At the 2026 Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair, Czech publisher Albi showed off three new games coming out in 2026, with Night in the Zoo being a 1-4 player game from designer Tomáš Holek, who burst onto the scene in 2024 with three releases, including SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Night in the Zoo posits that a few animal species have gone cruising elsewhere for the evening and are now trying to make back into the zoo before opening time. Each game, you choose three of five animal types for use in the game, with each having a different movement system and point value.
Each player has their own game board on which they will place drafted tiles. If you cover an action on the board or a tile, you take that action — but if you discard the tile, you get to move an animal, and that tension of how and when to use each tile to get animals to their proper places is what drives the game.
Night in the Zoo will debut at Gen Con 2026, then be available at SPIEL Essen 26 for those outside the Czech Republic.
Prague Unseen from Jindřich Pavlásek, Michal Peichl, and Petr Vojtěch is Albi's SPIEL Essen 26 release, with this being an involved worker-placement game for 1-4 players that takes 60-120 minutes to play.
Here's an overview of the game from the publisher:
Set foot in mythical Prague in the 19th century when fantastical creatures walked the streets freely. Meet helpful golems, amassing ancient knowledge; cunning Horned, controlling the city’s wealth; resourceful robots, and eccentric Vodniks. Use their unique meeples to calm the river Vltava, rebuild the flooded center, and control the city’s fate.
Yes, Prague has flooded, and you have been charged with rebuilding the city, keeping in mind that this 1-4 player game is not co-operative, so you will be happy to see others fail at the expense of Prague.
The game board is divided into four regions, and over the course of the game players will construct buildings in the various regions that determine which actions can take place there and which workers can be present in which locations. Each region will be scored individually, with you trying to increase your influence in a region compared to others.
Aside from these two Eurogames, Albi is preparing a new edition of Abaku, which plays similar to Scrabble, but features numbers on its wooden tiles, with players creating mathematical equations in order to play those tiles. What are those equations? Well, the symbols for addition, subtraction, and whatnot aren't on the board, but stated when you play...then they vanish, leaving you with numbers that can be re-used in different ways without regard to how they got there in the first place.
Finally, Albi is working on a small expansion for Petr Čáslava's rally racing game Dirt & Dust, with Harbordrift containinga new track on ten cards.
One of the secret pleasures of traveling to Spielwarenmesse is riding the U-bahn and straddling the grate that connects two subway cars so that you feel the grate slide and your feet move in different directions as the metro turns corners. Recommended!
