As you walk Hall 10 — a.k.a. the "game, book, learning, and experimenting" hall — at the 2026 Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair, you pass booths large and small, and if you're a curious sort of fellow who wants to know everything coming to market in the year ahead, you'll stop at every single booth that time allows for.
Even the smallest of booths, such as the one occupied by Edition Spielwiese, will often have a handful of new releases, and those titles are part of the stew of offerings that gamers will see over the next twelve months. Sampling that stew gives you a feel for what the market is doing, which in 2026 is continuing the trend of most games costing no more than US$/€30. Exceptions exist, of course, but publishers seem to be going smaller, whether due to concerns about the global market or worries about unpredictable tariff costs when delivering goods to the United States.
In any case, here are the five titles coming from Edition Spielwiese:
Spooky Bar from Benjamin Schwer puts 2-4 players in control of taverns that each start filled with five guests, guests who wouldn't mind taking home a ghost as a souvenir of their night out. Just don't confront them with too many ghosts, though, or else they'll flee without paying for their drinks — and in the end, cash in hand is all that matters.
On a turn, each player places two cards with different actions face down in front of themselves, then everyone reveals their cards at the same time. (If you have three cards of the same type, you can use these three as a joker, with the lowest number being on top.) Players then resolve cards from high to low in the following way:
- If the action is present among all face-up cards at least three times, turn your card over. No action for you!
- If the action is present twice, do the action twice!
- If the action is present once, do it once and be happy that you're getting to do it at all compared to those schmoes earlier in the round who got stiffed.
What are those actions? From left to right above:
- Place a drink on a guest.
- Have a guest leave your tavern, placing them (and their drinks) off to the side, then take the guest's action.
- Bottle a ghost at your tavern as a souvenir, placing it to the side.
- Attract a new ghost to your tavern, with that ghost being pink if you would take this action twice.
- Move a ghost from one tavern to another.
Bottled ghosts are worth coins, so you always want to move ghosts to your tavern, right? No! If three ghosts are at a tavern, they scare away one of the guests before fleeing...and if that tavern is owned by another player, that guest runs to your tavern for safety.
When a tavern has no guests, the game ends, then everyone tallies their cash for ghosts bottled and guests served, with them paying more for each drink they've had.
Spooky Bar is due out in Germany in Q3 2026 and will debut in the U.S. at Gen Con 2026.
Leaf it!, which is also due out in Q3 2026, is a stacking and memory game for 2-4 players from frequent collaborators Anja Wrede and Christoph Cantzler. To set up, place pairs of cards vertically in the nested box top and bottom to form the tree trunk, then distribute cards brown side up to the players.
On a turn, reveal your top card, then add it to the tree's canopy, covering the animal placed by the previous player. Once all the cards have been placed, take turns removing one card at a time from the canopy, pulling cards from anywhere you wish. If you knock over the canopy at any point, but don't wipe it out entirely, each other player takes one card from what's fallen, then you discard the rest; if you wipe out everything, you lose the game straight off, so don't do that.
Why does it matter which cards you collect? Because each frog is worth 3 points, each butterfly 2, and each mouse lemur only 1, so you want to remember which animals are where so that you can snatch the frogs out of the canopy before anyone else. Your prize for winning? The bill for mouse lemur therapy to address their feelings of worthlessness.
Not pictured: MAGNET's YUBIBO, a dexterity game that debuted from Japanese publisher JELLY JELLY GAMES in 2024. In this co-operative game, players build a "hand sculpture" of sorts; specifically, each turn, the active player reveals a card that shows a player color and a specified finger, and the indicated player and one other player must place a long wooden dowel between their fingers. Over time, everyone takes part in this living sculpture, and ideally you can keep all of the dowels in the air.
Maybe. Not. Perfect? is a small party game from Friedemann Friese that will debut at SPIEL Essen 26 in which players try to place professions in the right places.
On a turn, a player reveals three professions and sees a secret ranking card, then gives a clue that (ideally) matches one of these professions perfectly, another of these professions a little bit, and the third profession not at all. Can your fellow players guess who belongs where?
Given the image above, for example, what clue would you give for judge, fisherman, and construction worker to have them match these symbols? What about for jeweller, shepherd, and engine driver?
In Marco Teubner's Isle Tiles, which will also debut at SPIEL Essen 26, 2-4 players take turns placing domino-style tiles comprised of two hexes onto a shared game board, creating islands together and claiming valuable locations with their camps based on the four public goals revealed in this particular playing. The higher an area, the more valuable it is, but ownership is not guaranteed and an opponent might de-camp you before it's time to score.
Finally, as you might expect, designer Johannes Sich and Edition Spielwiese are making more MicroMacro, with MicroMacro Kids: Alarm im Ferienlager ("Alarm at the Summer Camp") repeating the format of MicroMacro: Kids – Crazy City Park, with all of the cases that players need to solve being packaged in a spiral notebook that keeps everything in order.
Here's the view in one of the men's bathrooms at Spielwarenmesse...when you're staring at the ceiling.
