My first stop of the day at the 2026 Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair on Wednesday was Ravensburger, which had a a smidge of alea titles, an overhaul of its children's game line, and a large number of family friendly games...including a trick-taking game for five-year-olds!
At SPIEL Essen 25, Ravensburger had announced that designers Max J. Kobbert and Klaus-Jürgen Wrede were working together on a game that would merge their two signature titles, respectively Labyrinth and Carcassonne. You can see the result — Carcassonne Labyrinth — in the images above and below, with this 2-4 player game scheduled for release in September 2026.
Gameplay for Carcassonne Labyrinth should be intuitive for anyone who's played the two earlier games. At the start of your turn, if you lack a goal tile, draw the top tile of your colored deck. In the image above, the tile shows a mouse, so you want to move your figure to the tile with the mouse — and a path already exists, so don't mess it up with your next action, which is to slide your tile in hand into a row or column along any of the eight triangles, ejecting a different tile at the other end of the line. (You can do this in five ways.)
Move your figure, landing on the mouse in this case, which satisfies your objective. As a result, you take both the tile you ejected and the goal tile you completed, then start or add to a personal city built in front of you. The game lasts ten rounds, so you'll have at least ten tiles for this city, but the more objectives you complete, the more tiles you have.
Once the goal tile is in your city, the circle showing the goal serves another purpose. If you complete the city feature — a city in this case — that includes the goal, you take a rat token from the reserve and cover this circle. At game's end, you stack all of the tiles and tokens in your personal city, and whoever has the tallest stack wins.
In an Oct. 25, 2025 BGG News post, I gave an overview of Labyrinth: Chronicles, a legacy-based version of the forty-year-old Labyrinth. Ravensburger's Andre Maack said that Labyrinth: Chronicles — which will be crowdfunded in Q1 2026 — will be released to retail outlets in September 2026, although it's not clear how many stores will be stocking the game given its price and size, with the box width being roughly half of its length.
In that Oct. 2025 BGG News post, I mentioned that Ravensburger's alea brand would release three German-language licensed games in 2026. Two of those titles are Donald X. Vaccarino's Moon Colony Bloodbath and Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich's Propolis, both of which are due out in Q1 2026.
Why is alea releasing licensed games at this time? Partly it's a result of Ravensburger relaxing its alea marketing practices and allowing licensed games to be published in formats other than the numbered rectangular box that has been a constant with alea since its debut with Ra in 1999. Maack said that some licensing deals hadn't proceed in the past because alea wanted to re-package a game to match its line and the originating publisher insisted on maintain the original format.
The third alea title was going to be Maxime Rambourg's Présages, but that game, now titled Vision and due out in March 2026, will be part of the regular Ravensburger line. Vision is a team trick-taking game in which one team member needs to get down to a single card in hand for the team to win the round; this can difficult to do since only one played card is guaranteed to be discarded at the end of the trick, with the played card effects making many surprising things happen.
My guide through the Ravensburger booth, designer, developer, and game scout Lena Burkhardt, was disappointed that I already knew Vision as she was excited to teach the game. I can appreciate that desire to share something you love...
Timothée Decroix's BoBoBon is the aforementioned trick-taking game for youngsters, with cards coming in four colors and eight shapes. Each trick, the lead player lays down a card, then each other player must lay down a card of the same color, if possible. After each player has played a card, the largest card wins the trick — and in this case "largest" literally means largest. You can stack all of the cards, then see which one is visible under all the others (or obscures those beneath it). The winner takes one of two score tiles on display, trying to collect more stars than anyone else. In the base game, ants cost you a point, so you want to avoid winning a trick in which only ants are available.
BoBoBon lasts five rounds and is due out in February 2026.
Jens Merkl's Minecraft: Digging Down, which is due out in Q3 2026, is a co-operative card game for up to four players in which you're trying to dig through the field of cards (with only a few shown in the image above) before everyone runs out of the tools. Maybe you spend picks to get a super pick or a torch to lessen the number of swords needed to fight a monster. Take enough wounds, and you'll need to travel to re-boot your health.
Rudi Biber's Snackaroo, due out in January 2026, is a quick-playing, card-slapping design, with up to five players trying to give various critters the snacks that they're missing.
Each player has a deck showing the critters with their snacks, and a central deck features snackless creatures, sometimes with more than one on a card. In the base game, someone reveals a central card, then everyone flips through their personal deck one by one, racing to be the first to reveal this animal (or one of two featured animals) and claim the card.
The initial level is basic, but you can up the challenge by separating your personal deck into two snacks, looking through only one of them before the game begins. After the central card is revealed, you can pick up only one stack in your search for a matching animal. If you do well, split your cards among three stacks, looking at only two of them. This set-up also gives a way to level the field against players at different skill levels.
