by W. Eric Martin

I've sampled a bit of what the GAMA Expo trade show has to offer in 2025, with a deep dive into the exhibit hall coming up later today and tomorrow. Here are pics and short notes to let you sample my sampling:


The look of the Kentucky International Convention Center is about as archetypal as it comes, complete with for-pay scooters on every corner of the sidewalk and multiple spots in between.


Game nights are held on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, with 80-ish long tables available that publishers need to reserve/pay for in advance. Most publishers have 2-4 games per table, and game nights last only three hours, so you can sample a tiny proportion of what's on hand — but that's true for the game market as a whole, of course.

In general, the focus is on presenting games to retailers so that they can decide whether to stock a game and (if they do) have some idea of how to pitch it to customers.


Roxley's Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx from Paul Saxberg and James Van Niekerk has shipped to crowdfunding backers and should hit retail outlets in May 2025, along with a new printing of the Santorini base game.



I previewed Victor Saumont's Popcorn after seeing a mock-up at SPIEL Essen 24, but here's the final production, which debuts in France in mid-March 2025 and which will be IELLO's big release at Gen Con 2025 from distributor Flat River Games. (Saumont's designer diary will run in this space in March 2025.)

The game includes dozens of fake movies, with each title and tagline translated by FRG's Danni Loe. Kudos to the detail shown here!

Mock-up components with final artwork
I previewed Zenith from Grégory Grard, Mathieu Roussel, and PlayPunk even earlier — SPIEL Essen 23! — and that game is finally nearing release in the U.S. in June 2025, with a European release prior to that.

Zenith is available on Board Game Arena should you wish to try it now, but I find the in-person games more enjoyable, especially the four-player set-up that we sampled at GAMA expo 2024. You play in teams of two, with each teammate taking a turn in the order of their choice, then the other team going.

You can show your cards to one another, but you can play only on three of the five colors, which creates interesting hand management challenges. Sometimes you ditch cards from your hand for tech upgrades or to claim the captain tile, with the latter action also allowing you to give up to two cards to your teammate, so you're never stuck with nothing to do. Instead, as in many great games, you have far more that you want to do than you can. I'm looking forward to this one!


Floristry from David Gordon and TAM through their UP Games brand is due out in mid-March 2025.

In this two-player game, you have ten rounds of Dutch-auction bidding, with four random domino-style tiles up for bid. You each press "ready" on the app to start the timer, then someone clicks to buy the tiles whenever they feel the bid is right, with the cost lowering from 5 to 1 over fifteen seconds. The winning bidder takes three of the tiles, with the remainder going to the other player.


Tiles have icons in six colors, and at game's end you score points for each color based on the size of the largest connected group in that color. The player who has the most coins remaining scores based on the difference between their purse and their opponent's. Gameplay is roughly 10-15 minutes.


UP Games' 2026 release will be Scurry Up!, a 3-7 player game in which each round you secretly bid on which spot on the tree you want to occupy, with the number of available spots varying based on the player count. Go to a spot on your your own, and you get all of the stuff depicted. Share a spot that can be shared, and you each get some of the goods. End up with too many squirrels for the spots available, and you each score an "Oops!" instead.

The goods escalate at the higher levels, then you tally points at game's end with flowers and "Oops" scoring based on who has the most and other items scoring as shown on the player aid. One fun aspect: Each bug scores 1 or 3 points. How do you know which? Flip each bug token and see how it lands on the table. Bugs that end up on their back are worth only 1 point because that's the ugly side.


Vital Lacerda's CO₂: Second Chance is getting a second chance of its own, with Mayfair Games co-publishing a new edition of the game with Italian publisher Giochix. This edition will include a previously released small expansion and feature newly edited rules and somewhat upgrade components. Mayfair expects this game to be out in the March/April 2025 timeframe.

Additionally, Mayfair Games will release Kanal in Q3 2025, with the game ideally showing up in time for Gen Con 2025.

Kanal is a new edition of Uwe Rosenberg's 2023 game Oranienburger Kanal that is 90% less orange, includes the two separately published expansion packs, and features enlarged icons and other graphic changes. This new edition is being put together by French publisher Sylex in co-ordination with original publisher Spielworxx, with Mayfair releasing the English-language version of this edition.