Grab Bits and Nuts, and Assemble Snowman Butts

After landing on multiple "best of the year" lists in 2025 for the games Magical Athlete and Hot Streak — in addition to releasing a new edition of Quacks — U.S. publisher CMYK has been quiet so far in 2026...until now.

On 29 September 2026, CMYK announced the availability through its website of Grabble, a new edition of Naoki Fukuda's game Nuts a GoGo!, which Japanese publisher itten released in 2022.

Gameplay is straightforward: Put the six types of bits in the game box. Give a signal, then everyone starts grabbing bits and placing them in a tiny personal cup. When a player has a full cup, they start counting down and whoever is last to stop collecting bits must give a bit of their choice to the player who stopped first. Starting with the player who stopped and going clockwise, a player reveals one bit from their cup, then everyone else must discard a bit of the same type; if they don't, they're out of the game. Keep going until only one person remains.

The design is fairly silly, yet it still gives you moments to ponder during the lightning-fast play. Do you go for a variety of bits to try to counter every call? Do you want to hoard one type of bit, then call that each time your turn comes around? Three types of bits come in two sizes, so should you concentrate on grabbing the smaller bits to fit more in your cup, or will you be wasting time when you could be grabbing bits indiscriminately?

Grabble has small differences from Nuts a GoGo!, starting with the rules, which fit neatly on the inside of the box, whereas Nuts a GoGo! includes rules for four variant games, e.g., instead of dumping out your bits behind your hand so that you can access everything, you must grab bits from the cup as they're stacked, which might lead to you dropping bits and having them removed from play. A representative from CMYK told me that including only one ruleset seemed to make sense given that the game will be marketed in a wide variety of retail outlets. (While initially available only from CMYK, Grabble will be available via retail in Q4 2026 / Q1 2027.)

The change of components surprised me as the wood bits in Nuts a GoGo! are both pleasing to the eye and a source of confusion when you're trying to grab a particular type of bit — and yet I can understand why CMYK went with something different. I mean, that's kind of its thing given its new look for Quacks and its Magenta card game line. Why copy another publisher's component design when we can make something new? If someone really wants the Nuts version, that's still available on the market, but now players have a second choice, too.

What's more, Nuts a GoGo! wasn't even the first release of this design as it previously appeared in 2021 as MADA HAiLE from Asobication Games — and I was lucky enough to play that edition at BGG.CON in 2023:

That's wildly different from Nuts a GoGo!, with translucent components such as plastic rings, bells, and cars in many colors, along with metal coins and gold bars. You can't just grab all the blue bits to horde an item because many types of bits are blue, so you need to poke around in the pile to find what you want.

I dig it when publishers — and by extension artists — go out of their way to put their unique spin on a licensed game. The varied editions of Reiner Knizia's Circus Flohcati delight me in their unique takes on the design, for example, and Daniel Newman does something novel with each title he licenses for New Mill Industries. More of this, please!

Olaf Mix-Up!

In June 2026, I previewed KPop Demon Hunters: Battle for the Spotlight, a game based on Seiji Kanai's Love Letter with design by Waleed Ma'arouf, and before that game has even hit retail outlets in the U.S. on 2 October 2026, publisher Z-Man Games has already announced another spinoff of Love Letter courtesy of Ma'arouf: Olaf Mix-Up!

In this 2-5 player game, you follow the Love Letter formula — on your turn, draw a card, then play one of the two cards in hand — but your goal is to use various Frozen characters to re-assemble the snowman Olaf, with each player having their own seven-piece jigsaw puzzle. Some card effects let you place a piece immediately, while others take effect at the end of the round. Standard Love Letter effects are in play — swap your hand, protection from attacks, guess the card an opponent holds — but your reward for holding the highest card is to add two pieces to your puzzle.

The game lasts multiple rounds, ending as soon as someone puts Olaf together again...after which you can slap him apart and start over again.

The LOOP

In late 2020, French publisher Catch Up Games released The LOOP, a co-operative design from Maxime Rambourg and Théo Rivière in which up to four players use time-travel shenanigans to try to defeat Dr. Foo, who attempts to use clones to destroy eras of time. How time travel is implemented in this design is that you can spend energy to re-gain cards played on a turn so that you can play those cards again — and if you can afford the ever-increasing cost, you can loop multiple times.

Publisher Pandasaurus Games released The LOOP in English in 2021, with Dr. Foo becoming Dr. Faux, then followed up with English-language editions of The Revenge of Fauxzilla! and The Fur Brigade in 2022 — but those expansions were released in short supply, leading to copies selling for multiple times their suggested retail price.

However, in late September 2026, Pandasaurus announced that it was reprinting the base game and both expansions, with copies due out in March 2027. Pre-orders are available for those in the U.S., and these copies will also be distributed in non-European, English-speaking locations due to licensing restrictions.