Polish publisher Portal Games will debut the English-language version of Rodrigo Rego and Danilo Valente's game Abroad at Gen Con 2026, with a retail release in September 2026.
Abroad is a design with Big Deck Energy — that is, a fat stack of cards with dozens of different effects — that debuted from Austrian publisher 1 More Time Games in September 2025. I wrote a long overview of the game in January 2025 to unofficially kick off the "SPIEL Essen 25" season, but if you'd prefer the abbreviated version: Travel around Europe for 28 days to demonstrate your familiarity with the continent. If that's too abbreviated, how about this:
A position has opened up at the most prestigious travel guide publisher, and you have four weeks in Europe to show that you are the right person for the job. Visit stunning locations, meet locals, get insider tips, collect postcards from famous attractions, and maybe even visit a festival on weekends or fulfill an adventure worthy of a bucket list.
You start with a hand of seven location cards from a deck of 240, as well as a postcard with an endgame goal. The game lasts four rounds, with each round consisting of seven days. Take turns in a round until you have spent all of your days. On a turn, you can stay where you are, or travel to a new location by plane (by spending money) or by train (by spending energy). Then take one of four activities:
- Write about the location.
- Rest, spending a day and three cards to earn 2 energy.
- Plan, spending a day to draw three cards.
- Carry out an activity, spending as many days as listed on a card in your hand matching your region.
After four rounds, score all your postcards based on whether you met their primary or secondary goal, then see who has logged the most points as evidence of their awesome travel skills.
For the solo game of Abroad, you compete against a bot that always has three location cards in a row that determine where it travels next, although you spend money or energy to discard its locations and send it elsewhere.
Looking ahead to the next major convention after Gen Con, at SPIEL Essen 26 Portal Games will debut Robo Run, a two-player game by Eryk Nowak that seems akin to a less chaotic version of Nikki Valens' Quirky Circuits.
In the game, you and your fellow robot navigate through a factory full of hostile robots that threaten destruction. You alternately play action cards, trying to guide your robots to the exit while being extremely limited in how you communicate with one another. Hoo boy, that sounds like catnip to my ears...which is not how catnip works, but never mind that! Here's a game overview from the publisher:
During each scenario, players may not speak to each other. Communication is limited to a single BEEP token — a subtle signal that says "don't play that card". Everything else must be read from the shared board and the visible faces of the action cards.
Each player controls a unique robot with a personal board featuring four upgradeable special abilities — from ABS (stop before hitting an enemy) to Nitro (play your movement twice) to Hacking Probe (replace a blue robot with a weaker purple one).
Robo Run includes five campaigns — Toy Story, Cold Steel, Heat of the Furnace, Thousand of Cogs, and The Acid Flow — each with five regular scenarios and one optional expert challenge. As you progress through a campaign's linked scenarios, your robots grow stronger, and abilities unlocked in one scenario carry into the next. A single campaign takes approximately 2 to 2.5 hours; individual scenarios can also be played standalone in 20-25 minutes. Each campaign is replayable with different robots (four unique robots are included), random events, and loot cards.
Finally, Portal Games has announced an expansion for Jasper de Lange's Bohemians, which debuted at SPIEL Essen 25. (I posted an overview after playing a demo game, and you can read de Lange's designer diary for background info.)
Bohemians: Tales From Montmartre will include new hardship cards (such as depression, paranoia, and panic attacks); new muse cards with a focus on animal companions; and an event deck that presents players with a fresh situation each turn: "Examples include A Sunny Day in Montmartre, Riots in the Streets, and The World's Fair 1889, each giving the round a distinct narrative and strategic context."
