Continuing through the halls of the 2026 Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair, we come to KOSMOS, which was celebrating the tenth anniversary of Inka and Markus Brand's EXIT: The Game series, in addition to featuring many other upcoming releases in the first half of 2026. I'll cover the new EXIT titles in a post on February 17, 2026 that will be clear at the time and cover everything else now.
The most appealing novelty might be Bernhard Weber's Temple Twist, which KOSMOS will release in Germany in March 2026 and Thames & Kosmos will release in the U.S. in Q2 2026.
In this 1-4 player co-operative game, you need to complete all of the objectives facing you before the deck runs out of cards.
This vertical game board has a red cube inside, and as you rotate the game board, the cube falls and lands in a different location. To complete objectives, you need to see the cube through the proper openings in the game board, but to see the cube through a circular opening — the goal on the objective at the left in the image above — you will need to add barriers to keep the cube from falling through the game board since no corner of that board features a circle, and to add and remove barriers and to turn the game board certain ways, you need to play cards.
The rules include different difficulty levels so that you can scale up the challenge as you improve, and the components include door tiles, order tokens, joker tokens, and a slime monster, with the purpose of the latter being a mystery to me.
Happy Holiday, which is also due out in Germany in March 2026, is a 1-4 player game from Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert in which each player will construct a three-week vacation for themselves. Such a European concept!
Players draft tiles from the shared market, with the market being in three segments — bus, train, and plane — and you can acquire suitcases from the market in the matching colors in order to allow for transitions from one city to another. In the player board facing you in the image above, that player spends three days in Venice, then goes to Amsterdam, and since no direct connection exists on the map, the player must spend plane suitcases to travel to the Netherlands.
The longer you stay in a location, the better, with tiles having restrictions on what goes where, in addition to symbols indicating sights, shopping, cultural visits, and meals.
For a different type of European experience, you could play Günter Burkhardt's Schätz dich durch Europa, in which 2-5 players are challenged in their knowledge of European countries.
Max Ostrander's Der Wanderzirkus, which debuted in late January 2026, gives 1-6 players a hand of three performer cards, with a player adding a performer to their circus row each turn and getting a new card. Cards contain various combinations of colored tabs on their left and right edges, and you want to complete those tabs across connected cards to gain stars, coins, and other benefits.
Joker cards match everything next to them, but cost you points when scoring a round, and a round ends when someone can't make a legal play or their circus row features four red hands, which are visible in the card corners.
Ubongo! Flex is the latest entry in Grzegorz Rejchtman's Ubongo! game line, with the twist in this March 2026 release being that players will first use generic pieces to create their own puzzle level that needs to be filled, then they'll race to fill that level.
The description had me saying, wait, is that it? But it's not like Ubongo! itself is that complicated, so I don't know why I would expect a radically different challenge.
Another Rejchtman release, this time in May 2026, is Ubongo! Extrem Brain Games, a set of two hundred challenges in which you're tasked with covering a specific area with specified pieces.
A similar release is Andrea Mainini's Into the Dungeon Brain Games, which features two hundred challenges in which you need to create paths to avoid pits and monsters on your way to specified treasures.
Unfortunately, I had limited time at the KOSMOS booth with a rep before they had to move to their next meeting, so I have correspondingly limited info on the remaining titles. Luc Rémond's Fantasy Ink, for example, is a two-player game in which you're collecting characters to complete your book. Whoever does this first — or whoever collects a certain group of characters — wins this 30-minute game due out in March 2026.
Another March 2026 release is the trick-taking game Tricky Teams from Florian Biege, Jan Cronauer, and Marc-Uwe Kling, with four suits of animals that bear special powers.
Man, card games take the worst photos in situations like these. It just looks like someone forgot to clean the table before the show opened.
Ken Gruhl and Quentin Weir's card game Dino Party has 2-5 players trying to collect three sets of six dinosaurs of the same color, with played cards triggering effects.
Missing out on an overview of Benjamin Teuber's CATAN: Das Kartenspiel is probably my biggest failure at this show. I keep seeing short descriptions from KOSMOS and asmodee (which will distribute the title as CATAN: On the Road in North America), and they say things like, "Feels just like CATAN, but in twenty minutes. Build roads, trade resources, build settlements into cities, and watch out for the robber." Okay, and...?!
Ideally I'll finally get an overview at Toy Fair NY in mid-February.
Klause Teuber's CATAN: Das Würfelspiel is the same design that debuted in 2007, but now has graphics matching the newest edition of CATAN.
Jacob Berg's Die Jury: Die Welle des Schweigens (The Wave of Silence), which is due out in March 2026, follows the same format as 2025's Die Jury: Zwei Gesichter – Ein Schuss, with 2-5 players listening to audio recordings from a courtroom — closing arguments from the prosecution and defense, as well as questioning of witnesses, police officers, and medical examiners — in order to gather clues and figure out what happened to a man who was found dead on a fishing boat with signs of severe injuries and strangulation.
Tobias Tesar's Perfect Murder might look similar to the title above, but it's actually a two-player game of murderer versus detective. Before the game begins, the murderer determines which of the nine suspects committed the crime, which of the twelve weapons was used, and through which of the eight rooms the murderer entered the villa. Over eight rounds, the detective tries to discover this information, while the murderer tries to muddy the waters to keep it secret.
Steffen Hecker's Monstersnack is a memory challenge in which you're trying to recall which monster wants which goodies, with monsters moving around the table instead of staying in their seat like well-behaved critters.
Die Insel der Mookies is a German edition of Florian Sirieix's Mooki Island, which Scorpion Masqué debuted in 2025. Two stacks of cards are on the table, and each turn a player drafts a card off the top of either stack, turns either side face up, then places it on their own stack (if it's a mooki) or an opponent's stack (if it's a spider). Once all cards have been placed, you see who has the majority in each of the five mooki families, claiming that family's trophy, with the majority spider holder returning one of their trophies. Whoever then has the most stars on their trophies wins.
The five-book Furzipups series from Kai Lüftner has sold more than 800,000 copies, but it's news to me, with my awareness of the series consisting only of a game adaptation KOSMOS released in 2025: Furzipups der Knatterdrache: Drachenstarkes Memo-Spiel. "Knatterdrache", in case you didn't know, translates to "farting dragon", thus the widespread appeal of these books.
For 2026, KOSMOS has a new such adaptation: Furzipups und seine Freunde from Manfred Ludwig, with 2-4 players racing to reach the end of the track first, with movement controlled by a die roll and random fart sounds generated by the included device. Farts determine who gets to move next! Be sure to introduce this rule in your next game.
