Many a publisher looks at a successful game and generates hope for a successful spinoff. Here's another round-up of upcoming games that might look familiar to you based on what's already on store shelves.
▪️ In the second half of 2026, Kinson Key Games will crowdfund Excursions, a design by Ben Rosset set in the Galactic Cruise universe in which 1-6 players are cruise directors who are organizing trips. An overview:
When you are the active player, you choose one of the seven actions around the outside of the space station. These actions include building developments, advertising to guests, discovering new excursions and adding them to your itineraries, upgrading your ships and player board, and sending guests on the vacations of their dreams. All players take this action simultaneously, but as the active player you gain a bonus, the potency of which fluctuates as the space station rotates.
When a player hits the point threshold, final scoring takes place.
▪️ In July 2026, Horrible Guild will release Similo: Wonders, a co-operative card game from Martino Chiacchiera, Hjalmar Hach, and Pierluca Zizzi that has had many versions released since its debut in 2019, versions that irritate some people to no end as they're all listed on a single BoardGameGeek page — a decision I still stand behind to this day. (Honestly, I'd combine many more game listings into single pages, but it wasn't my call then and it's even less so today.)
Each Similo deck contains 36 cards on a theme. One player is the cluegiver and wants to help others identify one of twelve cards on the table. In each round of five, they use a single card to give a clue as to that target card's identity, with the others needing to remove cards from the pool of possibilities. (For more details, read my overview from 2019.)
What's neat about Similo is that you can use cards from one deck to give clues to cards from another deck, which creates fascinating and frustrating connections between characters and objects that you might otherwise never have connected. Maybe you want to use Similo: Aquatic Animals to give clues about Wonders? Or cards from Wonders to clue Similo: The Lord of the Rings?
Note that Similo: Wonders will have one cover (above) for release in North America and another cover (at top) for release everywhere else. I've spoken with publishers over the years about how releases vary in different locales, and one factor that repeatedly came up for the United States was that a game couldn't look foreign as that will suggest it's more complicated than it actually is.
▪️ Speaking of The Lord of the Rings, Stone Blade Entertainment has announced a Q3 2026 crowdfunding campaign for The Lord of the Rings: Ascension, a version of Justin Gary's 2010 deck-building game Ascension that (in the publisher's words) "takes you on an adventure through Middle-earth across three interconnected Ascension sets".
▪️ Canadian publisher Inside Up Games has two new entries in its Earth game line that it plans to crowdfund, with Earth designer Maxime Tardif offering Earth Express, which plays in one-third the time, yet accommodates 1-8 players. How? By having players simultaneously draft cards as they build a personal 3x3 tableau of flora and terrain that will ideally satisfy goals both private and public.
Behind the Lens: Photographing Earth from Danielle Reynolds and Charlie Bink is a standalone game for 2-4 players in which you're manipulating a 5x5 grid of tiles that serves as your camera, with you trying to line up the right settings in order to take pictures, boost the values for various settings, and (once again) satisfy goals both private and public.
▪️ River Valley Jewelcraft features the setting of 2024's River Valley Glassworks from Adam Hill, Ben Pinchback, and Matt Riddle — as well as Andrew Bosley's anthropomorphic critters — but is otherwise an independent game.
Each player is a critter with unique powers and a 5x5 mine that features a few gems and lots of rubble. Each turn, you roll two dice, then receive the gems in one row or column that you roll, using them to explore and upgrade your mine, as well as to craft jewelry that you'll sell, probably to humans since these valley animals lack fingers and defined wrists.
Publisher Allplay plans to crowdfund River Valley Jewelcraft in late April 2026, along with Things on Strings, a Peter C. Hayward and Alex Cutler design that riffs on Hayward's 2024 title Things in Rings. In that earlier game, you wanted to place items in the proper locations of a Venn diagram, and now you'll be using items to construct a flowchart.
