SPIEL Essen 26 Preview: Wireless

Wireless

The headline title for German publisher Spielefaible at SPIEL Essen 26 will be Wireless, a 1-4 player game from the design team of Stefania Niccolini and Marco Canetta, best known for 2014's Zhanguo, which was re-released in 2023 as Zhanguo: The First Empire. Here's the publisher's pitch for this game:

At the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century, contemporary research primarily in the United States and Europe laid the foundation of modern telecommunications.

The game Wireless traces the history of those years in which experimental antennas were installed to transmit the radio signal over increasingly greater distances. Players play the role of scientists of the time (Marconi, Tesla, Edison, Braun). They must seek funds and support to develop new patents, install telecommunications systems, and create permanent links between different locations.

So there's the setting and a general idea of what you need to do...and here's what the game board looks like:

Well, most of the main game board, that is, along with one player's pair of game boards. Yes, a pair! In this game, you will (going through the eight player columns from left to right) install radio stations, transmit signals, modulate connections, raise funds, replenish action tiles/acquire patents, collect contracts, reach new nations, and record your progress in four categories.

Each player takes one action in a round, and over the course of play you want to do all of the above to grow your network, but your game life will be complicated by the need for money and action tiles. In the four left columns of your game boards, you can take an action in them only if you (1) pay the costs shown below the action you want to take and (2) remove a tile from the column. Each time you remove a tile, you reveal another cost, making the next action of this type more expensive. By developing technology, you gain new action tiles, allowing for cheaper actions and more of them.

Patents add new actions to your game boards — see the tiles above the player's three leftmost columns in the image above — and contracts give you new ways to score. Columns are added to your sixth column from bottom to top, and to fulfill a contract you need to meet its conditions as many times as its height in that column: once for the bottommost tile, twice for the one above it, etc.

You also want to have a presence in all countries listed on your personal objectives in order to score them.

Bean to Bar

Spielefaible will also release a German-language edition of Masaki Suga's Bean to Bar, which appeared in a Japanese edition from analog lunchbox in 2025. Here's an overview of the setting:

You are a chocolatier with a singular dream: to share truly delicious chocolate with the world. To this end, you have decided to build your very own chocolate brand. In order to grow your brand, you'll need to source quality cacao from cacao farmers; develop new confections to sell at events, local markets, and your own brick-and-mortar stores; recruit specialists to help with your operations; collaborate with local confectionery shops; and participate in an annual chocolate contest.

The heart of the game involves a 3x3 action grid of nine action tiles. In each of the twelve rounds, you pay time to move clockwise around the grid, then players will spend time to take actions present in the row where they stand. As you acquire cacao and process it into chocolate bars, sometimes using special flavor chips, you'll have product to sell in department stores and your own shops, with 5 money always being convertible into 9 time that you'll ideally use to further increase your business, often via the hiring of experts that provide special bonuses and unique scoring opportunities.

Spielefaible crowdfunded this new edition of Bean to Bar, with the game due out in retail at the end of October 2026.

Other Releases

Finally, Spielefaible has two six-card expansion packs for Thomas Spitzer's 2023 game Bier Pioniere — Freitrunk and Frederick Pabst — along with Chroniken von Brighthelm, a set of four expansion modules for Paul Stapleton's 2019 game Paupers' Ladder, which Spielefaible released in Germany in January 2026 as Aufbruch in Brighthelm ("Departure from Brighthelm").