Party in the Back To Back

Back To Back

Belgian publisher PlayPunk, run by Thomas Provoost and Antoine Bauza, has launched with two hit titles: Captain Flip, which was nominated for the 2024 Spiel des Jahres, and Zenith, which won the 2026 As d'Or in the "Initié" category for experienced gamers. (Here's my review of Zenith from July 2025.)

For its third title, PlayPunk is releasing a design unlike either of its first two: Back To Back, a co-operative party game for 2-8 players from Antonin Boccara. That said, Provoost co-developed the co-operative party games Just One, So Clover!, and Concept with Cédrick Caumont when they ran Repos Production, so I have great confidence in his choices and abilities!

Each player in Back To Back receives five erasable whiteboard cards, a pencil, and a "mystery word" card that features four pairs of nouns in the categories children, easy, medium, and difficult. After collectively choosing a category, each player chooses one of the two words in it, then they write five clue words on their whiteboard cards and (important!) shuffle those cards.

When it's your turn to be the "mystery player", reveal the top card from your stack, then everyone collectively makes one guess at your mystery word. (The player to your right has final say on the guess.) If they guess wrong, you reveal your next card, and so on. If they guess right, the team scores 1 point, then they have just one shot at guessing one of your remaining clue words. If they're correct, they score 2 points from the successful back-to-back guesses. After all players have been mystery player, sum the points and consult a chart to determine the scale of your victory (or defeat).

This concept is beautifully simple and mirrors the gameplay of Just One, which I reviewed in 2018. In that game, everyone other than the guesser writes a single word clue (with duplicates being eliminated), then they reveal these clues to the guesser, who tries to identify the mystery word. In Back To Back you're doing the reverse of this, creating a word nexus on your own for everyone else to guess, with the words ideally "pointing" to both the mystery word and to one another.

Back To Back is due out in France and in the UK on 11 December 2026 and in the U.S. in 2027.

Packed House Games

At SPIEL Essen 26, designer Rikki Tahta of La Mame Games had a banner promoting a new company: Packed House Games. "I'm taking what I learnt from running games at events and making games for large groups in a box for people to self-run", Tahta told me.

Packed House Games will debut with a crowdfunding campaign in Q2 2027 for Heist Club, a game for 5-24 players co-designed by Tahta and Matt Leacock for which no other information has been revealed to date.

Hitster: Music Bingo / Melodifestivalen

The term "one-hit wonder" typically applies to someone in the music industry who is known for a single song. The Spanish band Los del Río is a good example of this, with their song "Macarena" being a smash hit worldwide in 1993 and with the rest of their four-decade-long career being unknown by almost everyone.

Game designer Marcus Carleson has been a one-hit wonder to date, with that wonder being (surprise, surprise) based on hits in the music industry. Carleson's game Hitster debuted in 2022 from Dutch publisher Jumbo and has sold millions of copies of the base game and more than two dozen spin-off editions.

Gameplay is straightforward: On your turn, scan a QR code with your phone, listen to the song, then place the card in your timeline and flip it over. If you placed the card correctly, keep it. Whoever first has ten cards in their timeline wins.

In an August 2026 interview, Jumbo's Christian Huber-Roscher explained why this "simplified" approach to a trivia game works so well: "Many people like to listen to a lot of music, but they may not always remember the performer or song title. That said, we often associate music with personal experiences or certain stages of life. It is precisely these memories that let you pinpoint a song in time."

Given the game's format, you can easily imagine the various Hitster spin-off titles. Let's do rock, heavy metal, movie soundtrack, hop hop, disco, schlager; how about special editions for French music, Spanish, Taiwanese, and so on.

The most recent version I've seen announced is Hitster: Melodifestivalen, with Melodifestivalen being an annual Swedish song competition that determines the country's entry in the next Eurovision event. Produced in combination with competition organizer Sveriges Television (SVT), Hitster: Melodifestivalen features more than three hundred songs submitted during Melodifestivalen events from 1958 to 2026.

A press release for this title, which is due out 1 December 2026, mentions that more than one million Hitster titles have sold in Sweden alone, and the 2026 televised finale of Melodifestivalen averaged 2.7 million viewers, so the audience is already there for this special edition.

The spin-off edition Hitster: Music Bingo debuted in Europe in 2024 and finally reached the United States in August 2026.

Each turn, someone spins the disco ball, which highlights one of five categories: decade of release, group or solo artist, within three years of release, etc. After listening to the song, everyone writes an answer on their personal game board, and if you answer correctly, you mark a square of the matching category color on your board. Whoever makes a line of five marks first wins.

Every edition of Hitster can serve as an expansion for Hitster: Music Bingo, which is a neat selling point. I always marvel at designers who can embiggen a game system in this way, placing an existing title within a larger concept.