▪️ Gen Con is one of the primary conventions publishers use to launch games into the world, sometimes with the debut of a title just hitting the market and sometimes with a limited release that won't show up in retail outlets for months.
Mind Sweeper, a party game by Charlie McCarron for 2-10 players, falls into the latter category, with publisher Floodgate Games planning to sell "a limited number of copies" at Gen Con 2026, along with the game's Deep Clean Expansion, ahead of their release in Q4 2026.
You'll be forgiven for expecting the game to be one in which you search for bombs; instead players will be collectively searching for a word. In each of ten rounds, one player knows the secret word and has one minute to sweep — yes, literally, sweep with a tiny broom — tokens spread out on the table into clues that will ideally get others to guess the correct answer.
Floodgate is running demo events for Mind Sweeper throughout Gen Con, with McCarron on hand Thursday at 14:00 and Saturday at 11:00 to sign copies, ideally with an ink-filled broom.
▪️ Another co-operative party game in which you want players to guess things is Photo Dump, a 2-8 player game from Annika Wierichs and Moodbox Games, a new asmodee studio that focuses on party games. (I wrote up another Moodbox title — Jack Degnan's Guess the Mess — in February 2026.)
Each round, each player receives a visible prompt card with four concepts or saying as well as a hidden card showing 1-4. You all have two minutes to search your phone, photo albums, magazines, etc. to find an image that you think will help others identify the correct prompt. The other players have only a single guess, and the more correct answers you have as a team, the better.
Photo Dump is due out on July 24, 2026, along with Guess the Mess and another Moodbox title: Link Out Loud from Ken Gruhl and Jeremy Posner.
Link Out Loud is ideally played in teams. Lay out five image cards and give each player a hidden card that shows two numbers from 1 to 5. You're trying to think of a clue word that links the images that match your numbers, for example, "negative" if you have the 4/5 or "transportation" with the 2/3.
Whoever thinks of a clue first yells it out, then their teammates try to identify the correct cards, scoring them if they do and giving them to the other team if they don't. In either case, you replace the images, and the cluegiver takes a new number card. Once those numbers run out, whichever team has collected more cards wins.
Interestingly, at least to me, the Moodbox titles were all developed by Hedyverse, a studio started in 2024 that features Jessica Aceti as CCO, with Aceti having helped launch Funko Games in 2019 as the company's VP of Marketing, Licensing, and Business Development.
▪️ You'll be trying to make matches in a different way in Beer Mug Dice, an Andreas Schmidt design for 3-6 players that debuted in 2013 from Zoch Verlag as Polterfass, German for "tumbling barrel". Korean publisher Playte released a re-named version in 2023, and now 25th Century Games is bringing the game to the U.S. market.
I've played Polterfass ten times since its debut, and it's a wild gambling game of sorts in that you're "betting" on the greed of everyone else at the table. Each round, one player is the barkeeper and will serve beer to others; everyone else secretly plans one or two cards face down to place their order, with those cards summing from 0 to 13.
The barkeeper then rolls a bunch of "barrel dice" by flipping a "dice mug" onto a coaster. The barrels mostly have numbers on their flat sides, although a couple have symbols. Any barrels that land on their ends have their values added together, and that's how many mugs of beer are available. The barkeeper can stop there, or re-roll any barrels that landed on their sides.
What's everyone trying to do? Well, when the barkeeper announces a final number of mugs, if the sum of all orders is equal to or less than what's available, every drinker scores points equal to their order, with the barkeeper scoring any that remain. However, if the orders sum to more than what's available, no one gets to drink and the barkeeper scores points equal to the number of mugs they offered. What's more, the greediest drinker loses points equal to their order, while the least greedy drinker gains this many points.
Finally, if the barkeeper ever rolls the barrels and none stand upright, the round ends, with everyone scoring points equal to their order and the barkeeper scoring nothing.
As I wrote in 2023: "Both the active and non-active players have factors that pull them toward pressing their luck and toward playing it safe, so the game plays out differently depending on the player count, but more importantly depending on who those players are and what their personalities are like. That's one element I greatly enjoy in 'older' 'German' designs: Player personalities having an impact on gameplay, and you needing to incorporate an understanding of those personalities to decide what to do."
