Don Your Chain, and Go Skating Indoors

Game Market takes place in the city of Chiba on Tokyo Bay on 17-18 October 2026, and one publisher you'll find on hand there — then at SPIEL Essen 26 the following week! — is itten, which I've covered for a decade thanks to its playful creations that seem unlike anything else on the market.

For late 2026, itten has three new titles in its "Funbrick" series of long skinny games, and we'll start with My Extreme Skatepark, some of the components of which you can see in the image at top and a mock-up gameplay example of which you can see in the image below.

Yes, in this design from Daniel Arosteguy Pino and Naotaka Shimamoto for 2-4 players you launch your skateboard from your hand, scoring points based on whether you touch, lean on, or land on the boxes. Each successful trick lets you remodel the park, with dice on surrounding obstacles giving you an additional way to score. (I'm sure you can imagine how!)

Each turn in Music Nonsense from Yoshiaki Tomioka and Mandy Tong, one player creates or plays a tune on the box xylophone (!) based on the letter-and-number combination they draw, then they change one of the words and play another tune. Will the difference between the songs help the guessers identify which words the player was trying to communicate?

Mystery Chain is a design by Paul Schulz, Arno Steinwender, and Mandy Tong in which the active player each round uses the "mystery stick" to move a linked chain and create an image matching their secret word.

This player has thirty seconds in which to create an image, but those thirty seconds come in ten second chunks. After the first two pauses, other players reveal word cards from their hand, earning one "assist point" if the active player thinks a word is a good clue. Ideally you can guess the secret word as well, but if not, you still might not be shut out for the round.

Mystery Chain is a re-iteration of Outlines, a Schulz and Steinwender design that moses. Verlag released in 2022. That game was simpler in that it had only a drawer and guessers, but adding the word clues seems like a great upgrade to the design as then the guessing isn't all or nothing, score or don't score. What's more, the assist points encourage the guessers to contribute to a successful round. In effect, you get partial points for a correct-ish guess along the path toward the answer.

By chance, I ran into Paul Schulz one morning at (I believe) SPIEL Essen 24 while chatting with other designers. He took out the chain and wooden stick from Outlines, and soon we were all taking turns playing with the chain, not from a gaming perspective, but simply due to the pleasurable challenge of trying to shape the chain into an image while touching it in a limited way. This is the type of thing people do for fun all the time, and it's neat to see it gamified this way.

Finally, Naotaka Shimamoto's Crash Octopus — which I wrote about in 2020 — has been reprinted after being out of stock for a couple of years and is available once again. In the game, cargo is scattered about in the ocean, and you want to be the first to collect all five types of cargo, with the octopus sometimes flailing about on the table and knocking cargo off your boat through the assistance of opponents.