Many games never die; they just lie underground for a while before returning from the grave, which seems very on brand for the first title covered in this post.
Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game
U.S. publisher Renegade Game Studios has made a habit of returning older games to the market — HeroScape, Robo Rally, Acquire — and its newest title along these lines is Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game, a design by Rob Heinsoo, Peter Lee, Mike Mearls, and Bill Slavicsek that Wizards of the Coast released in 2010.
Gameplay appears to be the same as in the original release, with 1-5 players coming together as fantasy heroes — cleric, ranger, rogue, warrior, or wizard — to explore a castle tile by tile in one of thirteen replayable scenarios. The publisher notes that the game features "updated illustrations and graphic design", and the game is due out in February 2027 in two versions: a US$100 version with 42 unpainted miniatures and a US$200 version with painted minis.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Netflix is collaborating with Hasbro on Ravenloft, which Deadline describes as "a live-action series based on the popular gothic horror setting of Dungeons & Dragons". (Of course, a live-action series based on The Forgotten Realms started development at Netflix in early 2025, but has apparently been shelved, so Ravenloft might go nowhere, too.)
Clank! The Forgotten Vault
Instead of exploring a castle with your hero, you could instead head deep underground, trying not to make too much noise that will attract unwanted attention from whatever is guarding the treasures you want to make off with. That's the premise of Paul Dennen's Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure, which debuted in 2016 from Dire Wolf and Renegade Game Studios, and which is published solely by Dire Wolf these days.
For the game's tenth anniversary, Dire Wolf is re-releasing the base game in a "Master Thief Edition" that re-balances some cards, tweaks the endgame, and moves various game board elements to their own boards. Other Clank! products will be Master Thief-ed in the same way as they go out of print, and Dire Wolf has prepared a "Clank! Mastery Pack" that includes material needed to update the base game and five existing expansions.
The "Clank! Mastery Pack" is part of a crowdfunding campaign along with a new expansion — Clank! The Forgotten Vault, which features two new maps and accompanying new gameplay elements — and "The Cube of Holding", an enormous plastic storage device for Clank! and its expansions, but not the various spinoff titles.
"The Cube of Holding" (US$90) is only one of many "cosmetic" offerings in Dire Wolf's crowdfunding campaign, along with a neoprene map pack (US$90), a card sleeve bundle (US$65), acrylic token upgrades (US$55), metallic cubes (US$50), metallic coins (US$30), and more. Maybe I should be surprised that the average amount spent by each backer as of this writing is US$288. Apparently a decent number of Clank! superfans exist, and they're quietly going all in.
The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow: 25th Anniversary Edition
Gothic horror of a different sort awaits in The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow: 25th Anniversary Edition, which is yet another edition of the Philippe des Pallières and Hervé Marly design that debuted in 2001 from French publisher Lui-même and that in 2026 is handled by asmodee studio Zygomatic.
Miller's Hollow is a branded take on the Werewolf/Mafia public domain party game in which each player receives a secret role that will determine their goal for the game. At its most basic, if you're a werewolf, you want to stay hidden among the villagers so that you can keep killing them, and if you're a villager, you want to find the werewolves and lynch them in order to save yourself.
The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow: 25th Anniversary Edition, which was released on 31 August 2026, features four scenarios and 28 character roles, with four being unique to this edition of the game: the Puppeteer, the Wise Monkey, the Colossus, and the Mighty Wolf-Mother.
Die Kutschfahrt zur Teufelsburg
Gamers of a certain age might recall publisher Adlung-Spiele, which was the Oink Games of its heyday from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. Every release was a deck of cards in a cardboard tuckbox barely bigger than the deck of cards. No one was demanding room to sleeve cards back then!
Marcel-André Casasola Merkle's Verräter (1998) and Meuterer (2000), Alan R. Moon and Aaron Weissblum's Canal Grande (2002), Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's Die Fugger (2003), Günter Burkhardt's Vom Kap bis Kairo (2001) — these games were tiny treasures that you were usually willing to spend a few Euros (or Deutschmarks if you go back far enough) on because they took up so little room in your bag at SPIEL.
To my surprise, Adlung-Spiele is still around, and it's partnered with Swiss publisher Carletto, which releases games under the brand Game Factory, to issue a new edition of the 2006 game Die Kutschfahrt zur Teufelsburg ("The Carriage Ride to Devil's Castle") from Michael Palm and Lukas Zach, with this edition also including the 2012 expansion Die dunkle Prophezeiung ("The Dark Prophecy").
In this 3-10 player game, players are secretly divided into two groups — The Order of Open Secrets and The Brotherhood of True Lies — and to win the game you need to be able to identify among your teammates those who hold the three specific objects your secret society is trying to collect.
On a turn, you either propose to trade an object with another player, attack another player, pass, or attempt to declare victory. To trade, you give someone an object from your hand, then they either return it to you or give you something else; some objects have effects when traded. To attack, you declare who you're attacking, then other players indicate whether they're going to join the attack or defense, with the winner learning the loser's identity and stealing an object from them.
Die dunkle Prophezeiung gives players more objects, allows the coachman (a player role) to decide whether events take place (with you being able to become the coachman by defeating them), and with an odd player count a traitor role allowing one player to win on their own.
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