At the 2026 Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair, Italian publisher DV Games featured 4-6 new games, depending on how you count both newness and games.
The company's Gen Con 2026 release will be Raindrops, a 2-4 player design by Fernando Cunha that falls squarely into the "cozy games" trend of the mid-2020s. The window depicted on the cover mirrors the shared game board, with colored water droplets "running down" the window via domino-style tiles that "fall" in vertical channels.
On a turn, you trace a trail of droplets of the same color from the top of the board to where the trail ends, moving left or right at most one column for each level you travel down the board. (The rules suggest using the included clear beads to mark the path when learning the game, but you probably won't do that for long.) You then remove these tiles from the window, placing them on memory cards on matching-colored spaces to score points and (if you complete three cards with the same symbol) collect bonus tiles.
If you remove only 1-3 tiles, you also take a square tile holding a single droplet, which can help fill in awkward holes in your memory. You might be able to avoid that "bonus", however, thanks to three actions that allow you to manipulate the tile layout. At the start of your turn, you can swap two tiles, rotate a tile, or move a tile to the top of a column, with you being unable to repeat the same action twice. Choose your path with care because if you take a tile from the bottom row, you receive a thunder token worth 3-5 points. Yes, the thunder token is shaped like a lightning bolt. Thunder is aspirational that way...
Cucumber Catastrophe, which is due out in May 2026, is a 3-6 player trick-taking game from Michael Feldkötter that riffs on the TikTok trend of showing cats being freaked out by cukes.
In each of four rounds, dill each player a random hand of ten cards. In each trick, the lead player plays a card, then the second player plays any card, setting up this trick as one in which everyone must play higher or lower than the lead card. Whoever plays the highest/lowest card "wins" the trick and claims all played cards, which is bad as you want to score as few cucumbers as possible. (For three-player games, the rules suggest using the "Surprise Cucumber" variant, with the lead card being flipped from the deck and the first player setting the high/low condition. Please do not use a "Surprise Cucumber" variant in any other game or elsewhere in life.)
If you can't "follow suit" by playing higher or lower, then the winning condition flips for that turn. If the highest card was going to win, now the lowest one will, and players can play whatever they wish.
In another variant, you set up the deck so that the six 5-cucumber cards will be included, and if you collect at least four of these cards in the round, you "shoot the cucumber" (cucumber the moon?) and score -5 points for the round instead of the barrelful of points you'd normally get.
The image above features six promo cards with values ending in .5 and special actions.
Further down the 2026 calendar, we come to Villa by Andrea Emiliani, with this being a 2-4 player game due out in Q3 2026 in which players take turns drawing a spindly plastic component from a bag, then connecting that component to others on the table to (over time) create enclosed areas. The spindly components have colored segments on their edges, and if you have more of your color on the perimeter of an enclosed space, you mark it with one of your tokens.
The game features ten unique power cards, with three random powers being active in a game to set scoring conditions for all players.
Combo Creatures is by Michael Løhde Andersen and Christian Kudahl, and this will actually be a pair of standalone games, each featuring eleven creatures with unique powers. You use a subset of creatures each game, playing them for their abilities as well as their points, which are represented by nuts.
The two Combo Creatures titles will debut at SPIEL Essen 26.
An expansion for Koi, a 2025 release from Rosaria Battiato, Massimo Borzì, and Martino Chiacchiera, is also in the works for SPIEL Essen 26, which will coincide with DV Games' 25th anniversary. Hmm, this means that Emiliano Sciarra's card game BANG! will turn 25 the following year, so I imagine celebratory shots will be fired in 2027...
In the "new?" category, we have Enrico Vicario's card game Sensu, which won the 2023 Gioco Inedito design contest run by DV Games and Lucca Comics & Games, with the prize being publication of the game in a limited edition at the 2023 game fair in Lucca, Italy.
Following that release, DV Games decided to develop the game further, as Vicario detailed in a designer diary on BoardGameGeek, then brought out a new edition of the game at SPIEL Essen 25, with Sensu finally having a retail release in January 2026.
You never know what you're going to find while walking Spielwarenmesse, with this booth featuring an advent calendar filled with AC/DC-themed socks, size 40-45, for the fan in your life who is currently walking around with cold and/or sockless feet.
I didn't see an open copy of "Huggable Pizza", so you'll just have to imagine that.
