by W. Eric Martin

At SPIEL Essen 25, I got to spend a bit of time in the asmodee business area checking out upcoming games from studios within that company.

▪️ I've already written fondly of Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière's Take Time, and in August 2026 Libellud will release a small expansion for the game that contains new elements. The idea isn't only to do "more", but to approach the gameplay dynamic from a different angle.

This expansion will be preceded by a Take Time playmat in March 2026.

▪️ Days of Wonder is working on a title about which I can say nothing...so why say anything at all? Only because of this: I first saw a mock-up of Heat: Pedal to the Metal at SPIEL '19, three years before the game debuted, and this new project has been developed similarly. The studio doesn't release many new titles, but the ones it does release have a long baking time to ensure they are as good as can be.

This new title might debut at SPIEL Essen 26. Depends on whether it will be ready in time...

▪️ Carnuta is a new title from Yohan Goh, Hope S. Hwang, and Gary Kim that Repos Production will debut on February 13, 2026.

The game feels like it fits in the Splendor design vein, with players taking simple actions each turn — draw a card, play a card, take runestones of one type, flip runestones of one type — that compound over time. The game ends once a player has eleven cards in front of themselves, then you tally scores.

Mock-up at SPIEL Essen 25
▪️ All In: Predictions is a 2-5 player game from Phil Walker-Harding and Next Move Games that will debut in March 2026, but before saying anything else, let's check out the cover by Dan Gartman:

Sweeeeet
Here's a short description from the publisher:

All In: Predictions is a competitive game in which you'll be playing cards for effects while looking at some, but not all, of the cards in a potential poker hand and trying to predict how the hand will rank.

Mock-up at SPIEL Essen 25
▪️ Spooky Tower will be a May 2026 release from Jonathan Favre-Godal and Corentin Lebrat in which 2-4 players walk down a metaphorical street taking pictures of houses in order to find ghosts. To do this, you'll roll dice in the tower and take cards from the display, with some cards in a number value showing what can be found in that pile. Which of those cards will you draw? That's the spooky part, I guess.

Your goal: Collect five ghosts, or reconstruct the clock face.


▪️ I introduced Johannes Goupy and Yoann Levet's Dewan in a July 2025 post, but now having played it once, I can provide an overview of gameplay.

Each player represents a tribe trying to claim area in a shared terrain, specifically area on story cards that you draft over the course of play. On a turn, you either draft two adjacent terrain cards from a six-card river or play cards to place your next camp on the board.

To place a camp, you must discard a card that matches the terrain of your camp from which you're starting — and initially you have only one camp on the board — then a card for each terrain you pass through until you reach your final destination. (You can cross any number of water spaces for a single card, but otherwise you discard one card for each hex you cross.)


Each camp you place carries an associated action, either drafting another story card or placing a card from your hand under your camp board. Each story card shows a combination of terrain and resources. When you have a camp on a terrain area, you possess both that terrain type and the resource on its border, if any. (Placing a second camp in that same area or adjacent to that same resource doesn't give you another terrain or resource. You must spread out!)

When you have enough terrain and resources to match the story demands, you slide that story card up on your player board and take the reward underneath. By placing a card under your camp board, you gain the terrain (and resource, if any) on that card to satisfy story cards.

Some terrain areas contain berries that you pick up if you're the first or second camp in that area, thereby giving you yet another incentive to build in space A instead of space B. Finally, you score points for a group of at least two connected camps.


Dewan plays like an archetypal Eurogame. Each turn, you take one of two actions — and you can't take one of the actions without first doing a bunch of the other action, Ticket to Ride style. You compete (modestly) for cards in the draft, but you also compete (fiercely) for spaces in the playing area since those spaces are limited. You're pushed to place a camp so that you can grab the story tile that fits with what you're already doing, and when possible you grab spaces that others will travel through since you get to keep the card they spend to cross that space.

The game includes a few scenarios such as a volcano scenario in which lava spills across the map, creating areas that can't be crossed, and a downpour scenario in which the low terrains get flooded and camps in forests and mountains are worth bonus points.

Dewan was available in a limited supply at SPIEL Essen 25 and due out in Europe in January 2026. As for a North American release, that has yet to be announced by asmodee studio Space Cowboys.

▪️ While on the topic of asmodee, here are a few images from another of the clearance booths at SPIEL Essen 25, with this one featuring sharply discounted prices on multiple titles that debuted at SPIEL Essen 24! This seems like a warning bell for any number of reasons: publishers overproducing games, editors making choices that don't fit the market, gamers spending more money than if they had waited a year...although you never know what's going to hit clearance and what's going to vanish from print and never seen again.