Publisher Mandoo Games releases games in Korean in its home country and in English at SPIEL Essen, with these titles being available for licensing by others, such as 25th Century Games, which has released several trick-taking games from Mandoo, such as Geonil's The Yellow House, which I reviewed in 2024.
One new release coming from Mandoo is Shimoda: Perry Road, a design from Lee Ju-Hwa and Giung Kim that plays in 15 minutes as two players each construct a shopping district on their side of a waterway to attract tourists. During set-up, four tourists are randomly placed on each of two bridges that span the waterway, and each player drafts a merchant, which provides a special power or scoring condition.
In each of the seven rounds, players take turns drafting a shop card and "installing" it in their street (as demonstrated in the image above). For each icon shown on the bottom of the drafted card and each matching icon on previously constructed shops, you can move a tourist on the bridge or on your side of the street one space.
Each shop card has a scoring condition on it, e.g., 3 points for each pink tourist within one space of this shop, or 2 points for each blue tourist within two spaces of this shop, or 7 points for three different colored tourists on this space.
After seven rounds, you score your shops and (if needed) your merchant, then you compare the number of tourists on each side of the waterway. For each space, whoever has more tourists on their side — with tourists matching the color of the building next to them counting twice — scores 5 points for that space. Whoever has more points overall wins.
Shimoda: Perry Road is due out in Korea in June 2026.
Don Quixote is a new edition of the trick-taking game Boast or Nothing, a.k.a. Best of Neopolitan, from designer Marco Jung, a.k.a. Yeon-Min Jung.
The game contains cards in three colors, and standard trick-taking rules apply, although the game includes "pass" cards, and you can choose to play a pass instead of matching the leading suit. The suits are initially ranked at random using the tokens, so in the image above, all green cards are stronger than red cards, which are stronger than blue cards, with higher numbers being better within a suit. Whichever suit wins the trick is moved to the bottom of the rank pile.
After seven tricks, players who have collected zero tricks score 3 points, and players who have collected three, two, or one tricks in a game with three, four, or five players score 1 point. Each pass collected in a trick scores you 1 point. Play multiple rounds until someone has at least 7 points.
Let me highlight the majesty of this cover:
Such glorious nonsense! You have the red/blue/green color story of the suits combined with a hallucinating knight, feverish mites, and a windmill that's seeing red and ready to show who's boss.
Don Quixote is due out in Korea in April 2026.
17 Dice Bets, which is due out in May 2026 in Korea, has the same graphic style as 2022's 12 Chip Trick (which I covered in 2023), but the designers and gameplay are not similar. Maybe Mandoo is creating a "# word word" game line? We'll see what comes in the years ahead.
17 Dice Bets, which is also from designers Lee Ju-Hwa and Giung Kim, presents 2-4 players with a Texas Hold'em-style bidding game in which you score based on both personal and communal dice.
At the start of a round, roll your personal dice behind your screen. The round's start player rolls the public dice, then in turn order players place a betting chip on an empty space. The last player re-rolls one of the public dice, then in reverse order players place another betting chip, then the first player re-rolls one of the public dice, after which everyone reveals their private dice and shows whether they made their bets. For each made bet, you score points equal to the bet value times the payout listed on the space; for each missed bet, you flip over the betting chip, which has different values on each side.
As the game progresses through the rounds, you add a red die that can't be re-rolled, another public die, a spare re-roll token for each player, and another private die for each player — and with eight dice in play near game's end, you can play it safe with smaller bets or swing big for a seven-value straight or two three-of-a-kinds. The re-roll token allows you to re-roll any number of private dice once prior to the round's payout.
