Starting with its Spring 2026 collection, which it's crowdfunding through May 8, 2026, U.S. publisher Button Shy has made a major change to how it packages games.
For more than a decade, Button Shy has been releasing tiny games — usually consisting of 18 cards — in a plastic bi-fold wallet, and starting with these titles games will be released in cardboard boxes, like most every other card game on the market. In an April 21, 2026 explanatory post, Button Shy writes:
[W]e have a few big changes to our product model that everybody knows and loves. We decided earlier this year to stop hand assembling games. Long story, but we've sort of outgrown it. It was getting very time consuming and at our size we are struggling to sell in certain markets without boxes. Unfortunately there's no affordable way to hand assemble a box. Our wallet line has just grown to the point where it needs to be mass produced, and we’ve accepted that.
The new Button Shy boxes are roughly the size of a Fluxx box, the company will sell wallets for each game separately for those who want them, and the wallet will fit in the box, although it won't come packed inside to ensure that manufacturing runs smoothly. (Each box will include a paper envelope that serves the same function as a wallet.) Button Shy has already used these boxes for a few titles sold at the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain in the U.S.
As for the games, they are:
— Shaper, a co-operative party game for 2-6 players from Mark Tuck in which the round's "shaper" uses pictorial elements on cards to assemble an image that will ideally help others guess the correct word.
— Everything Machine, a Connor Wielgosz design that's also a 2-6 player co-operative game, with one player giving a clue for a row or column of cards in a 3x3 grid so that the guessers can identify the secret word on the back of one of those cards.
— The Rise of a Jarl, a solitaire game from Joe Klipfel that gives you multi-use cards that will serve as kingdoms, citizens, wealth, and more, with you playing through your tiny deck each round, then facing invaders that will try to knock you out of the game.
— Astro ROVE, a sequel to Dustin Dobson and Milan Zivkovic's 2021 game ROVE, with a lone player once again trying to arrange modules into a particular pattern via movement cards and special abilities.
One interesting element of the Button Shy crowdfunding campaign is that it offers shipping to backers in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Australia, with everyone else falling into the "You're welcome to back this campaign for $1, and we'll try to figure it out later" bucket. In its explanatory post, Button Shy includes this explanation:
[I]international shipping has just become more and more difficult over the last few months, to the point where we can't offer it directly from us in all regions. The prices were ridiculous before and will jump 8% (as of next week) which causes its own issues after we just collected $17,000 for shipping a [previously completed] Kickstarter campaign. There are also other complications in regions like the EU which has gotten more strict in its import requirements. (We received a whole mail bin of packages back recently, marked as "Denied at border" with no other details. That’s an easy $500 out the door, and a whole lot of stressful uncertainty.)
Button Shy is also experimenting with a "modular game system" in which it would sell games* that require you to use your own components (dice, cubes, etc.), print out or download rules, and possibly buy multiple items in order to play. Thus, the asterisk following "games" as you might be buying only parts of a game, with those parts combining to give you enough material to play.
Okay, that sounds vague, but on April 23, 2026, Button Shy posted about a design codenamed DIEBALL in which two teams compete on a shared field, with each team being a pack of nine cards: four cards that are offense and defense, two cards that make up half the playing area, and three utility cards.
I appreciate the ingenuity here that calls to mind the old Cheapass Games ethos of selling only absolutely what must be sold. I mean, yes, the cards could be sold as a print-and-play item — and Button Shy might do that for sales outside the U.S. — but you get what I mean.
Boxed games might place more Button Shy titles in retail outlets, but the company is still working on quirky titles that will be available via direct sales.
Along the lines of the Button Shy project above are the four titles from U.S. publisher Deck Hand Games, which debuted in 2025 with Boil & Bubble and The Dig: Treasure Island — both from Stephen Sauer — and which will release its second pair of titles in Q2 2026: Kristen Mott's Spymaster One and Lisa & Michael Eskue's Pogo Possum Posse Poker.
Each Deck Hand title consists of 18 cards and is used with a standard deck of playing cards. Boil & Bubble, for example, has each player start with one suit of cards in hand, and during the game they'll use these cards to bid on spells while tucking five cards into their cauldron for endgame scoring.
In The Dig: Treasure Island, you draft cards to create a 3x4 treasure map that ideally matches well with the pattern cards showing on revealed treasure cards.
Spymaster One has you placing agents and recruits into cities, with many cities having effects that will trigger moves, draws, or more placements. When a city contains the right assortment of agents, whoever completed that city's mission scores it, claiming that city and three of the agents used, with other players each scoring one from whichever cards remain. At game's end, you score two of the cities you've claimed using agents in your control.
Pogo Possum Posse Poker has you working as bounty hunters, with you moving around the playing area each turn to collect cards that will let you scout up to three outlaws if you have the right card combinations. Each outlaw gives you a special power, and ideally you can use those powers and other cards you claim to make larger combinations and capture those outlaws instead since that will net you more points.
Deck Hand Games has run two crowdfunding campaigns for these titles, with the games initially being available for as little as CA$1 in a print-and-play format ahead of the release of printed versions.
