Sea trip, familiar tempo

Like Tokaido, Namiji runs on a one-way track where the player furthest back moves next. No fixed turn order, just tactical dawdling. Land on a space, take the corresponding action, repeat until someone has had a nice day and you begrudgingly admit it was well designed.

Actions revolve around angling for fish and scoring based on how you fill your nets, collecting crustaceans in a push-your-luck side game, grabbing secret end-game goals, and scooping up in-game benefits from objects at the docks. I appreciate a design that admits you might want a tiny gambling detour about crustaceans. It feels honest.

Components, in suspiciously exact millimeters

In the box: a double-sided game board measuring 548mm by 548mm, 5 wooden boats, 109 cards, more than 150 tokens, 5 boat mats, 5 reference cards, and a cloth bag. That board size reads like someone measured it with a laser while the marketing team argued about round numbers. The tokens count is “more than 150,” which is the cardboard equivalent of telling me my download will finish “soon.” Still, a cloth bag helps – less plastic, more rummaging.

There is also a solo mode that uses 16 solo cards and a pair of Automa mats. Two mats to simulate one opponent is a delightfully modern sentence. Somewhere a spreadsheet is proud.

Edition tweaks and extras

Stonemaier’s release folds the Namiji expansion set directly into the core box and comes with a reworked rulebook and updated reference cards. I will not complain about reworked references. I have seen what happens when you do not rework them, and it usually involves flipping, squinting, and bad decisions.

The game is for one to five players and takes about 45 minutes. That is enough time to be calm without your group devolving into plank-measuring and snack warfare.

Lineage and timing

Namiji was originally published by Funforge in 2022, created by Tokaido designer Antoine Bauza with artwork by Naiade. Stonemaier acquired rights to the Tokaido series in 2024 and released its own version of the original game and the two-player Tokaido Duo last year. If you are keeping score at home, that makes Namiji the third entry in the refreshed line. Next month, Stonemaier plans to release Braided Skies. Yes, schedules exist. My calendar also contains hopeful scribbles, and yet here we are.

If your group liked Tokaido’s stroll-and-snipe timing but wanted fewer roads and more fish, this is the sea leg. Same core cadence, saltier scenery, and enough set-collection choices to keep your brain humming without requiring a second monitor.

Bytebeard’s verdict: Namiji looks like a clean, ocean-flavored iteration of a proven travel system, with integrated expansion, clarified rules, and a solo mode that has more mats than your kitchen. If you fear tokens, brace your nets. If you crave calm, set sail. And if you measure boards to the nearest millimeter, you can stop – they already did.

Sources & Useful Links

• Original report from ICv2
• Stonemaier Games

The post Stonemaier Sets Sail With Namiji appeared first on Grumpy Goblins.

Yes, Essen SPIEL 2026 is almost upon us. From October 22 to 25, the Messe Essen will once again be invaded by people searching for their next great board game while carrying bags that become progressively heavier and wallets that become progressively emptier. The fair is using all eight exhibition halls this year, because apparently seven halls of cardboard were not enough for your species.

I have been digging through the new releases, and despite my better judgment, I have found ten games that have managed to catch my attention. Some look clever. Some look ambitious. One involves oil, because apparently we still have not learned anything. And one is about cheese and wine, which is probably the most sensible use of cardboard I have seen all year.

Here are the ten games I will be watching at SPIEL Essen 2026.

1. -60° (Sixty Below)

Antarctica. Meteorites. Research stations. Freezing temperatures. Limited resources. Finally, a game where the weather is more hostile than my opinion of most modern rulebooks.

-60° puts players in an alternate 1971, leading research teams across the Antarctic wilderness toward a mysterious meteorite impact site. Players build networks of stations, explore the frozen landscape, manage scarce resources and develop scientific projects while trying to reach the meteorite first.

It has exploration, worker placement and resource management, but what really catches my attention is the combination of harsh environmental conditions and long-term expedition planning. This looks like the sort of game where one stupid decision several turns earlier eventually comes back to bite you in the frozen backside.

Good. That sounds familiar.

2. Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game

Take a historically grounded medieval RPG, give it to Tomáš Holek and Vlaada Chvátil, turn it into a giant board game and charge humans €149.99 for the privilege of carrying it home.

Obviously I am interested.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game combines an epic adventure with eurogame elements and deck-building. Players begin as ordinary peasants in 15th-century Bohemia and develop their characters through different paths, including combat, alchemy, archery, persuasion and thievery. The game supports 1–4 players and is designed to run at roughly 90 minutes per player.

CGE is bringing the game to the Essen 2026 launch window, with its first pre-order wave scheduled around SPIEL. A second pre-order wave is already planned for 2027. Which means some humans will apparently be standing in queues to collect a very large medieval cardboard problem they were perfectly capable of ordering from a computer.

I understand completely.

3. Drillers

Mechs. Mines. Minerals. Deck-building. Running out of fuel while deep underground.

Yes.

Drillers has my attention.

You take a drilling mech into an abandoned mine, excavate valuable minerals and try to make it back to the surface before your resources become a particularly expensive funeral. The cards are multi-use, you upgrade your deck and mech, and your decisions can affect the opportunities available to other players. It supports 1–4 players and is designed around roughly 30 minutes per player.

The important part is that going deeper gives you better opportunities while also making the return trip more dangerous. That is the sort of push-your-luck decision I like. Humans always want to go deeper. Humans rarely consider the trip back.

Perhaps this is why you keep losing things in basements.

4. Carl von Linné

Natural science, exploration, specimens, botanical gardens and the historical development of taxonomy.

Somewhere, a Swedish goblin just sat up straighter.

Carl von Linné places players in the early 18th century as natural historians inspired by Carl Linnaeus and his contemporaries. Players explore distant regions, collect and research specimens, cultivate botanical gardens, correspond with scientific institutions and publish books while building knowledge and reputation. A lens system helps determine how players balance fieldwork and scholarly study.

It is an unusually specific theme, which is exactly why I want to see it. Essen does not need another game where somebody is building a generic medieval kingdom and calling it innovation. Give me taxonomy. Give me specimens. Give me miserable scientific arguments over where a plant belongs.

Now that sounds like civilization.

5. Carpet Racers

This one sounds ridiculous.

Which is precisely why it has made the list.

Carpet Racers is a racing game for 3–5 players where nobody initially knows which car is actually theirs. Players move cars, set traps, gather clues and try to work out their own secret identity while simultaneously attempting to win the race. It combines racing, bluffing and deduction in a game lasting roughly 25–45 minutes.

So instead of simply racing your own car, you are racing several cars while trying to figure out which one you are supposed to care about.

Excellent. A racing game with an identity crisis. Humans have finally made a game about modern life.

6. Oil Rock

Nothing says peaceful Thursday evening like building an oil empire.

Oil Rock puts players in control of expanding oil companies competing for influence and efficiency. You will position yourself on an action wheel, expand across the map, build drilling rigs, develop refineries and turbines, manage railway connections and improve your company while trying to dominate the market. It is a 2–4 player strategy game with an advertised play time of around 50-80 minutes.

It is also an interactive design, with worker placement on the wheel and development both on personal boards and the shared map.

I have no idea whether building an oil empire is morally questionable in this particular cardboard universe. I do know that if there is a mechanic where somebody can ruin my carefully planned supply chain because they placed a worker in the wrong place, I will probably enjoy it.

That is what board games are for.

7. Lairs

Build a dungeon. Fill it with walls, traps, treasures and monsters. Then hand it to your opponent and try to survive theirs.

Lairs is a two-player deduction game in which both players construct a dangerous catacomb for the other player to explore while simultaneously attempting to navigate the opponent’s creation themselves. The game is designed for roughly 35 minutes and mixes deduction, exploration and a little luck.

This is exactly the sort of compact idea I like seeing at Essen. You are not merely solving somebody else’s puzzle. You are building the puzzle they have to solve while secretly hoping you were more clever than they were.

Petty. Competitive. Efficient.

Very goblin.

8. Wine & Cheese

Wine and cheese.

Finally, a game about something humans actually understand.

Wine & Cheese is a two-player strategic game set in Burgundy where players manage farms producing both wine and cheese. Ingredients are gathered using paired workers, production and ageing need to be timed carefully, and players must balance the two products because at the end of the game the weaker of the two income streams determines the reward.

It is the spiritual successor to Beer & Bread, but the designers explicitly describe it as more complex with different mechanics rather than simply putting a new label on the old machine.

I appreciate that. Humans have enough games that are essentially the same mechanism wearing a different hat.

Wine and cheese, however, is a combination I am willing to investigate thoroughly.

9. Forbidden Legacy

Forbidden Legacy takes the familiar Forbidden formula and turns it into a seven-episode adventure involving a crumbling city floating above Earth, time travel, hidden components and lasting changes to the game.

Players must repair a portal and keep the city afloat while working through a campaign in which new rules, abilities and challenges emerge over time. It supports 2–4 players and is designed for roughly 30–60 minutes per episode.

I am particularly interested in the legacy element. The best campaign games make your decisions matter without turning the first thing you do into a permanent punishment because you misunderstood one sentence on page seventeen of the rulebook.

If Forbidden Legacy can deliver meaningful evolution without drowning the experience in campaign administration, it deserves attention.

Also, a city floating above Earth while everything is collapsing sounds like an appropriate metaphor for Essen on Saturday afternoon.

10. Timespan

Lead a civilization from the Stone Age to the Space Age in about 90 minutes.

Apparently humanity has finally invented fast-forward.

Timespan is a civilization game for 1–5 players where each player chooses from asymmetric civilizations and combines that choice with one of several technology boards. Players can further customize their civilization by recruiting from a large selection of historical people, buildings, technologies and wonders. Much of the game is played simultaneously, with five rounds covering exploration and action phases.

There is no warfare. Instead, the focus is on peaceful civilization building, exploration and developing an economic engine. That alone makes it unusual enough to get my attention. Humans have somehow managed to make a civilization game where you can reach the space age without immediately declaring war on somebody.

Perhaps there is hope for you after all.

So, What Am I Actually Looking Forward To?

There are hundreds of games competing for attention at SPIEL Essen 2026, and I have no intention of pretending these ten are objectively the ten best games at the fair. That would be nonsense. They are the ten that currently have me most interested in finding a table, stealing a chair and forcing some unfortunate human to explain the rules to me.

-60° has the exploration and survival puzzle. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an enormous project with some very serious names behind it. Drillers looks like the sort of risk-management headache I enjoy. Carl von Linné has a theme I genuinely want to see handled well. Carpet Racers sounds gloriously stupid in exactly the right way.

Then there is Oil Rock, Lairs, Wine & Cheese, Forbidden Legacy and Timespan, all offering very different reasons to stop wandering around Essen long enough to actually sit down and play something.

Essen SPIEL 2026 runs from October 22 to 25. The doors open at 10:00 each day, with Sunday ending at 18:00. The fair is spread across all eight halls of Messe Essen this year, so if you intend to play everything you want, I recommend bringing sensible shoes, water and the sort of determination normally reserved for military campaigns.

As for me, I will be looking for good games.

If I find them, I will grudgingly admit it.

If I find bad games, I will remember them.

And if I find a shiny ceramic mug at a reasonable price, the rest of the expedition is cancelled.

Now tell me, humans: which games are you hunting for at SPIEL Essen 2026?

The post Essen SPIEL 2026 — Jugbite’s 10 Most Anticipated Games appeared first on Grumpy Goblins.

What the game actually does

Gold Country drops players into the California Gold Rush as heads of mining companies. The job description is efficient and unromantic: build up your company, trade shares of mines on the map, and funnel capital into ability cards to outmaneuver rivals. When all the gold veins are discovered, whoever has the most gold wins. Clean win condition, minimal fluff, zero app install. My kind of fossil fuel for the brain.

The game comes with two different maps to explore and randomized setups to keep sessions from feeling identical. In old goblin terms, that means the board changes and the startup state shuffles, which is usually more useful than another jargon-laden feature list.

Specs for those who prefer digits to dirt

• Players: 2 to 4
• Ages: 8 and up
• Play time: 45 minutes
• Retail price: 45.00 USD
• Retail release: October 16, 2026

Yes, it is 45 minutes for 45 dollars. If they had fit 45 cards and 45 mines in the box we could call it numerology and go home. As it stands, you get a mid-length strategy game whose math is tidy enough to satisfy an accountant and a goblin with a stopwatch.

Mechanics in plain language

The spine here is company growth and market maneuvering around mine shares, with ability cards acting as your tactical grease. If you enjoy timing when to buy in and when to sell out, this looks designed to let you do exactly that without spending a whole evening in rules jail. Two maps plus randomized setups means your openings are not on rails. If you need a tutorial pop-up to understand that, you might be lost. Try a shovel.

Allplay side quest

Alongside this release, Allplay is launching three new game lines, beginning with a refresh of Dominant Species. That is a different rabbit hole, but it plants a flag that Gold Country is arriving as part of a busier-than-average season for them. I will refrain from loading a matrix printer until someone hands me details beyond that sentence.

Bytebeard’s take

This is Knizia doing what humans keep asking him to do: give them a strategic contest with clear goals and sharp edges. The presence of share trading and ability cards suggests interactive pressure without requiring you to bring snacks for a four-hour negotiation. Two to four players, 45 minutes, plug-and-play maps. It reads like the rare modern release that understands a session should end before your tea goes cold.

If you like quick, competitive systems with a bit of market friction, mark October 16, 2026, on whatever cursed calendar app rules your life. If you want chrome and lore paragraphs, the mine does not care. It just sits there while you decide whether to buy a piece of it.

Sources & Useful Links

• Original report from ICv2
• Asmodee
• Allplay
• Reiner Knizia

The post Asmodee Sets October 16 Retail Date for Reiner Knizia’s Gold Country appeared first on Grumpy Goblins.

FOMO is a particular kind of human stupidity that becomes especially impressive when cardboard is involved.

It can turn perfectly ordinary adults into frantic little purchasing machines the moment somebody puts the words “limited,” “exclusive,” or “last chance” next to a board game.

I have watched this nonsense happen far too many times.

You look at a game, decide you are not particularly interested, and continue living your life like a functioning creature. Then someone announces that there are only a certain number of copies, or that some tiny cardboard token will never be available again.

Suddenly, your magnificent human brain acts as though your entire bloodline depends on getting that box before Tuesday.

You check the campaign page again. Then you read comments from strangers, compare photographs, calculate shipping and taxes, and start wondering whether you might regret not buying it.

Never mind that you apparently did not want the bloody thing badly enough to buy it until someone suggested that you might not be able to get it later.

That is the part I find so wonderfully pathetic.

The game has not improved. The rules have not suddenly become cleverer because a clock appeared beside them. The cardboard has certainly not developed magical properties because somebody wrote “exclusive” underneath a picture.

Yet the closer the deadline gets, the more important the game becomes in your head.

You have stopped asking whether you actually want it. Now you are worrying about whether you can tolerate not owning it.

A goblin sees something shiny, decides he wants it and considers whether it is worth the coins. Humans need another human to point at the shiny thing and announce that it might disappear before you can even decide whether you wanted it.

And naturally, you will insist that this is not panic.

Humans Have Very Respectable Names for Panic

Humans are remarkably talented at giving embarrassing behaviour respectable names.

You call it enthusiasm. You call it being an informed buyer. You call it supporting a publisher or securing an opportunity.

Apparently, the one thing you will not call it is what it actually looks like when I watch you frantically refreshing a campaign page because somebody told you there might not be another chance to buy a board game.

The countdown makes everything worse because humans seem to have an almost religious faith in numbers becoming smaller.

Give you thirty days and you shrug.

Give you thirty hours and suddenly the matter requires urgent attention.

Give you thirty minutes and you are apparently prepared to negotiate with your bank account, your partner and several ancient gods to secure a box containing cardboard, wooden pieces and seventeen exclusive plastic objects you had never heard of that morning.

You were perfectly capable of living without the game yesterday. You would have continued living without it tomorrow.

But now there is a timer, and somehow that timer has become more important than your own opinion.

I find that deeply insulting to the concept of having a brain.

If you want to see how often humans create unnecessary drama around perfectly normal board games, you can also take a look at my previous rant, “Why Are Humans Like This?”. Apparently I had not yet complained enough.

When FOMO Makes Humans So Easy to Sell To

The word “exclusive” makes it even worse.

Humans see something that will not be available to everyone and immediately decide that this makes it more valuable. Apparently, rarity improves design now.

A normal component becomes an exclusive component. A normal edition becomes a special edition. Suddenly you are staring at a pile of plastic as though it contains the secrets of the universe.

You are no longer simply buying the game.

You are buying protection against the horrible future in which somebody else owns something you do not.

That is where your precious FOMO really shows its ugly little face.

You scroll through social media and see somebody else with the game. Then another person posts it. Then another.

People are excited, so you become excited. People are buying it, so you start wondering whether you should buy it too.

Someone says the campaign is doing well. Someone else says the game may become difficult to find.

Suddenly, your own opinion has been replaced by a collection of noises made by strangers on the internet.

I have watched humans do this with such enthusiasm that I sometimes wonder whether independent thought is simply an optional expansion for your species.

The Shelf Is Already Full

The most ridiculous part is that your shelves are already full.

They are groaning under the weight of games you absolutely had to have.

There are boxes you bought because everyone was talking about them. There are games you bought because they were on sale. And there are games you bought because you were certain they would become favourites.

There are also the games you bought because you were afraid they would become difficult to find.

Some have been played twice.

Some have never been opened.

Others are sitting in shrink wrap while you stare lovingly at photographs of yet another game you absolutely must own before the timer reaches zero.

Then you buy it.

Naturally, the moment the money leaves your account, the Great Rationalisation begins.

Admitting that you panicked would require a level of honesty that seems to become remarkably scarce whenever limited cardboard is involved.

Suddenly, the purchase was carefully considered.

You will play it eventually. It was a good price. The exclusive content might be difficult to obtain later. You could always sell it. You would have regretted missing it. You needed to make the decision now.

Your brain, having just thrown itself out of the window, climbs back inside wearing a little suit and starts explaining why everything was perfectly sensible.

I have seen this performance often enough to know how it ends.

The game eventually sits on your shelf beside the other games you were terrified of missing.

You continue defending the purchase because admitting that FOMO got you would mean admitting that you were not actually afraid of losing the game.

You were afraid of being the human who did not have it.

That is a much uglier truth, and I suspect that is precisely why you prefer all the elaborate explanations.

FOMO Turns Other People Into Your Shopping List

Humans spend an astonishing amount of time congratulating themselves on being rational creatures.

You build universities, legal systems, financial markets and machines capable of doing calculations that make my head hurt.

Yet put a red banner saying “LAST CHANCE” next to a board game and suddenly all that magnificent civilisation starts trembling.

A goblin at least has the decency to understand when he is being greedy.

You will spend an hour explaining why you absolutely needed something you had no interest in yesterday, then congratulate yourself for making a rational purchasing decision.

It is almost admirable, if you ignore the part where it is completely ridiculous.

Of course, sometimes a game genuinely is limited.

Sometimes an exclusive item really will be difficult to obtain later. Sometimes you have wanted the game from the beginning and the deadline simply forces you to stop procrastinating.

I am not so stupid that I cannot tell the difference between genuine desire and FOMO.

Humans simply have a remarkable talent for making the distinction harder than it needs to be.

If you wanted the game before you knew it was limited, fine.

Buy it. Play it. Enjoy it.

I have no interest in policing perfectly ordinary desire.

But if you did not want it, did not need it, had not even been thinking about it and suddenly became desperate because another human told you that your opportunity was disappearing, then you have allowed somebody else to make the decision for you.

You have let scarcity do your thinking, social pressure do your convincing and a countdown timer do the final push while you stand there insisting that you are completely in control.

You are not.

You Are Afraid of Regret, Not of Missing the Game

And before you tell me that you simply did not want to regret missing it, let us look at what that actually means.

You are not afraid that the game will ruin your life by becoming unavailable.

You are afraid that six months from now somebody will own it, you will see it on a shelf or in a photograph, and you will experience the terrible human tragedy of remembering that you once had the opportunity to buy it.

You will survive.

You may even discover that you did not want the bloody thing at all.

That possibility should not be terrifying.

Yet humans have somehow turned missing a board game into a personal failure.

You treat every limited release as though the universe has presented you with one precious chance to prove that you belong. You treat every exclusive component as though your collection will collapse into dust without it.

Meanwhile, your existing games are sitting around wondering why nobody has played them in three months.

This is what makes FOMO so irritating to me.

It does not merely persuade you to buy things. It teaches you to distrust your own judgment.

Instead of deciding whether a game deserves your money, you start worrying about whether you will regret not giving it your money.

Instead of asking whether you want it, you ask whether somebody else will have it.

Instead of choosing for yourself, you look sideways at everyone around you and wait to see what they are doing.

And then you call that a hobby.

You Will Miss Things. You Will Survive.

You are going to miss games.

You are going to miss promotions, crowdfunding campaigns, special editions, exclusive components and whatever ridiculous little plastic treasure humans decide is essential this week.

If your particular flavour of panic happens to involve a crowdfunding campaign, there are plenty of them to browse over at Kickstarter’s tabletop games section. Yes, humans have built an entire system for giving themselves deadlines and then voluntarily panicking about them. Remarkable species.

Somebody else will own something you do not.

You will see it online, feel that irritating little twist in your stomach and then, unless your species has deteriorated considerably since I last checked, you will continue breathing.

The world will not end because you missed a Kickstarter.

Your collection will not become worthless because somebody else owns a prettier edition.

You will not be exiled from the board gaming community because you decided that one particular box was not worth the money.

If that sounds obvious, congratulations.

You have just achieved something that FOMO apparently prevents a disturbing number of humans from doing: making a decision based on what you actually want rather than what you are afraid of losing.

I do not care if you buy too many board games.

Goblins buy too many things too.

What I find contemptible is watching humans convince themselves that panic is desire, scarcity is value and social pressure is independent choice, all while insisting that they are perfectly rational.

So by all means, buy the game if you genuinely want it.

Spend your coins. Fill your shelves until the furniture begins to surrender. I am not stopping you.

Just stop pretending that every game you are terrified of missing is something you desperately wanted.

Sometimes you did not want the game.

You just wanted to make sure nobody else got it first.

And frankly, if that is enough to empty your wallet, I am beginning to think the goblins have been giving humans far too much credit.

— Krizbella the Grim
Supreme Princess of Disappointment
Queen of Cardboard Rage
High Priestess of Petty Rage

The post Humans Will Buy Anything If You Tell Them It’s Limited appeared first on Grumpy Goblins.

What it is, without the smoke

Braided Skies is designed by Dan Germain and illustrated by Andrew Bosley, who created the Smoking Bones universe itself. The setting puts players in the Shallows as airship captains trying to build up their own skybound travel companies to service the Northlands. The objective is simple to read and less simple to win: rack up the most fame and end the game as the Commodore of the Clouds. Yes, titles again. Humans cannot resist them.

The game supports one to five players, is listed for ages 14 and up, and runs 60 to 90 minutes. That last part is merciful. Nothing with airships should take longer than it takes a kettle to boil twice.

What you do up there

The job description is brisk and to the point: explore both land and sky for new wonders, upgrade your travel company operations and attract tourists. Your ships run on tapstones, so keeping your supply topped up is part of the gig. Bytebeard translation: sightsee, optimize, market, refuel. The four horsemen of board game project management, now with more clouds.

I am told there is joy in shepherding tourists through exotic vistas. I assume that joy increases when the vistas are floating and you are the one charging for the view. At least the fuel has a name. Tapstones is better branding than Generic Blue Gems.

Dates that actually matter

Braided Skies will be available at SPIEL Essen 2026, with a wider retail release set for November 2026. That is it. No labyrinth of pledge managers, no seasonal mystery drops. A date, then a month. I almost smiled. Almost.

The Smoking Bones connection

This one lives inside the Smoking Bones universe, with illustration by its creator, Andrew Bosley. That should keep the vibe consistent from box lid to cloud bank. If your eyes like that world, they will probably like it here too. If your eyes do not like anything, welcome to my club.

The Bytebeard checklist

• Theme: Airship captains running magical travel companies in the Shallows to serve the Northlands.
• Core loop: Explore, upgrade, attract tourists and keep the tapstones flowing.
• Win condition: Accrue the most fame and claim the very dignified Commodore of the Clouds title.
• Table stats: 1 to 5 players, ages 14 plus, 60 to 90 minutes.
• Availability: SPIEL Essen 2026 first. Retail release in November 2026.

It is a clean pitch. No seven-phase production chains hiding under the table, at least not in the announcement. If it lets me sail a respectable blimp and bully my rivals with tasteful advertising while refueling with rocks, I will tolerate the word tourist for 90 minutes.

Bytebeard verdict: File under watchlist. If you like your strategy with sky lanes and scheduled arrivals, this looks tidy. If you prefer your cardboard on the ground, there are plenty of rocks down here too. Fewer titles, though.

Sources & Useful Links

• Original report from ICv2
• Stonemaier Games
• SPIEL Essen

The post Braided Skies Takes Flight at SPIEL Essen 2026 appeared first on Grumpy Goblins.

It focuses on the big sieges from Tolkien’s pages – the Battle of Helm’s Deep and the Siege of Minas Tirith – and bolts new mechanics onto the existing game to model those confrontations. I can already hear the rulebooks creaking like a drawbridge.

What this expansion adds

The announcement highlights a handful of new levers to pull, poke, and inevitably forget at the worst possible moment:

• Great sieges in Middle-earth as described by Tolkien’s works, including the Battle of Helm’s Deep and the Siege of Minas Tirith.
• Shadow players get Siege Engines, such as Siege Towers and Catapults.
• Free Peoples players get new Heroic Feats to attempt to break a siege.
• Fellowship tokens arrive as a new Free Peoples resource that, once used, transform into Palantir tokens – a Shadow resource. Yes, you spend a thing and it becomes their thing. Very reassuring.

Mechanically tidy summary: Shadow piles up engines at the walls, Free Peoples hits back with feats, and a fresh token system changes hands mid-arc like a treacherous coin. If your group already argues about timing windows, I recommend snacks.

Release timing

Sieges of Middle-earth is slated to hit retail in December 2026. That is the entire date, and for once I will not demand a firmware version or a patch note. Cardboard ships when cardboard ships.

Bytebeard, squinting at those tokens

Let us linger on that Fellowship-to-Palantir trick. You use a Fellowship token, and it flips into a Palantir token for the Shadow. In old-school terms, that is like borrowing a floppy disk and returning it formatted for the other guy’s system. Elegant? Maybe. Annoying? Almost certainly. Interesting? Definitely. It is a clean little narrative punch: press your luck and the Eye gets a turn with your leftovers. I respect a design that forces players to feel the cost of a choice without needing a paragraph of flavor text or a QR code to unlock the explanation.

The siege focus is also refreshingly literal. No buzzwords about “ecosystems” or “platforms” – just towers, catapults, and the thud of orcs at the gate. Shadow players get to roll up the heavy equipment; Free Peoples players get to try acts of desperate heroism. That division tracks nicely with how these stories are remembered: one side builds machines, the other hopes the walls hold. You do not need a cloud service to understand that.

Now, yes, “adds new game mechanics” is a phrase that makes my left eyelid twitch. More moving parts means more chances for someone to knock over the catapults while asking if feats resolve before or after the second sentence on card three. But if you are going to bolt complexity onto a beloved wargame, doing it around Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith is about as defensible as it gets. If you are going to go big, go full siege tower.

What we do not know

The announcement sticks to the high points. It does not list price, component counts, or further rule specifics. No promises about box size, campaign modes, solo modes, reversible boards, or any other modern box flaps people love to photograph and then never read. We have a focus, a handful of headline mechanics, and a retail month. Frankly, that is enough to plan a calendar and set aside a shelf, which is already more organization than most humans manage.

So that is the shape of it: big sieges, siege engines for the Shadow, heroic feats for the Free Peoples, and a token system that literally turns your effort into their advantage after you use it. Bring your best table manners. And maybe a ruler tall enough to measure a siege tower.

Bytebeard’s verdict: Clear theme, punchy new toys, and a token twist with teeth. If you like War of the Ring loud and literal, December just put a ladder on your wall.

Sources & Useful Links

• Original report from ICv2
• Ares Games – Official Publisher Website

The post Sieges of Middle-earth Brings Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith to War of the Ring appeared first on Grumpy Goblins.

Over a hundred vegetable cards. Carrots, onions, peppers, lettuce. That’s it. Just vegetables! When goblins see a hundred vegetables, we don’t play — we set them on fire. Where are the skulls, explosions, or cursed artifacts? No slime, no blood, not even a single rotten tomato to throw. Just a tidy stack of greenery. Weak!

Here’s the so‑called challenge: pick vegetables, pick scoring cards, make a salad worth more points than your neighbor’s salad. That’s it! This isn’t a game, it’s grocery shopping. “Collect carrots for points.” “Collect peppers for points.” In goblin culture, collecting too many carrots earns you exile. Strategy? You call choosing between a lettuce or a scoring card strategy? Real goblin strategy is: which wall do I smash first, and who do I bite while doing it.

Theme? None. Just vegetables on a table. A salad is not a theme, it’s a sad appetizer. If you want goblins to play, give us Point Swamp with slime and bones. Or Point Cheese, where the winner hoards the most before Jugbite eats it all. Anything but this pile of fresh disappointment.

The only “interaction” is stealing the vegetable another human wanted. Oooo, conflict! You took my onion! What thrilling drama. Pathetic. A proper goblin game ends with mud, shouting, and someone missing a tooth. Here it’s just produce envy.

Final Verdict

Point Salad is quick, simple, and colorful. Perfect for humans who like counting vegetables. For goblins, it’s an insult. I will not waste swamp time tallying cabbages. The only joy I had was using a lettuce card to scrape mud from under my nails.

Krizbella’s Rotten Score: 6 Mushrooms out of 10
And why 6, not 2? Hmph. Because even though I’d rather chew gravel than eat lettuce, the blasted game is quick, colorful, and sneaky enough to make humans argue. I give it credit for causing squabbles at the table — music to goblin ears. And the cards? Easy to throw across the room when you lose. That alone is worth a couple mushrooms. Still, don’t mistake this for goblin approval — it’s salad, and salad is an insult to proper food. In the end, salad is not a meal, it’s punishment. Call it points all you want, humans — to goblins it’s just leaves pretending to be victory.

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Unfortunately, they also built a game about worker placement, brewing efficiency, card management, turn order, barrel logistics, brewery expansion, objectives, worker experience, brewing levels and approximately seventeen different ways to make Jugbite stare into the middle distance.

This is Bier Pioniere, designed by Thomas Spitzer and published by Spielefaible. It puts you in charge of a small brewery around 1850 and asks you to turn the miserable little operation into a proper industrial beer factory. The game supports 2-4 players and runs roughly 75-100 minutes according to BoardGameGeek.

And yes, humans.

For once, they may have built something worth drinking near.

Build the brewery, then make the beer actually work

At first, your brewery is pathetic.

You can only brew Alt, most of your brewery is blocked, and your workers are inexperienced little problems with legs. The rules begin with five of your six beer coops blocked by tokens and cover tiles, while your brewing level limits how many beer types you can brew.

So you improve.

You remove blocking tokens. Expand the brewery. Improve your brewing process. Upgrade workers. Add extensions. Build up your card display. Acquire barrels. Move barrels into the cellar. Brew beer. Deliver beer.

Then discover that the beer you desperately need is sitting on a card you cannot currently access.

Excellent.

Now that is a board game.

The clever part is that almost everything feeds something else. Improving brewery progress reduces brewing time. It also unlocks bonuses such as increased income, a larger hand limit and a victory point. Meanwhile, your brewing level determines both how many beer types you can brew and which cards in the shared display are available to you.

This creates the kind of development curve I actually like. You are not simply collecting points. You are gradually making your brewery more capable of doing the things you already wanted to do.

Workers with experience. Finally, useful employees.

The main action system is worker placement, but your workers have experience levels.

You start with workers at experience 1 and 2. Put a worker on an action space whose experience value combines with the worker’s experience to reach at least 6, and congratulations, your employee has apparently achieved enough professional development to unlock a bonus action.

This is one of the game’s best ideas.

It makes worker placement more than simply “I put meeple here because this spot does thing.”

You are considering which worker to use, which action space to occupy, and whether that placement will also trigger something extra. Later, workers can be upgraded, with retired workers opening additional cellar space and providing bonuses.

Even the turn order becomes part of the puzzle because choosing your position for the next round can give you access to bonuses, including the neutral worker or truck that provides additional actions.

That is good design.

Annoyingly good.

The cards are doing far too much, which is exactly why they work

The action cards are particularly nasty little things.

Each card has three possible functions. The beige-brown section can become part of your permanent display and improve things such as barrels and brewing rotations. Purple cards are beer delivery contracts. White cards provide special actions or can become permanent master brewer characters.

So the card you are holding is never simply “a card.”

It is a future engine component.

Or a delivery.

Or a useful special action.

Or something you desperately want now but probably should save for later.

Humans do enjoy making decisions unnecessarily difficult.

The six-card display is tied directly to your brewing level, too. As your brewery develops, more of the display becomes accessible.

That creates a satisfying relationship between your personal development and the public card market.

And then there is the beer

Brewing itself is a delayed process. You place brewing dials into available coops, and the required number of rotations depends on the beer and your brewery progress. Beer eventually reaches zero and moves into your cellar.

This means you cannot simply decide:

“I need Weizen.”

Then immediately have Weizen.

No.

You need the right coop. You need access to the beer type. You need brewing capacity. You need rotations. You need cellar space.

And then, assuming the beer survives the bureaucratic nightmare, you can use it for deliveries.

Those deliveries are where the points start coming in properly. Purple contract cards specify the beer and barrels required, with many providing victory points and additional rewards.

It gives the whole game a nice production-chain feeling without reducing everything to a spreadsheet.

My biggest complaint

The problem is obvious.

There is a lot going on.

The rulebook is 32 pages long, and that is not because someone needed more room to draw pictures of beer.

The game has worker placement, multi-use cards, brewing timers, player order, objectives, extensions, blocking tokens, cellar management, upgrades, bonus workers, trucks, income and several overlapping development tracks. The rules are organised, but the game is undeniably substantial.

This is not the game I would put in front of someone who thinks “worker placement” sounds like something you do at a furniture warehouse.

There is also plenty of opportunity for analysis paralysis. When every action can affect another system, the temptation to stare at the brewery board for twelve minutes while everyone else ages into dust is very real.

Krizbella would probably call this “a perfectly organised disaster.”

For once, I would not entirely disagree.

The thing I reluctantly like most

The game understands progression.

Your brewery genuinely becomes better.

You start with one beer type and a miserable collection of blocked spaces. Over time, you improve brewing efficiency, unlock beer types, expand your brewery, improve workers, develop your card engine and gain access to stronger actions. The six extension types each provide different effects, including beer filters, truck fleets, cooling systems, laboratories, malt factories and machine halls.

And the endgame rewards that development rather than simply checking who collected the most points along the way. Once someone reaches 20 victory points, the round finishes and additional scoring comes from lightbulbs and, for players who reached the final brewing-level space, coins spent on those lightbulbs.

That is a proper arc.

Small brewery.

Big brewery.

More beer.

More machinery.

More points.

More headaches.

Excellent.

Final Verdict

Bier Pioniere looks like the sort of game humans designed after deciding that making beer was not complicated enough.

And somehow, it works.

There is a lot to learn, plenty of interconnected systems to manage, and enough strategic development to keep the game interesting beyond simply completing orders for points. The worker experience system, multi-use cards, brewing progression and brewery development all reinforce the central idea rather than sitting beside the theme wearing a fake moustache.

The price of entry is complexity. This is a game for players who enjoy having several things to worry about at once.

If that sounds appealing, Bier Pioniere deserves serious attention.

If not, well…

There are always lighter games.

I assume Krizbella has already thrown them into the swamp.

Jugbite’s Rating: 8.5 cabbages out of 10.

A surprisingly sophisticated brewery engine with meaningful development, clever worker placement and enough interconnected systems to keep a goblin busy. Disgustingly competent.

The post Bier Pioniere – Jugbite’s Industrial-Strength Review appeared first on Grumpy Goblins.

This is apparently what happens when you give a tech goblin access to a website, a Patreon account and too much free time.

The result is Goblin Tokens, a new system I have built and implemented across the Grumpy Goblins website. They give our Patreon supporters another way to get something useful from their membership, while giving us a system we can expand later.

And yes, before anyone asks, I did test it.

Repeatedly.

Because unlike some modern software developers, I prefer discovering the bugs myself rather than waiting for 4,000 people to discover them simultaneously.

How Do You Get Goblin Tokens?

Goblin Tokens come with selected Grumpy Goblins Patreon tiers.

The number of tokens depends on the tier:

• Shiny Copper — 0 Goblin Tokens
• Rusty Silver — 1 Goblin Token
• Crumpled Gold — 2 Goblin Tokens
• Ancient Dragon Hoard — 5 Goblin Tokens
• Utterly Foolish Treasure Heap — 20 Goblin Tokens

The system handles the token allocation automatically through Patreon and your Grumpy Goblins account.

No goblin has to sit behind the website every month counting coins with a piece of string and a calculator.

I built the system specifically so that the tokens are tied to the Patreon membership rather than some unreliable collection of buttons and webhooks pretending to be a database.

You’re welcome.

What Can You Spend Them On?

For now, the first use is Goblin Review Requests.

Have a board game you’d like the Goblins to consider for review? You can submit a request through your account and spend one Goblin Token.

There is, however, one important restriction.

We are not going to promise reviews of games we haven’t actually played.

I know this sounds like an obvious feature for a board game website, but apparently we live in a world where stating the obvious counts as a design decision.

If a request is declined because we haven’t played the game, the token is returned to your account. The same applies if there is another valid reason why we cannot take the request.

So you’re not throwing a token into a dark hole and hoping something crawls back out.

This Is Only Version 1.0

The Review Request system is only the beginning.

The whole reason I built Goblin Tokens as a proper system rather than simply attaching a Patreon perk to one feature is that we can add more uses later.

Exactly what those uses will be is still being worked out.

There could be additional Goblin services, community features, special requests, digital rewards or other things that make having a pile of Goblin Tokens useful.

I am deliberately not promising a list of features that don’t exist yet.

That’s called planning.

Humans used to do it before they discovered the internet and started releasing software updates to fix the software updates that broke the software.

So for now, you get tokens, you can see them in your Goblin Treasury, and you can spend them on Review Requests.

More functions can be added later without rebuilding the entire system from scratch.

That was the point.

The Goblin Treasury Is Open

If you’re supporting Grumpy Goblins through one of the token-bearing Patreon tiers, you now have a stash of Goblin Tokens attached to your account.

You can check your balance, use a token for a Review Request, and keep whatever remains in your treasury for future features.

And if you’re not currently a Patreon supporter, well…

There’s an entirely unnecessary new currency waiting for you.

I built it.

It works.

Nobody asked for a blockchain.

Now I want to know what you want.

What would you like to be able to spend Goblin Tokens on?

Tell us in the comments. I’ll read the suggestions, investigate the technically sensible ones, quietly reject the ones requiring a quantum computer, and possibly build some of them.

The post Goblin Tokens Are Here! appeared first on Grumpy Goblins.

Hoste has been running the company’s international business since 2020 and now takes over as head of studio. Former CEO Carly McGinnis has moved into a global publishing role at Asmodee. So the corporate chairs have been shuffled, the titles have changed, and somewhere a spreadsheet has achieved enlightenment.

Same cats, bigger machine

Hoste says the goal is to keep making games that bring people together while expanding Exploding Kittens into a brand with staying power. Which is corporate language for “please keep buying the cat things.”

Exploding Kittens has already travelled considerably further than most card games. The original Kickstarter raised almost $8.8 million in 2015, and the company said it had sold more than 60 million games by its tenth anniversary. The brand has also expanded into mobile gaming and an animated Netflix series.

At this point, calling it a card-game company is a bit like calling a computer with three monitors a calculator. Technically defensible. Not particularly useful.

Asmodee likes the party

Asmodee has also been putting more resources into social and party games. In March, it agreed to pay up to €250 million for French publisher ATM Gaming, with the deal described as combining ATM’s European strength with Exploding Kittens’ position in the US.

Asmodee has also launched US party-game studio Moodbox Games. The corporate folder labelled “party games” is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to close without something falling out.

Exploding Kittens has remained a strong performer for Asmodee despite weaker conditions in parts of the US market. Asmodee has specifically highlighted the brand’s growth while discussing declining US quarterly sales. The cats, apparently, continue to function.

Bytebeard checks the system logs

There is nothing particularly mysterious about this move. Exploding Kittens already has a large audience, a recognisable identity and ways to exist outside a cardboard box. Asmodee wants more social-game business, and Hoste has been given the job of expanding the brand.

The interesting part is the word “evergreen”. Humans love this word. It makes a product sound as though it will quietly generate money forever while everyone involved drinks coffee and talks about brand ecosystems.

Personally, I prefer “works reliably”. That is how we described software before every program needed an account, twelve notifications and an update because somebody moved a button.

For now, the facts are straightforward. Joeri Hoste is the new head of the Exploding Kittens studio, the stated goal is to build the IP into a long-lasting brand, and Asmodee is continuing to invest in the social and party-game space.

Whether the cats can remain interesting for the long haul is something humans will have to find out by buying the next box. I will be here, watching the logs.

Sources & Useful Links

• Original report from BoardGameWire
• Exploding Kittens
• Asmodee

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