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Krakel Spektakel

In March 2026, I covered two expansions for the 2025 Spiel des Jahres-nominated party game Krakel Orakel — game overview here — and mentioned a new standalone game: Krakel Spektakel.

As with the expansions, Krakel Spektakel from designers Die 7 Bazis and publisher TOPP features new word cards — 250 cards with 500 words, nearly twice what's in each expansion — that can be used with the original Krakel Orakel, but it also features a new game mode. At the start of each round, flick the spinner to determine the rule twist. Perhaps you'll receive a prophecy card that tells you whether to draw the easier or harder word on your card, but since no one knows who has which prophecies, you'll have twice as many words to consider. You might need to flip the drawing boards to their geometric side where one has only circles, another only rectangles, still another only stars, and so on. You might use a timer that stops randomly after 40-90 seconds.

Jurassic Zoo

Another TOPP title that you can find at SPIEL Essen 26 is Jurassic Zoo from the design team of Matthew Dunstan and Phil Walker-Harding. This flip-and-write game has up to six players fencing off dinosaurs — and visitors! — on their own sheet of paper.

In each of fifteen rounds, two number cards are revealed, then you must draw a rectangle of that size, e.g. 3x5 or 1x6, with the first rectangle abutting the left edge of the zoo and each subsequent one sharing a line with or overlapping a previous one. When a Triceratops or T Rex is fenced off on its own, you score 1 or 2 points. To score a visitor center, you must isolate it in a field that's the same size as the number on that center. If you're using the B-side of the player sheets, you can also score for fencing a pair of Brachiosaurs on their own.

Three goal cards of eight are in play each game, with the first player who completes each scoring 5 points while everyone else will score 2.

KRZ GRTN

TOPP's new party game for 2026 is KRZ GRTN from Mads Fløe, with the title being short for "Kurz geraten", which means "briefly put" or "in a nutshell".

In this co-operative game, you're trying to get one player each round to identify the proper image from several on display. To do this, everyone but this player looks at the target image, then creates a clue using two or more of their letter tiles, which feature only consonants (along with two starting blanks). You can stack letters or position them in whatever way you think might be helpful to the guesser.

Once all the clues are ready, draw more image cards from the deck, then shuffle and reveal them, after which the guesser sees the clues and guesses. If they get it right, everyone but the guesser receives more letter tiles; if not, you lose a life...and receive no new tiles! You can give up a life for each player to receive two tiles, but if you run out of lives before completing six levels of play, y ls.

Reflect: Das Spiegelduell

Similarly puzzley, but in a different way, is Reflect: Das Spiegelduell ("The Mirror Duel"), a German-language edition of Reflect: Mirror Mazes, which Professor Puzzle Games released in 2021.

In this two-player game, each player gets the same maze on a sheet of paper, then places the maze behind a screen so that they can see it only in a double-sided mirror that stands between the players. Whoever completes the maze first wins.

Die Zwerge: Königswahl

Designers Michael Palm and Lukas Zach have been creating games based on Markus Heitz' Die Zwerge ("The Dwarves") novel series since 2012 when Pegasus Spiele released Die Zwerge.

Their newest title in this fictional world is Die Zwerge: Königswahl ("Election of the King"). In this game, players play cards in front of themselves to affect their standing in the succession rankings or play cards and discard them for their immediate effect. The game ends when a player cannot play or players have met a game-ending condition on a card.

Other Titles

Three other games TOPP will have at SPIEL Essen 26 are:

• Crime Files Adventskalender: Fallakte – Sherlocks Zeitungsarchiv from Lukas Setzke and Verena Wiechens, with this being an advent calendar featuring 24 (connected) cases in which you rustle through Sherlock Holmes' newspaper archives.
• Dobro from Fel Barros, Lucas Castanho, and Pedro Vinicius, with this being a German edition of a climbing card game first released in Brazil in which you score points based on your position relative to others in terms of cards collected. The fewer, the better!
• Geschickt Gefädelt from Cami Muñoz Villar, with this being a German edition of Warp & Weft, a game with up to five players drafting colored threads to weave them into valuable scoring patterns.