Two companies that typically go big on releases in the fall include the TLAs of AEG (Alderac Entertainment Group) and CGE (Czech Games Edition.) This year, AEG was showing off some previews of games coming later this year and next. Let’s Go! To France copies the Japan game of the similar name but removes two-city travel, adds in a little travel board, and generally edges the gamer-y-ness a little bit with more combo-opportunities. Into the Machine is a worker robot-placement game of upgrading your robot team to help them win a race. Mystic Lands, a successor to Mystic Vale, has gone all-in on making an impression with the art in its card-crafting game. Finally, Electrify has players running a steampunk city by constructing a victory point engine through constant action improvements.

CGE was showing off a prototype of a new tile-laying game, Wispwood, where players are trying to place tiles in their personal grid to match goals. However, at the end of each round, some of a player’s tiles are removed making it both easier and harder to reap those goal rewards. After that, we have a number of expansions and rereleases. SETI: Space Agencies adds some quickstart features as well as player powers. Galaxy Trucker: Do What? adds in missions and crazy VIP passengers, and Lost Ruins of Arnak: Adventure Chest is a big ol box containing one new expansion and room to fit everything that has come before. Codenames is getting a refresh in its art and base dictionary and there’s a new Hogwart’s themed game with special powers for each of the four houses. Finally, CGE is bringing some small German titles to the US in the form of Umami: The Forest Food Fest (players play out sets of cards to match the desires of forest creatures) and the classic Frank’s Zoo (a climbing/shedding game where players try to get rid of cards by playing animals that would likely scare off the previous animal card played.)

Alderac Entertainment Group

Let’s Go! To France

I’ve had a great time playing Let’s Go! To Japan. I’ve not personally been, but do enjoy many aspects of the culture and have a few local friends with connections to the country. It is on my bucket list to visit. Imagine my pleasure to hear there was an entire game dedicated to touring Japan. To make matters even better, it was supposedly a pretty good game. One Christmas present later and I was playing the game. Players draft cards from hands that are passed around and then place their chosen card on their tableau of days of the week. Once everyone’s schedule is full, the trips resolve and points are scored. While drafting moves quickly – everyone is doing something at the same time, I have found the scoring to be my favorite part. There’s a lot of friendly jocularity between players as we almost role-play our journey through the country. Our favorite country to visit is France, and I was very pumped to find out there’s a sequel to Let’s Go! and it is France.

The gaming formula hasn’t changed. Players are still drafting cards and planning out their vacations in Paris. Some complexities have been removed. It’s just one city so no need to juggle train movement, and bonus scoring at the bottom of cards will no longer have prerequisite requirements.

Rather than limiting each day to three cards, players are free to put down as many as they think wise. However, cards now have time values and spending too much time doing things on a particular day can affect your mood. If a card matches the daily symbol, a player may claim a bonus from the top of their board, or they may push their luck and get more points if they are able to place a second symbol-containing card for that day. The cards are, in general, also a bit more combo-heavy which should allow players to specialize a bit more than the previous game.

Graphically, the most striking change to the game will be the addition of a travel board. Players have a location marker that starts in one corner of the board, which they can then move as they’re playing (not scoring) cards. Moving one’s marker around to other locations serves as an additional way for players to pick up specific symbols or alter their mood. There are even some places that grant a wildcard symbol. There are actually several different travel boards included in the game, allowing players to explore all the different areas of France (and yes, Monaco.) Look for a Kickstarter for the game coming soon.

Into the Machine

Into the Machine is a 2 to 5 player game of racing robots along a track all the way to the end, upgrading, and then racing back to the start. If a player gets two robots to the finish before anyone else arrives, they win. Otherwise, the first player to get three total robots to the end wins the game

It’s a bit of a worker placement game with three main rows from which to pick. Each player has worker robots in three shapes: circles, triangles, and squares. Each row has a limited number of types of robots that can use it. Only circles on the top, circles or triangles in the middle, and all three available for the bottom row. Players can use occupied locations, but must pay extra robot workers to do so.

The game will launch its Kickstarter campaign on August 26th.

Mystic Lands

Seen as a successor to the card crafting game of Mystic Vale, the elevator pitch for Mystic Lands is “what if we did card crafting, but didn’t try to make our cards look like they’re from Magic: the Gathering.”

As such, AEG has tried to embrace the layering feature of see-through card construction and elevate it to an art form. Since they’re very proud of how the art looks, we were only able to get a look at digital versions of them on a tablet. It’s pretty good.

Unlike so many game themes, Mystic Lands is not a dystopian place, under siege by some nefarious plague. It’s a “land where everything is great.” This does allow for some impressively vibrant colors in the art. Details of play are still a bit vague, but players are still spending mana points to build and play cards that will help them move pieces across a land in some form of a race. Look for a Kickstarter campaign sometime in Q4 2025.

Electrify

Electrify (Kickstarter in 2026) puts players in the role of a visionary leader of a steampunk city, trying to grow your city into a green-energy powerhouse of the age.

Players earn points by satisfying the conditions on a row of energy cards in the center of the table. Meanwhile, players have a set of tiles below their player board representing the types of actions they can perform.

Players simultaneously, and secretly, choose which action they want to invest in using a personal dial. There is a small bonus if one is the only player to pick that action. The dials are all revealed and players “run” their actions by taking the action along with any upgrades previously placed on that tile. Tiles that are further to the right in the order will give greater benefits, but whenever an action is selected, it gets moved to the bottom on the left, pushing up the others to the right. These action tiles are the movers and shakers of the game engine, with multiple slots available for upgrades – each of which will then be activated when a player selects that particular action. Players will also have to weigh the advantages of specializing in one or two actions against the disadvantage that those actions will necessarily usually be lower powered since they are always getting reset to the left.

Czech Games Edition

Wispwood

Wispwood is a 1 to 4 player game of putting together a personal tableau of little colored wisps to match that particular game’s goals. Players build their grid tableau over several rounds, but remove some of them at the end of each round.

Players take turns drawing wisp tiles from the center board. Each tile is also adjacent to two shapes. Players then place their wisp tile into their personal grid according to one or the other of the shapes. The wisp tile is obviously part of the shape but the other boxes in the shape are filled in by the player using extra tiles played face-down. Players are always trying to put their wisps on their grid in such a way as to score points as shown on one of the three (out of many) goal cards for that game. These goals typically involve placement, adjacency, and the various colors of wisps available. Players have a little cat token on their board that can be moved around, and even cover up a wisp tile (if that’s advantageous.) Some of the goals include the cat in some way.

At the end of each round, players can move their cat one last time before scoring their wisps. After scoring their wisps, all the face-down (non-wisp) tiles are removed from players’ grids. This allows more openings to place new wisp tiles, but also means it may be harder to get the shapes to fit.

SETI: Space Agencies

A new expansion to SETI arriving at SPEIL, Space Agencies adds in asymmetric starting player powers, two new aliens, scanning-related tokens to make that easier, and some quick-start cards aimed at getting to the meat of the game more quickly.

The expansion has 11 different asymmetric player powers. Each player takes on the role of a large organization complete with a custom income, a passive ability, and one ability that they can perform once per round. The quick-start cards included in the game are dealt out to players, who choose some to keep and some to discard. Using the organizations and the quick-start cards reduces the turns in the game from 5 rounds down to 4. However, it is predicted the added complexity of the organizations will probably mean the game will take around the same amount of time to play. Not much is released about the two new aliens, although I’m aware that one includes a derelict ship to explore. As usual, you unlock levels to gain cards but I have in my notes that the cards can be played to get a big bonus off of another card that is flipped.

Galaxy Trucker: Do What?

The Do What? Expansion for Galaxy Trucker has two modules to add to the base game. Missions include things like strange cargo effects, escorting aliens, and other such activities – look for them to sport the oddball-like feel of the game, of course.

The second module includes VIP Astronauts you can drive around like a taxi driver, helping them smuggle goods, let them boost your weapons, some might even drive away with parts of your ship! In addition to the two modules, there are rules for a turn-based style game for less frenetic scrambling of parts.

Lost Ruins of Arnak: Adventure Chest

Part expansion, part storage solution, Lost Ruins of Arnak: Adventure Chest is a box large enough to hold all previous content in eight smaller boxes (soon to be renamed “Arnak: The Russian Dolls expansion”.)

The Adventure Chest does not contain any past content (base game or the two expansions), just space to house it. However, it does contain some brand new stuff. There’s a big new double-sided main board. It’s even bigger than the original board and has two new research tracks including one new resource – dark tablets. There’s the obligatory new stuff like guardians, sites, assistants, etc…

There’s a bit of new solo content, including some new rival tiles and rival objectives for the new maps. I suppose there is one bit of repeat content. Included in the box are the two mini-expansions previously released on the web as print and play material. (For those literal folks: No you don’t print and play the new material… its printed material you can play with that matches older material you could have printed. See, that’s so much more explanation than you need…) For those with everything Arnak but have already set up a storage solution (or don’t care), my understanding is that all the new content will come out as a stand alone expansion at a later time.

Umami

CGE has partnered with a German publisher to release some of their small box titles in the US. The first two are Umami: The Forest Food Fest and Frank’s Zoo. Umami is is a small card game about making delicious food for animals. Players try to play cards into a stack to create a specific dish.

Players place one card from their hand and one card from the central tableau (owned by some friendly otters, I believe.) Players can be playing cards on up to 5 different piles at a time, trying to get a recipe just right to meet a hungry animal’s needs. Players maybe wanting to put together things like red and green cards, but no matching numbers or a run of three cards (ignoring colors), etc…

There is player interaction in the form of stealing cards or even, with the right card, stealing another player’s entire dish. Not a completed one, of course, completed dishes are set aside and “locked” from any other players’ interference.

Franks Zoo

Frank’s Zoo has been around for a long time, but is getting a rerelease into the US in English. It is a card game for a larger group, four to seven players. It is a shedding game where players are trying to get rid of their cards by playing a higher value card than the previous one. Rather than numbers, cards represent animals and a given animal is higher than another if it can eat it (more or less.)

The highest card is the elephant, although there is a mosquito card which works a bit like an elephant and a chameleon that acts as a wildcard. In addition to playing a higher level animal, players must also play at least as many animals as previously played. In other words, a player must play at least a pair (or more) if another player just set out their own pair. The goal is to go out, but there are also a few other ways to score including collecting lion cards or getting a hedgehog card.

Codenames

Codnames is getting a refresh and rerelease. The base game and the 2-player Duet are both out in the wild, with the Pictures version coming out at SPEIL this fall.

The games sport new visuals, with more vibrant colors and take advantage of the very successful Codenames app. They have taken the data gathered from the many, many games played online and used it to revise the word list for each game. Also at SPEIL will be a new release of the XXL format game. It has even larger fonts than before and (thankfully) comes in a smaller box than before.

Codenames: Back to Hogwarts

Also releasing at Essen, is a Hogwarts version of the game. It is more than just a bunch of new thematic words – although those words are there. It also has some new Harry Potter style rules changes.

The biggest change will be the addition of special powers. Each team is assigned one of the four houses and gets a special power. These are things like being able to ignore every first bystander selected or (in Ravenclaw’s case) knowing that all their words are connected. This is possible because each of the keycards/clue grids is unique to that pair of houses. In other words, one keycard might feature a Ravenclaw vs Hufflepuff game. There is also a test-tube looking tracker that slowly fills up as players guess the right words. The word tiles are double-sided with pictures on the back. Players can play with either side or even have them mixed.