut at SPIEL Essen 26 in French and English editions from IELLO and a German edition from Pegasus Spiele, with _Solara_ appearing prior to that. If you want to know nothing else about these titles, skip everything else that follows, but IELLO gave me a mock-up of the first part of _Fragments: Fungataï_ at Spielwarenmesse 2026, so I'll present a few gameplay elements below, keeping spoilers to a minimum in this first chapter of the story that takes an estimated 40 minutes to resolve. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • To start, here are the components included in chapter 1 of _Fragments: Fungataï_ : All components shown in this image and below are mock-ups produced for promotional purposes; actual components might differ. The rules manual details how to interpret icons included in the adventure book and on the puzzle pieces. At the bottom of this post, I'll include a summary of those icons from the back of the solution guide so that you can first see how intuitive you find these icons. To get started, the rules manual tells you to read the first pages of the adventure book: Again, this is a mock-up component, so please ignore the character's name change...aClick on any image (other than the one at the top of the page) to enlarge it. You now have a few goals — pick mushrooms, and collect hotpepper and fish — as well as your first "Take [icon]" command, so let's pull that sleeve from its wallet: You should punch out puzzle tiles as soon as you pull a sleeve from a wallet...but you might be distracted by symbols on the tiles, such as the "flip over" arrow icon and another "Take [symbol]" icon. Some puzzle pieces have jigsaw-like connectors as with the two on the left above. If the connectors fit together — and the edges of the tiles line up(!) — then go ahead and piece them together. The cutting tool on the right has a "flip over" arrow command, but the yellow arrow leading to the arrow means you must first connect this tile to another before flipping it over. The same is true for the "Take [mushroom]" and "Take [bamboo]" icons. You can't pull those sleeves from the wallet until you "use" the cutting tool correctly. (Of course, you _could_ pull all of the sleeves out immediately and punch every piece. You could flip over all of the tiles whenever you want, but the story is crafted in a way that gives you enough to work with, without being overwhelmed.) If pieces are jigsawed together and you use the "flip over" command, then all of those pieces flip together, as with the two pieces above. Those pieces revealed three things: * A flip-over arrow, so you can go to the other scene and back here as you wish. * A "Take [icon]" command, so that sleeve is now on the table. * A lightning bolt next to an adventure book symbol, so let's open the book once again. If you're going to find ingredients for soup — a common trope in adventure games — then you need to head outside, and the adventure book is taking us there by having us take out a new sleeve, then assemble those tiles into a village before continuing, and those tiles include another adventure book symbol, so let's flip to the "lips" page: The "lips" has us talking with someone on shore, who tells us that they're recovered your brother's necklace...which means it's time to take out another sleeve. So much to work with here! In addition to the jigsaw-style connectors, the pieces feature zigzag "connectors". You can try to fit pieces together to see whether they go, and the construction of the pieces will let you know whether tiles go together: Nope!Double nope! What's going on? What should we be doing? Maybe you need to revisit the story and see what you've been tasked with, such as picking mushrooms. Do you see mushrooms anywhere? If so, how would you collect them? You might also review all that you've seen so far and realize you've overlooked something: Yes, as in various _Unlock!_ titles, you might have to look more closely at tiles than you originally thought. In this case, the village had a "Take [icon]" command I had overlooked. Below this icon is a command I haven't yet explained that looks like a circle around a fishing pole on top of a grid of squares next to a "flip over" arrow. Here's how you read this command: You need to see a fishing pole symbol on a group of tiles that have been connected. Once you see this symbol, you can flip over this tile — and since this tile is connected only with a zigzag connection, not a jigsaw one, you don't flip over all four tiles in the village, only this single tile. So you need to find or craft a fishing pole, which makes sense as your father told you to collect fish, so how are you going to get (or make) a pole? As for the new tile we revealed, it features a lightning bolt and an adventure book icon, so we should head there before worrying about other things: Ah, yes, the "Should you steal?" dilemma often presented in adventure games. Will you steal? Well, the "Take [icon]" command doesn't have a question mark on it. You're supposed to "Take [icon]", so grab that cardboard sleeve and see what comes of it. Congratulations, you're now a thief who robbed someone who's blind. I'll leave off here in the playthrough of chapter 1, with only a handful of pieces punched out and much of the adventure book still untouched. You might have noticed in all of the above that you don't have choices for what to do. _Fragments_ isn't a game in the sense of you having options, but rather a game in the sense of _Myst_ and other point-and-click designs. Did you spot something or figure out how to assemble a tool or discover a new location? If so, then you've progressed. Keep going. Eventually you'll figure out everything and "win", although losing was never an option unless you just stopped altogether. In my playthrough of chapter 1 — which I've done twice, missing the same thing (not mentioned above) each time — nothing is destroyed. You set aside the puzzle piece sleeves and can re-assemble everything, so once you're finished, you can sell or give away _Fragments_ to someone else. Maybe this situation changes in later chapters, but I haven't seen those. To close, here's a summary of commands from the back of the solution guide: The commands on the lower right are what has messed me up. You need to see (or not see!) a specific icon, possibly on its own and possibly on a group of connected pieces. Additionally, you want to keep the story in mind. What are your assigned tasks, both immediate and more long term? Why are you doing something? What would be the next step? I've played almost no computer games along these lines, so my brain doesn't naturally think in these terms. I want to start piecing together everything, brute-forcing a solution from what's on hand, but if I stepped back and considered my assigned tasks, I'd probably be able to figure out what to do more quickly. Probably. Mock-up of the __Fragments: Fungataï__ box, which has four pull-out "drawers", each with the components of a single chapter ****Want more game previews like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

I surveyed readers in March 2026 to asked what type of material they'd like to see on this site, and now I'm running a related survey that asks about your game preferences and how you learn about and acquire new games. Once I have enough responses — as in, submissions slow down to the point I think results won't change — I'll post an overview of the results. Individual responses won’t be shared without your permission. At the end of the survey, you can opt in to being quoted in a future post, and you can choose whether to be quoted by name or anonymously. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Designer Alan R. Moon is best known today for the game Ticket to Ride, but prior to that game's debut in 2004 he had already released other "network" games, that is, games in which points on a map are connected by pre-determined paths and players need to either build or travel on those paths. Those games include Airlines in 1990, Santa Fe in 1992, Elfenroads in 1992, Elfenland (a re-working of the previous game that won the Spiel des Jahres) in 1998, and Union Pacific in 1999. _Union Pacific_ was a streamlining of _Airlines_ , with players building interlocking networks of railroad track across the United States while trying to earn dividend payouts that go to whoever owns the most or secondmost of a company's shares when a dividend occurs. (If you've played Sid Sackson's Acquire, you can spot elements of that design in _Union Pacific_ and the earlier _Airlines_.) _Union Pacific_ was nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in 1999, losing out to Tikal, but despite that critical success, the game disappeared from the market after printings in 1999 in German by the originating publisher AMIGO (which had previously released _Elfenland_), in Dutch by 999 Games, and in English by Rio Grande Games. Nearly thirty years later, a new edition of _Union Pacific_ will hit the market courtesy of a crowdfunding campaign run by Sean Brown of Mr. B Games, a brand purchased in 2023 by Webbed Sphere, which also owns Mayfair Games. Promotional image of the new edition of __Union Pacific__(art by David A. Orem__)__ Brown describes this new edition of _Union Pacific_ as a "kitchen sink" edition: "This is Alan's vision of everything he's ever wanted to do for the game all at once, all in one box, one last time." This edition will be a single printing, with all of the copies serial numbered to 1000, with the only stretch goal for the crowdfunding campaign being the addition of numbered copies up to 2,000 (3,000, etc.) if demand warrants. "_Union Pacific_ was the first train game I really fell in love with that blended Euro mechanics", says Brown. "This oddly was a grail game for me when I started in the industry back in 2005, and it's incredibly difficult to track down to this day." (I'll note that while the Rio Grande edition of the game is scarce, secondhand Dutch and German copies seem relatively easy to acquire.) Brown says that Moon had approached him about developing an all-in edition years ago. "Alan and I have been working on this together as a project for awhile now", he says. "We are working on the game as long as needed until it's crowdfunding ready. Without a deadline, we can go when we are ready or have enough interest, and in the meantime we can continue to pile up cool components in the sink visually and graphically until the vision is ready to print." As for what's changed in this edition, Brown says that the initial seeding of dividend cards in the deck has changed, a variant many players have adopted as the only one to play. More substantially, the game will feature a re-balanced map of the United States on one side of the game board, with a UK map on the reverse side. Says Brown, "Alan has had a GDR expansion — a new railroad with trains and cards — ready for years, but it never saw the light of day, nor did the 'Black Market' for the UK map." Those modular expansions have been placed on their own game board, and they can now be used with either map. "We have literally gone over everything in the original game", says Brown, "re-editing the rules and taking the time to obsess over deluxified components and trains." One element you might notice in the image of the new edition is the difference in typeface size of the designer's name and the game's name. Years ago, while talking with Alan, he brought up how the book industry champions authors and makes them a selling point. Look at new releases from Stephen King and Tom Clancy, he told me, and you'll see that their names take up the top third of the book cover. Why isn't it the same for game designers? I know that some people argue that a game's designer isn't a selling point for most players, but Moon's counterargument is that publishers don't do enough to champion the creators of the games they sell, so many players don't associate a creator with a particular game — but by promoting a designer, a publisher would encourage a long-term relationship with them, and as gamers become more cognizant of that creator, they would look for games from them, thereby encouraging more sales for that publisher. AEG, for example, should be blasting John D. Clair's name on each new release given how successful and long-lasting that relationship has been. By promoting Clair, AEG will help itself through that marketing. For this new edition of _Union Pacific_ , Moon has been able to carry out this vision. ****Like this kind of coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

Another day, another sampling of my travels through the Indiana Convention Center during Gen Con 2026: The deluxe edition of Hanami at Gen Con 2026 (click on any image to enlarge it) At Gen Con 2025, U.S. publisher Keymaster Games was demoing Reiner Knizia's Hanami — a new edition of his 1998 game Samurai — to coincide with an ongoing crowdfunding campaign, and at Gen Con 2026 Keymaster was showing off the finished product, with the version depicted above being the deluxe edition with clacky wooden tiles that sells for nearly twice as much as the cardboard-filled standard edition. If you're not familiar with the game, players take turns placing one of the five tiles behind their screen onto an empty space, then drawing a new tile. Whenever one of the tokens on the game board is surrounded, whoever has the most strength in that token in their surrounding tiles claims that token. At game's end, you need to have a majority in at least one of the three tokens in order to be eligible for victory. Staying in Japan, we come to Kanō, a design from Pablo Jiménez and Angel Pintero that publisher Matagot sold at Gen Con 2026 ahead of the game's retail release. Summing up, that's a game set in Japan from Spanish designers and a French publisher sold in the U.S. _Kanō_ is a take-and-make design in which each turn you manipulate one or more of the paint pots in the shared 4x4 grid, then take pots of the same color in a line, then "drop" them on your personal board _Tetris_ -style, with the pots falling to the lowest rows possible. You want to arrange pots in patterns (which are shown on the left of the image above in the middle) to transform them into paintings, which are worth points. Each player has secret masterworks they can create and score, but if you have more than four pots open, some of them dry up. In May 2026, Plaid Hat Games teased The Monolith, a 3-4 player game from Phil Gross that the publisher describes as "a game of war unending, a test of smart maneuvering, vicious combat, and unstoppable powers with which to upgrade shamans — and just as important is boasting of the wanton slaughter you have committed for the glory of the laughing stone!" During Gen Con 2026, Plaid Hat showed off the game components, including the wee plastic hearts you can collect. The publisher plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign on 18 August 2026, with a 1-2 player expansion being available, along with the usual crowdfunding hoo-ha. As was probably made clear in my February 2026 profile of designer Raf Peeters, I'm a fan of the logic puzzles from Smart Toys and Games, so it was nice to see this booth quite busy with customers young and old upon each pass through the exhibitor hall — a booth that seems noticeably larger than its 2025 booth, although I might be misremembering it. Speaking of logic puzzles, in February 2026 I wrote up Rush Hour Duel after seeing it at Toy Fair NY 2026, but **_World's Smallest Rush Hour_** was new to me when I passed by the Ravensburger booth. When I looked for more info on this 2.5"x2.5" version of _Rush Hour_ on the Ravensburger website, I didn't find it there. Turns out that Ravensburger, which owns the ThinkFun brand, is not the manufacturer of this item. Taht would be Super Impulse USA, which has an entire line of licensed "World's Smallest" products, including **_World's Smallest Catan_** , **_World's Smallest Kerplunk_** , **_World's Smallest Pop It_** (only ten bubbles!), and **_World's Smallest Throw Throw Burrito_** , the components of which you'd probably lose under the couch immediately. Pegasus Spiele North America had a fantastic solution for game presentation in its booth, with plastic shields on top of laid-out game components. Employees could easily demonstrate a game, identifying the game components and running interested parties through the essence of gameplay, while being able to remove the shield should someone want to look at bits more closely, see the rules, touch stuff, etc. I recall seeing game displays like this in the retail store of Japanese publisher Sugorokuya back in 2015 and am surprised that I haven't seen other publishers use this same approach earlier. Maybe I've just not run across them, but this presentation seems ideal for presenting the game cleanly amidst a crowd of thousands. ****Like this kind of coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

Asmodee USA has a new promo item for Alan R. Moon's Ticket to Ride coming to stores in its Hobby Next network — Ticket to Ride: Legendary Characters. This pack consists of five character cards and a rule card, with players drafting one character in counter-clockwise order starting with whoever goes last. The characters and their powers are: * Irene Adler — before calculating the final score, discard up to two incomplete tickets, which now won't cost you points. * Phileas Fogg — once per game, claim a route that's already been claimed by another player, otherwise following the normal rules for claiming route. * Arsène Lupin — once per game, treat a route you're claiming as if it's a gray route, thereby allowing you to play a set of cards in the color of your choice. * Captain Nemo — once per game, play up to seven cards on a single turn to claim one or more routes in a contiguous path, otherwise following normal route-claiming rules. * Mina Harker — once per turn, when claiming a route, you can treat a pair of cards of the same color as a locomotive. To get this mini-expansion, you need to purchase _Ticket to Ride_ or Ticket to Ride: Europe at a participating Hobby Next store, although that might not be true for all participating stores as the item's page on the Hobby Next site says that in some cases "players may be invited to participate in a challenge organized on social media". Details will vary depending on the store. (My understanding is that participating stores receive a quantity of promos based on their initial order of the related game, with stores able to distribute these items in a manner they see fit as long as they don't sell the promos.) I can understand the desire to acquire this expansion, as well as the frustration that might come with the thought that you'd need to buy _another_ copy of the game to get it or that you have no Hobby Next store in your vicinity. In those cases, well, the abilities of the characters are listed above. To expand on what I wrote in late July 2026 when announcing another hard-to-get promo item, companies do all this promo stuff to earn more money. I'm sure you know that. You might think, "I needed to buy Jessica a birthday gift anyway and she loves _Ticket to Ride_ , so I'll get her a copy of the game and keep the promo as a treat for myself." If so, the marketing forces at asmodee have done their job — but try to avoid the feeling that your game is not complete if you can't get your hands on this promo. If you never knew _Legendary Characters_ existed, _Ticket to Ride_ would still feel complete, yes? I mean, the game has been on the market for more than two decades and has been complete all that time without these five cards, so treat this item as a neat bonus if you can get your hands on it and otherwise ignore it...or print a homemade version. You can even create new characters yourself to expand on this idea. How about an Andrew Carnegie card that allows you to discard up to two trains or take up to two extra trains from the reserve once per game? ****Like this kind of coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

Scott Almes' two-player game Wine & Cheese was one of the first titles I wrote about on Board Game Beat, but German publisher Deep Print Games has another half-dozen titles on its 2026 schedule. ## Bloom Kingdom Christian Kudahl has co-designed multiple "cards with powers" games, such as The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville with Erik Andersson Sundén, the Combo Creatures line with Michael Løhde Andersen, and the Mindbug line with Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield, and Marvin Hegen, and now he's partnered with Thomas Weber for Bloom Kingdom, which debuted in early July 2026. Bloom Kingdom consists of one hundred cards, with ten copies each of ten characters, each of which has a scoring condition and half of which have a "comes into play effect". Each turn, each player simultaneously reveals a card from their hand and adds it to the display, carrying out its effect, if needed. Once each player has only two cards in hand, you score those cards: the queen gives 3 points per queen/king pair on display, the unicorn is worth 3 points per unicorn on display if no other card type appears more frequently, the jester is worth 4 points per king on display if someone else tried to score a king, and so on. All revealed cards remain on display as you play two more rounds, adding more cards to the display and thus increasing the point potential of each round. ## Bounce It! Christoph Cantzler's Bounce It! is an all-ages title that you can teach in seconds: Bounce the ball into the hole to score points. You can lock in those points, or go again, multiplying your points with each success. Miss, though, and the next player can grab the points you dropped if they find the net. Whoever reaches 42 points first wins. _Bounce It!_ lands on the German market on 30 August 2026. ## Cubaneo Cubaneo is a new edition of Michael Rieneck and Stefan Stadler's Cuba, which first appeared in 2007 from German publisher eggertspiele. (Peter Eggert was one of the founding members of Deep Print Games in 2020 and is currently the company's CCO.) This edition includes the El Presidente expansion from 2009 and will hit retail outlets on 30 October 2026 after debuting during SPIEL Essen 26. _Cubaneo_ is set prior to the Cuba Revolution that took place in the 1950s, with players buying, selling, and shipping rum and cigars; constructing buildings that occupy space previously used for production; and trying to control which two bills become laws of the four revealed at the start of each round. Ideally you want to position yourself to take advantage of those bills, such as paying duties and taxes that earn you points for being a good citizen, but you also need to secure the votes in parliament to make those bills law. ## Rooms & Roomies Another 30 October 2026 release is Rooms & Roomies, the debut design of Juri Alexander. In this 1-5 player game, you spend each day going to the furniture store to acquire new items for your apartment, but you can also pick up a new roomie as well at the café. Who knew it was so easy to pack your place with new pals?! You need to fit all of the purchased items on your truck in order to transport them home, and after four days of reckless spending, you'll see who has best satisfied the desires of their new roomies and has therefore created the happiest home. ## Familiar Feat Friedemann Friese designs far more games than he can publish on his own through his 2F-Spiele company, so he's been pitching games to other publishers, with Deep Print picking up the solitaire game Familiar Feat. Given how much I love his 2017 solitaire game Finished!__ — four hundred plays on the app version! — I'll be looking forward to more details, whether during its debut at SPIEL Essen 26 or when the game reaches retail outlets on 29 November 2026. For now, here's an overview of the game from the publisher: > The fairytale castle has been overrun by monsters! Grab your familiars, cuddle up with more creatures along the way to recruit them, and liberate the castle with your mighty party! But don't take too long; only by reaching the castle quickly can you ensure you don't lose too many familiars along the way because you'll need every helping hand and paw! > This unusual deck-building game for one person comes with continuously increasing difficulty levels – and a large dose of cuteness! > Familiar Feat takes up little table space and is therefore perfect for train journeys or passing the time while waiting. ## Deckers: Duplicity Deckers: Duplicity is an expansion for Richard Wilkins' card game Deckers, which debuted in 2025 and which was a revised version of his 2018 game Renegade. (You can read Wilkins' story of the game's creation in this designer diary.) Given that this is an expansion, the publisher's description is somewhat puzzling: > In Duplicity, nothing on the network is as it first appears. A new SMC is constantly shifting between two states, demanding ever-changing tactics. To counter this threat, the new, two-tone Deckers can flip their profile cards to gain a different ability. Dive right into the action with the two new missions and combine the new content with the base game to challenge old foes in fresh ways. If you're already familiar with _Deckers_ , you can check out the three Duplicity preview posts on the Deep Print Games website for more details. ****Like this kind of coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

Follow along on a re-enactment of my wonderings through the Indiana Convention Center to see some of what was on display during Gen Con 2026: __Small Batch__ mock-up at Gen Con 2026 (click any image in this post to see it enlarged) U.S. publisher Paverson Games showed a mock-up of Small Batch, a Ben Rosset design it describes as being a distilled version of Distilled, the 2023 game with which designer Dave Beck launched his company. To its detriment, Paverson Games leans hard on the connection between the two games, making it challenging for a newcomer to learn what _Small Batch_ is about and how it plays. Here's how the game is introduced in a company newsletter: > Small Batch**** is a standalone experience designed to **capture the essence of Distilled in a tighter, high-intensity package**. While the visual style and core theme will feel immediately familiar to fans of the original, Small Batch introduces fresh, crunchy mechanics that streamline the distillation process, making it the perfect entry point for new distillers yet also an exciting challenge for our returning Distilled veterans. Okay, but aside from a nod to the "distillation process", what is the game like? Another paragraph: > **Familiar Core Gameplay:** Small Batch utilizes the much loved and highly thematic heads & tails mechanic from Distilled. Collect ingredients and distill different recipes from around the world. Invest in powerful upgrades, and add special bottles and barrels to improve your spirits. And that "heads & tails" mechanism is what now? For spinoff games, I suggest publishers intro the new release with a paragraph or two that stands on its own before referencing a connection to an earlier game. You don't want someone to feel like they need to learn about another game before learning about the one in front of them. Ideally you're expanding the audience for the product line, so you're reaching new people rather than selling only to those already familiar with the earlier releases. Mock-up of __Old Ones: Origins__ at Gen Con 2026 For comparison with the title above, we can look at Chaosium Games' presentation of Samuel W. Bailey's Old Ones: Origins — or _Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones – Origins_ to use the publisher's name, although you probably wouldn't get this from looking at the box. Here's how Chaosium intros this game: > _Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones Origins_ takes players into the world of the Cthulhu Mythos, where ancient powers rise and rival factions fight for dominance in a battle that began long before humanity existed. Boom! There's your thesis sentence, and everything that follows will build on that first impression...but unfortunately there's nothing more than that for now, other than Chaosium describing this 2028 release as "an enhanced re-implementation of Forbidden Stars", a 2015 Fantasy Flight Games release that was co-designed by Bailey, James Kniffen, and Corey Konieczka. Publisher Ghost Galaxy showed off its fancy-shmancy "ultimate collector's edition" of Reiner Knizia's two-player game The Lord of the Rings: Confrontation, which collected US$1.3 million in backing during a crowdfunding campaign, with this table (minus leg and based) selling for US$2,200. As you can see, the table is the height of a small child — a child that would likely not be allowed anywhere near this game once it's set up at home. Note that the game table cover is leaning against the leg of the table. (I initially saw this table as having a funky zigzag support, which seemed like an incredibly unwieldy design. Nope, just looking too quickly while zipping around the ICC.) Erik and Acke Ambring's game Stuglandet debuted from Swedish publisher Ninja Print in 2023, with HABA now having licensed the game for release in other countries. "Stuglandet" is Swedish for "country cottage", and in the game you will be rolling your country cottages like dice to try to place them on the game tiles. You roll three cabins, then re-roll all cabins up to two more times, then carry out the results: If a player fills a tile with their cabins, that tile is locked, and when any player has placed their final cabin the game ends. You score 1 point for each cabin placed, with bonus points for being next to a lake or on the city tile. You also want to have more cabins on a tile than others to score 2 bonus points and have the longest chain of connect cabins for 6 bonus points...even if you then have to plop a cabin next to a landfill and absorb that penalty. The bonus will be worth the smell! Inside the playpen I was amused to see this relatively large space fenced off in the Renegade Game Studios exhibitor area. So much empty space occupied by just a few standing tables! Clearly, this space was fenced (and roped) off for events that would attract a huge crowd, but at this moment it just looked like a flex: We have so much floor space that we give game testers the room to dance between turns. Another somewhat spacious exhibit was this demo space for The Why Files Declassified, a conspiracy card game from Studio Far Horizons and lead designer Jacob Way that's based on the YouTube series The Why Files and that will be crowdfunded in September 2026. In this game, 2-6 investigators gather evidence, outmaneuver rivals, and race to go public with the truth. I saw this empty storefront while riding to the Indianapolis International Airport, a storefront for a closed Mexican restaurant called "nada", the letters now removed to leave behind a more ghostly "nada" than had existed — a restaurant called "Nothing" that was now more nothing than it had ever been before. Beautiful... ****Like this kind of coverage?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!

Designer Marceline Leiman graduated from New York University with a MFA (master of fine arts degree) in Game Design, and her experience there has served her well in the intervening years. "We were turning around projects in a week", she tells me. "They'd say 'Make a co-operative word party game", and we would turn in a project fully designed, playtested, and fabricated in a week's time." That environment did two things: First, she learned to work quickly and fail fast, while trying to make interesting things happen. "I don't know which particular game will be a hit", she says, so she wants to keep moving and not fixate on one design. Numerous designers I've talked with over the past two decades have said the same thing: A publisher might not respond to your pitch for months — and the path to publication after signing a contract might take years — so dive into new projects while waiting for publisher feedback. Second, she gained skill in preaching her design work to others. "It's important to get people to listen," she says, "and you want them to latch on to your work." After all, designing games is only a small part of the work you do as a game designer. You need to sell that work to someone who will publish it, write rules so people will play it, work with artists to create the world of the game, and so on. ## Diving In Leiman's first published design, Oceans: Solo, followed her "work quickly and fail fast" formula, but not as she originally intended. Before having any professional game design experience, she had tried to design a solo mode for Oceans, a title from North Star Games. In a newsletter, _Oceans_ co-designer (and North Star owner) Dominic Crapuchettes had invited fans of the game to submit a solitaire version, but Leiman's first efforts, including one that used an AI-style bot to play cards, went nowhere. She left a video editing job to spend less time on screens, took a part-time job at a game store, and dove into rogue-like video games and solo versions of various board games. In a designer diary about _Oceans: Solo_ , she writes: > It was around that time I started to have game design dreams. These are dreams where it's as if my design problems are thought through to their logical conclusions and solved as I sleep. > > This was the first time it ever happened. It was a simple thought: What if I replaced the AI's card plays with a chit-pulling mechanism? After stumbling out of bed and making coffee, I set up Oceans on the table and started moving pieces around. Everything I needed to make the proof of concept was in the deluxe box already: bags, tokens, population boards. The process was like lightning in a bottle. I was able to play a full game there and then. She posted about this design on social media, and Crapuchettes reached out to ask for details. In late 2022, _Oceans: Solo_ was included in a crowdfunding campaign along with an expansion for the game, and it was released in the second half of 2023. ## Starting a New Trek By that time, Leiman was working part-time at Underdog Games as a developer, initially focusing on the second edition of Trekking the World, with that game's co-designer Nick Bentley (who had also co-designed _Oceans_) praising her efforts in a designer diary, pointing out that she had designed both the solo mode in the new edition, as well as its Bucket List expansion. Of Bentley, Leiman says, "We would talk for hours in our off-hours about what makes great games. Those conversations were very fulfilling as we imagined what the future of Underdog would look like." Unfortunately, after President Trump imposed illegal tariffs on goods imported to the United States, many companies responded with cutbacks, including Underdog Games, which let go of both Bentley and Leiman. At the time, Bentley said, "I may have worked my way out of the job" as he had started to focus on developing card games for the company at the end of 2024, and by early 2025, five card games were "mostly ready to go", with three of those games having been designed by Leiman. (The first of these titles, Dino Racer, debuted at Gen Con 2026. Here's an overview of that game.) Post on Leiman's Bluesky account, with faces blurred by WEM ## Going Solo...in a New Way While working at Underdog, Leiman also created other designs, with Daniel Newman's announcement of Indie Games Night Market at PAX Unplugged 2024 inspiring her to create and publish a game of her own: High Tide. Image: Marceline Leiman _High Tide_ is a two-player abstract strategy game in which you take turns moving one of your tiles (or a neutral tile) to a higher adjacent space in the playing area. Whenever a player can't move, the round ends and whoever has the most visible tiles wins. Win three rounds to win the game. Leiman brought twenty handmade copies to sell at Indie Games Night Market and sold out in less than ten minutes. (You can read about her production process and the design of _High Tide_ in this designer diary, and you can discover the IGNM experience from PAXU 2024 in this report from Chris Wray.) Multiple publishers approached Leiman about licensing the design, and she went with Underdog Games, "who I trusted to make the game right, with access to the audience who I think will connect with the game". Underdog's edition of _High Tide_ debuted in September 2025, with U.S. book chain Barnes & Noble featuring the title as its "game of the month" in June 2026. For IGNM at PAXU 2025, Leiman debuted the self-published card game Heavenly Bodies, which Korean publisher Playte has since licensed for release as _**Nebular Colors**_ , and in addition to Underdog launching _Dino Racers_ at Gen Con 2026, Leiman released the self-published card game Shortstack during that show at the first Game Market Indianapolis. ## Becoming Unstable After getting notice from Underdog that her position at the company was ending, Leiman says, "In that period of time when [Nick Bentley and I] sort of had jobs, we made a bunch of games together. From that process, we were happy with how we collaborated and worked alongside each other — and we decided that whatever we'd do next, we should be together." During that time, they were approached with bids from Unstable Games and Dolphin Hat Games, which re-branded as Taco Cat Games in May 2026. "We talked about these brands and how we'd work with them", says Leiman, and in the end she went with Unstable Games and Bentley went with Taco Cat. "I think Nick has been doing a great job with the Taco Cat line." Promotional image for Ordinary Magic Unstable Games launched in 2017 with the take-that card game Unstable Unicorns from company founder Ramy Badie, and it's released many other mainstream-friendly games since then. With Leiman now on staff, Unstable Games is launching a new studio titled "Ordinary Magic", which will debut with three Leiman designs as part of a Q4 2026 crowdfunding campaign. The idea behind Ordinary Magic is that all of the games will exist in a shared world of characters and locations that will be expanded as future titles are released. Magic in this world isn't something unique and explosive, but an everyday part of the characters' lives. "Magic is not used from a position of power or as part of a social hierarchy", says Leiman. "It's just this thing that exists to help you find joy or comfort. Magic in this world is always non-combative." Just as we humans wouldn't be freaked out to see a dog walking down the street in our world, the inhabitants of Ordinary Magic would shrug at a gryphon passing by. One creature you won't find in this world, though, is humans, although the games were inspired by very human experiences: a bit of humor, real-life interactions, "places of nostalgia, places related to my childhood or the American idea of 'growing up', the experiences we have day to day", says Leiman. "Sifting through those themes and interests in our internal conversations, the name 'Ordinary Magic' came up." As for the games in the Ordinary Magic line, Unstable plans to reveal one every two weeks, so to date only the first design has been revealed, with **_The Curious Little Bookshop_** taking place in a cozy neighborhood bookshop where every member of the staff has an opinion about which titles deserve a place on the coveted "staff picks" shelf. As one of the booksellers, you will arrange books that match your hidden preferences on a shared shelf, trying to build lines and groups of books that feature the genre with which you're obsessed. (For a few more details, read this Gamefound update.) Sample titles in __The Curious Little Bookshop__ "These are the largest games I've ever produced", says Leiman. "I'm excited for the world to see them and discover how varied a designer I am." She says that while the first three Ordinary Magic releases differ in terms of who they will appeal to, in terms of difficulty these titles will all straddle the BoardGameGeek audience and the mass audience that's more typical for Unstable Games, landing somewhere between Pandemic and Forbidden Island in terms of complexity. As for what to expect in terms of gameplay, Leiman says she likes to create "passive aggressive" games, designs that aren't about in-your-face conflict, but which do place you in direct competition with others. "When making any game, my personal goal first and foremost is interaction", she says. "I want players to feel like they're playing with each other and organically creating an experience. You shouldn't be expecting 'take that', but worthwhile experiences that meaningfully bring people together." She continues, "Some people have suggested my designs are created by subtraction, by seeing how much complexity and depth you can get out of a smaller set of rules. They're all streamlined in rules, but broad in complexity." Leiman says that working with Unstable Games has been like joining a boosted start-up business: "I have access to their developers, testing environments, graphic designers, artists. Everyone at Unstable does great work behind the scenes, and it's hard to appreciate from a customer's point of view. All of these interesting creative people are working behind the scenes to make the design a reality." The Gamefound crowdfunding campaign isn't necessary for these games to exist given the stability of the publisher. "Its primary purpose is to build awareness of the brand", says Leiman. What's more, this campaign will offer deluxe editions of each design that won't be available via retail outlets. Beyond these titles, Leiman says, "I have a lot of ideas for the brand in the future. My current worry is what I'm releasing two years from now." Aside from Ordinary Magic, Leiman still plans to release self-published "weirder stuff" at indie game markets. "They're close to my heart", she says, and she was delighted to hear from Nick Brachmann that _High Tide_ had inspired him to self-publish Imps in 2025, with that design having since been picked up by Allplay, with the updated version of that design being crowdfunded at the same time as Leiman's Wildberries. (I published overviews of these two titles in June 2026.) She encourages designers to try the self-publication route, adding that "When you have to sell your idea to a normal person who doesn't know what BGG is, it's a humbling experience." Whether on her own or working with the Unstable team, Leiman is excited for the future: "People think you're coming out of nowhere firing on all cylinders, but what seems like rapid success is years of work. I want to run a successful business with me doing game design. The only way to do that is with fire in the heart." Promotional image for __The Curious Little Bookshop__ ****Want to see more profiles like this one?**** Get Board Game Beat’s free posts by email — original reporting, designer interviews, and industry news, with no tracking, no ads, and no spam. Sign up!