U.S. publisher Rio Grande Games has been relatively quiet in 2026, releasing only Tom Lehmann's Race for the Galaxy: Xeno Counterstrike in the first half of the year, with this being the second expansion in Race for the Galaxy's third expansion arc following 2015's Xeno Invasion. For details on this expansion, check out Lehmann's designer preview.
German publisher 2F-Spiele says the Rio Grande Games will release Friedemann Friese's Fishing 2 — which I covered in May and [disclosure] for which I was hired by 2F-Spiele to edit the English rules — but beyond that game only three more titles seem likely to appear from RGG in 2026...and possibly not even by then. Of the three titles covered below, Rio Grande Games owner Jay Tummelson tells me, "We are still waiting for expected production dates, and we expect [the release dates] will be later this year for all of them. We will publish the rules on our website when the games are available."
What are those games? Well...
StageCoach
As far as I can tell, Rio Grande Games first mentioned Andreas Seyfarth's StageCoach in a July 2024 newsletter. Here's the publisher's brief description of this design:
Load up your stagecoach, and make your way through the early American wilderness. Establish safe routes between the growing major and minor towns, while gathering resources to establish businesses in them. Provide vital services to the swiftly migrating populace to build up your influence in the various territories. During your travels, seek out those with the needed skills who are ready and eager to help you make your mark in a new world.
Some speculate that this game is a new version of Thurn and Taxis, a 2006 design by Andreas and Karen Seyfarth that won the Spiel des Jahres award, and that speculation is half right.
"The game is based on T&T in terms of planning your routes", Seyfarth told me. "Once again you have a map divided into areas with several towns. Those towns are connected in your route by cards. This feature feels identical to T&T, while the rest of the game is quite different. You have to deal with area control, collecting enough wood for your buildings, and useful help of non-player characters."
As for Thurn and Taxis returning to print, Korean publisher Playte has announced a new edition of that design, now titled The Birth of the Post, for release in 2026. Adds Seyfarth, "For all players waiting for a re-release of the old T&T outside Asia: Your requests have been heard."
Kangaroo Island
Now we'll head to the southern hemisphere for Talia Rosen's Kangaroo Island, which first appeared in RGG's November 2024 newsletter. I wrote about Kangaroo Island at the time, and the game description today remains as minimal as before:
Off the coast of southern Australia sits Kangaroo Island, home to an abundance of diverse wildlife. Mobs of kangaroo inhabit the scrublands, while local little penguin colonies thrive in nearby rocky burrows. If you look up into the occasional eucalyptus tree, you're sure to see a pair of koalas, and if you peer into one of the many waterholes, you may spy the venomous platypus.
In Kangaroo Island, you'll control a growing herd of these animals as you explore and lay claim to the island's finite territory. Earn nature stars by taking a balanced approach to claiming territory, while unlocking new abilities for your animals and watching out for bushfires and human construction sites along the way.
Rosen has detailed the development of the game, which started as "an intergalactic space exploration game", in a designer diary on BoardGameGeek, with Twilight Struggle's Jason Matthews having a hand in the game's final setting.
The diary details what Rosen looks for in games and how her design delivers this experience:
...I like board games that confront me with difficult and meaningful decisions. I want games that are chock full of player decisions; I want those decisions to be difficult so players have to wrestle with their decisions; and I want those decisions to be meaningful so that they impact the subsequent turns, the game state, and the outcome. I want all of that with limited downtime between turns and in 1-2 hours...
The part of the design that I think best reflects this is the way in which the game separates out tile placement from point scoring. When you place tiles, you can complete terrain features that unlock important advancements on your player mat that give you a new unit or improved abilities, but you cannot earn any points through tile placement. This is a conscious and fundamental break from the inspiration of Carcassonne. This is coupled with the somewhat counterintuitive turn structure that has players completing movement and claiming territory before the tile placement step of your turn. While playtesters are often eager to place their tile at the beginning of their turn, this would make decisions often too obvious because you would move onto and claim the tile that you just placed. Inverting the order of the phases means that players need to consider how their tile placement may be exploited by their opponents for points. The difficult and meaningful decisions that I’m aiming for are wrapped up in how players prioritize competing incentives, how players space out their limited animal units, and whether going with your instinct to complete a given terrain feature is always the best path in a given situation.
By chance, between my initial 2024 coverage of Kangaroo Island and today, I played and reviewed Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's 2007 game Venedig, which features a similar turn structure:
- Play 0-5 of your cards in hand.
- Drain 0-2 swamp spaces on the game board.
- Draw cards.
You want to do those steps in reverse order so that you can act immediately — drawing cards, clearing land on which to build, then building through card play — but you can't, which leads to tangled interaction among the players as you compete for control over what gets built where. For me, this reversal creates a far more interesting play dynamic, so I'm curious to see Rosen's game once it's finally available.
Clockwork Wonders
The final title is Clockwork Wonders, a 2-5 player game mentioned as far back as RGG's January 2024 newsletter from Nikolaj Wendt, who self-published one game in 2010 and who is currently head of design at video game studio BetaDwarf. Here's the overview:
Take the role of a wealthy family of patrons during the fictional golden age of steam and clockwork. Each house vies to construct marvelous buildings, combining artistic flair and clockwork technology to show off their wealth and power. By expanding throughout the area and building trade houses, players gain access to natural resources that can be used on their wondrous projects.
A player completing their fourth project triggers the final round of the game, after which players sum their points.
