German publisher Hans im Glück showed three upcoming items at the 2026 Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair, with the first item hitting retail outlets in March 2026: Paleolino from Marco Teubner and Peter Rustemeyer, the latter being the designer of the 2021 Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning Paleo.
Paleo is a co-operative game of up to four players trying to survive together in the stone age, and Paleolino was apparently inspired by the idea that children were probably having a rough time during that era, too, and we definitely want to relive that hardship.
Each turn in this game for 1-4 players, aged 5 and up, the active player takes two random resources from a device that looks like a leather waterbag or bellows, then drops them from the top of Plinko Mountain.
These resources will bounce around on the pegs and land secretly in one or two of the four drawers, after which the active player chooses a drawer and withdraws all of the resources, if any. They can use these resources, along with any stored in each player's backpack, to pay the cost of an available invention, placing it in one of the game board's slots. A player can store one unused resource, discarding any others. If the players complete ten inventions before the resource bag runs dry, they win the game.
To make the game more challenging, you can remove the inventions that require only a single resource or play with a single stack of invention tiles; similarly, to make it easier, place the invention tiles in three stacks, giving everyone an additional building choice each turn.
In Q3 2025, Hans im Glück released the two-player card game Duel for Cardia from designers Faouzi Boughida and Mathieu Rivero, and in April 2026 the expansion Cardia: Guardians of the Wild will be released.
The main feature in this expansion is a set of legendary guardians that will twist player expectations during the game. To set up, place a face-down guardian between every second "encounter" that players will have during the game: the second, the fourth, the sixth, etc., then turn the first guardian face up.
If you play a card into that encounter of the same suit as its legendary guardian, that guardian's ability will affect your card: placing an extra signet on it, allowing you to swap adjacent cards; adding or removing influence; giving you card filtering; and so on. Afterward, you check whether someone achieved victory, and if they didn't, reveal the next guardian.
Experienced players are advised to have all six guardians face up at the start of play to allow you to have a grander plan than playing from only one turn to the next. Additionally, the publisher lists the player count of this expansion as "2 (4)" instead of only 2, so expect variant rules.
On January 28, 2026, I posted an overview of Carcassonne: Labyrinth, a co-publication of Hans im Glück and Ravensburger due out in September 2026. One thing missing from that post was the box cover, which wasn't on display in the Ravensburger booth. Thankfully Hans im Glück had the cover on hand, with the newest version of the original Carcassonne present as well, perhaps for comparison:
