Old Games Made New

I appreciate how publishers revamp games to bring them back to market, although not necessarily every choice they make. Here are a few examples from mid-2026:

Star Trek: Space Hunt

While visiting French publisher Matagot at SPIEL Essen 25, I got a peek at Star Trek: Space Hunt, a design based on the Captain Sonar game system created by Roberto Fraga and Yohan Lemonnier. In that system, two teams face off, with each team controlling a vehicle and each player on a team controlling one or more aspects of that vehicle: navigation, weapons, engine maintenance, etc. Only by communicating well with one another will your team outmaneuver the opponent and destroy them.

This system went through many iterations prior to the release of Captain Sonar in 2016, with the game being shown at conventions as early as 2013 under the name "U-Boat". I played the game, then called "Polaris", three times in early 2014 while a publisher was considering the prototype, and eventually Matagot picked up the design and gave it the final name.

Well, "final" until Matagot then released Sonar in 2017, with this being a scaled-down 2-4 player game compared to the 2-8 player count of Captain Sonar. (Some roles in CS were more enjoyable on a first playing than others, so I can understand tightening the system to improve every player's first experience.)

Star Trek: Space Hunt — which is co-designed by Delphine Lemonnier, debuts in July 2026, and will be available at Gen Con 2026 — keeps the 2-4 player format, with the game featuring several generations of the Star Trek universe, "allowing players to step into the roles of legendary duos such as Captain Kirk and Spock, Captain Picard and Data, or even the formidable Khan and Joachim". The setting seems like a great fit for the game system, but I'm not a Trekkie, so I can't assess how well the setting has been integrated in this new release.

TworDuel

TworDuel is a new version of a two-player game from Joli Quentin Kansil that debuted in 1972(!) as My Word!, then was brought back to market in 2010 by Eagle-Gryphon Games as What's My Word? Eagle-Gryphon's former parent company, FRED Distribution, is crowdfunding this new edition in August 2026, with the title being an awkward smashing together of "two word duel", which is apparently shorthand for "two-player word deduction duel"...

...but which also sounds somewhat like Wordle, and that is not an accident. The crowdfunding campaign mentions Wordle five times, and Wordle is also name-checked on the front cover of TworDuel, so the publisher is clearly leaning on the "If you like X, you'll love Y" formula of marketing.

And that approach makes sense given that My Word! featured gameplay similar to Wordle nearly five decades before Wordle was released.

The game is played in two rounds, with you trying to guess your opponent's six-letter word in round 1 and their seven-letter word in round 2. To do this, you'll enter guesses into a snaking grid, scoring points if a letter in your guess is in the hidden word and scoring even more points if that letter is also in the proper location, similar to the "scoring" in Mastermind, which debuted one year prior to My Word! Ideally, you can use these points to deduce where letters should go in your final guess, which will earn you a huge bonus if correct.

Risky Mixes

Devir has licensed a José Manuel Fernández Aguilera design that first appeared in 2019 from Rocket Lemon Games as Mal Trago, a phrase that literally means "bad drink" or "unpleasant drink" but is used figuratively to refer to an unfortunate situation.

The name works with both meanings as in this party game, 4-10 players serve as goblins who must test witches' potions, some of which will kill you. Each turn, you draw an action card, which might make you drink or choose an opponent to drink or put some condition on you that will force you to drink should you violate it. Whoever is the last living goblin wins.

In 2026, Devir will release Mal Trago in English as Risky Mixes, with Devir noting in its announcement that this game has sold more than 150,000 copies to date worldwide.

Golfie

The game world has seen plenty of golf-style card games over the past decade — games like Skyjo in which you're trying to manipulate cards in your display to score the fewest points possible — but Jimmy Dorion's Golfie is the only golf-style card game I know of that actually features golf.

Golfie debuted in 2022 from Canadian publisher Les Éditions Momentum, then was re-issued as Golfie — yes, the same name — in 2024 by Canadian publisher Unigoat Edition, with the game now including character cards and tweaked action cards.

A game of Golfie consists of nine or eighteen holes, with each player starting with a 3x3 grid of cards, with one card face up in the top and bottom rows. Each turn, a player reveals an action card, and everyone carries out that action, which is generally one of two things:

• A hole card, which represents your score for that hole on the course. Take one card in your top row (whether face up or face down) and remove it, scoring the value on your scoresheet. Slide other cards in that column up, then add a new card.
• A "zone to play" card, which highlights one or two cards in a display. For each card marked, you can either flip it face up or swap it with an orthogonally adjacent card. (Some "zone to play" cards have character symbols, and if your symbol is on a card, you can act on that card instead of the general one for all players.

If you get three cards of the same value in a horizontal or vertical row, you remove those cards, then add new ones to fill the grid and reduce your overall score by 2 points. Ideally, you'll push all the low numbers to the front row and ditch everything else.

Hachette Boardgames USA plans to distribute Golfie in the United States starting in September 2026, with copies initially available at Gen Con 2026.