German publisher Schmidt Spiele has revealed several games it plans to release in early 2025.
▪️ Let’s start by looking at Atua, a 1-6 player game from Scott Almes that seems like a representative 2020s design with players openly drafting cards to create and score their own island:
To start, each player has a face-up village card in front of them, and four face-up island cards and three face-down draw piles constitute the building materials of these islands. In each of nine rounds, you choose a card featuring symbols, properties, and borders that appeal to you, then overlap that card on your existing island, trying to create different sources of harmony that will affect its value.
The game features three intermediate scoring rounds in which players choose which sources of harmony they will convert into points and when. Timing is crucial because each source can be scored only once. Whoever best keeps an eye on fishermen, birds, and volcanoes; maintains the balance between island residents and natural resources; and gains the most harmony points will win.
Gameplay demonstration from the back of the box
Atua includes expansion materials — resident and fate tiles — for additional scoring opportunities, as well as a solo variant in which you play against the imaginary opponent Tahuma in one of four levels of difficulty.
▪️ Crystalla looks like a family game for 2-4 players from Renaud Libralesso, Pierrick Libralesso, and Joel Sayada, with gameplay being summarized thusly
You start with a tableau on which you will eventually place twelve crystal cards. These cards are divided into two shimmering segments that show different colored types of gemstones. Each crystal is scored in a different way and is worth more or fewer points either separately, together, or arranged in a certain pattern. An interactive selection mechanism not only determines the cards to be placed, but also sometimes distributes additional crystal pieces that further enhance your own work of art by covering a segment — or clouding over the crystal-clear structure of other players.
Whether with a sparkling row of diamonds or shimmering emerald flowers, who will create the work of art that scores the most points?
▪️ Designer Tobias Tesar is debuting with (at least) three games in 2025: Right on Time and Get That Cat from KOSMOS (as covered in Nov. 2024) and One Round? from Schmidt Spiele. Here’s an overview of that 2-12 player game:
In this co-operative party game, you need to close the gaps in the word circle — quickly! — in order to win. The game is played with one hundred numbered cards on which you can write. Initially, three starting cards with the numbers 33, 66 and 100/0 are laid out in a circle, and each is labeled with a freely chosen starting word. Twelve of the remaining cards are placed face down in the middle of the table; these must be placed in the correct place in the circle over the course of the game.
On your turn, secretly look at the number on the top card, then think of a word that indicates the card‘s position among the cards on display. This requires quick creativity because you have only a short amount of time before the other players have to agree on a gap in the circle of words based on the tip. The more cards are laid down, the closer the distances between the numbers become and the more difficult it is to classify new cards correctly.
If the team places the last card correctly before it loses its three life markers, everyone wins.
One Round? includes a team variant so that players can compete against one another in groups, in addition to 28 entertaining challenges and word categories.
▪️ Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau‘s co-operative game Ziggurat from MindWare will be released in a German edition by Schmidt Spiele.
▪️ Schmidt Spiele will extend its For One game series from Reiner Knizia with the release of For One: Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, putting yet another spin on the century-old standard Mensch ärgere Dich nicht by transforming it into a solitaire game:
As with other For One titles, this design features multiple levels of gameplay to present you with new challenges over and over again.
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