Let's return to Origins Game Fair 2026 for more looks at new and upcoming games:
▪️ STACCS is the debut title from designer Dave Chau, with him and his wife Tatiana having crowdfunded the game in July 2025 as their initial release from STICCY©©.
Your goal in STACCS, which plays with up to five people, is to ditch all of your cards first. The deck features hexagonal cards, with most cards depicting a 3D box that features a card suit on one "side" of the box, a card value on a second side, and an image on the third.
On a turn, you ideally play a card from your hand to the display, either by placing a value on a matching value, which builds the card stack in one direction, or by placing a suit vertically atop a matching suit. Jokers always match what they're played on, but (1) you get to name a suit and the next card played must be of that suit and played atop the joker and (2) the joker is rotated 120º from what it was played on, so the cards are now stacked in new directions.
If you can't play a card, you draw a card, so you're somewhat riding the waves of randomness that come from card games, especially ones with UNO-style effects such as skipping the next player's turn, forcing the next player to draw two cards, taking another turn immediately, and so on.
Uwe Eickert of Academy Games was excitedly showing off Stellaris: Infinite Legacy, which was crowdfunded in 2021 and should be delivered to backers by the end of 2026, which marks the tenth anniversary of the Stellaris video game by Paradox Interactive.
I forgot to take a pic of the plastic cardholder at the upper right of the image above, but Eickert detailed its many iterations, with the goal being to have multiple layers of cards held in precise locations. These "scientific" experiments included leaving the holder on a car dashboard to roast in the sun to check for curling, separation, and so on.
He also showed off the "short" box lid — where the double gold lines are on the edge — noting that the initial lid was the full height of the box and annoying to pull off. Thus, the lid now fits onto a lip in the bottom of the box to make access easier.
Academy Games is doing something different with some tokens in Stellaris: Infinite Legacy, with these tokens being delivered in a double-layered board. When you need a specific token (for a scenario or some event), pop it out and put it into play; when you're done with it, push it back into place. The idea is to obviate the need for plastic bags or a container, while letting players find what they need quickly.
I recognize that many KS backers are peeved that this project is taking so long to come to completion, but (1) not everything is under a publisher's control regarding licensed materials and (2) Academy keeps showing up at events to show progress on this game, which suggests dedication in bringing it to completion.
One of the games being demoed at the asmodee booth was The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict, a co-design between Geoff Engelstein and Stephen Buonocore that asmodee studio Office Dog will release in November 2026, with advance copies being available for purchase at Gen Con 2026 and SPIEL Essen 26.
The game comes with four erasable game boards, with "The Free Peoples" on the left and "The Shadow" on the right. You're using your Shadow board to hunt and attack the player on your right, while the player on your left is doing the same to your Free People. In theory, with multiple copies of the game, you could play with any number of people.
In this r0ll-and-write game, someone rolls two white dice each round, then you use the symbols on one die to mark spaces on one board and the symbols on the other die on the other board.
You can use symbols in four fields on "The Free Peoples" board, with, for example, sand timers and boots allowing you to move the Fellowship and banners and horns allowing you to build up troops in Gondor, "Elves", or Rohan. In the style of That's Pretty Clever, crossing off one space may give you an icon to cross off something else.
You use "resolve" to move the Fellowship one location on a turn, with the cost to enter a location listed on the board; extra resolve carries over to future turns. Some locations share an icon, and they might give you immediate symbols or endgame points.
"The Shadow" game board features a similar map, but with different costs to enter locations and you concerned about hunting the Fellowship instead of moving. If you don't hunt successfully, you learn information about their distance from you — and by using the Nazgûl the Fellowship must announce their location's symbol, which will help you narrow down the options.
The Shadow wants to corrupt the Fellowship, with this being tracked on the battle board between you and your neighbor and with the Shadow being rewarded with icons and points. The battle board also tracks each side's "march to battle", which lets you know how soon you might need to resolve battle between two armies.
As you build up in a region, you "unlock" the die for that region, rolling it with other dice at the start of a turn and possibly gaining extra symbols from it. (I said to Geoff Engelstein at the show, "Oh, like in 7 Wonders Dice", and he said, "Yes, but I think we actually did it first." This design has been in the works for several years, and it's flexible enough to be used in other settings that feature multiple one-on-one conflicts.)
I'm leaving out many details of gameplay in this overview — the game end trigger, what Gollum is doing marching around the central dice board, etc. — but with copies being available at Gen Con 2026, I'm sure more details will be available in the near future.
Despite me not having seriously played a trading card game in decades, I still find them fascinating to look at — although my look at Soul Masters TCG was brief given that cards such as "Dizzy, Number 1 Fan" and "Uma, Firebrand Captain" have 9-10 lines of extremely tiny type.
Maybe someday a company will release a TCG for those over 55, with the cards being 5"x7" so that everyone can read them easily across the table.
Of course, then we'll complain about the cards being impossible to shuffle...
