Thanks to my time at both the Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair and Toy Fair NY, for the past four weeks I've mostly been focusing on games due out in early 2026, but let's look a bit further into the future with a sampling of games looking for financial support on crowdfunding, starting with Lion Dancers, the third title from Pauline Kong and Marie Wong of Hot Banana Games after Steam Up and Moon Bunny. (Kickstarter)
In each of three rounds of this 1-4 player game that blends lion dancing with the traditions of Lunar New Year, the players' lions dance across the stage to demonstrate their routine while collect items worth points. From the publisher: "When you think you have enough items, seize the Lucky Lettuce and return home, forcing the other lions to do the same. Timing is everything: ending early means fewer points…but ending too late might mean no points at all! Plan carefully to maximize your score."
I first wrote about Almighty — a 1-4 player game from Kevin Privalle and Malachi Ray Rempen — in April 2024, and publisher Keen Bean Studio has finally launched a crowdfunding campaign for the design, with delivery anticipated in early 2027. (Kickstarter)
In this game, you are a moody ancient god competing for belief and glory by playing act cards in one of four different lands to create, move, bless, curse, and poke mortals in that land. Whichever god has the most belief in a land gains glory, but only worthy mortals are worth glory, so if any unworthy mortals walk a land high in belief of your mighty self, you had best move them elsewhere — or smite them. No god owns the mortals, so you need to manipulate them to best effect ahead of a round's end.
Each god — of Sun, Love, Storms, and the Dead — has a unique deck of act cards, and you see only a smattering of the mortal deck in each game to enable variety in gameplay.
Through the Ash is a new U.S. publisher founded by Joshua Koester and Michael Young, and they're crowdfunding their debut title: Sugarworks, a game in which you need to manage the flow of candy down three conveyor belts in order to get the right bits packaged to fulfill orders. Newly arriving candy bumps the belts, as do opponents, so don't take a sweets break until one type of candy runs out, after which players tally fulfilled orders. (Kickstarter)
André Teruya and Igor Knop's Àiyé first appeared in 2023 in a Portuguese edition from Grok Games, and now U.S. publisher Moon Saga Workshop is crowdfunding an English-language edition for release in late 2026. (Kickstarter)
This 2-4 player game uses mancala as the basis for its engine-building engine, with each player developing a personal display of cards and activating one or two columns of cards each turn. Initially you start with basic cards that provide only sun and moon seeds — the currencies of the game — but over time you can acquire character cards that allow you to add and remove columns, sabotage other players' columns, develop and trigger a council that can't be sabotaged, convert one currency to another, and so on.
Moon cards include scoring conditions based on seeds on hand, icons in your display, the number of cards in columns, etc., and play continues until someone has four moon cards or eighteen cards total in their display, after which scoring takes place.
Moon Saga Workshop is crowdfunding two other games at the same time, with Jason Harris's Loom being a tile-laying game in which you score for extending chains of the same color yarn and for creating loops and weaves, with more colors granting more points.
Mark Jambeck's Dragon Scrolls is a minimalist game in which 2-5 players build scrolls of only seven cards over three rounds. You start with a single card showing one of eight colors of dragons, and in each of three rounds, you all simultaneously choose one of three cards in hand and add it to your scroll. After seeing what your neighbors did, you pass one card face down left and right. From your face-down cards, you randomly pick one and add it to your scroll — or you throw it away and get the other card instead. Surprise! The eight dragon colors all score differently, so ideally you end up getting something good.
