Upland & Prairie
In May 2026, UK publisher Osprey Games announced that it plans to sell its board and card game line, while still being committed "to release, sell, and license upcoming games according to our existing schedules".
One of those upcoming games was revealed near the end of July 2026: Upland & Prairie, a 2-4 player game by Peer Sylvester, who designed the first board game Osprey released in 2015 — The King Is Dead — as well as other titles from Osprey such as The Lost Expedition and Brian Boru: High King of Ireland.
Upland & Prairie asks you to repopulate the land, whether Montana's plains or the Scottish Highlands, with appropriate animals — but which animals are appropriate depends on how the game ends. The double-sided landscape tiles and animal tokens allow you to play in either location with nearly identical rules.
During set-up, each player draws two animal tokens and places them behind their screen; animal tokens come in three types. On a turn, you draw three animal tokens from the bag, then place one behind your screen, another on the game board, and the final one back in the bag. Each space initially holds only one token, but as you draw "rewilding" tokens from the bag, you can place two or three animals of the same type in the same space.
Some landscape spaces are off-limits, while others have an "impassable edge" that makes adjacent hexes viewed as non-adjacent. Play continues until one of two conditions takes place:
- A continuous line of animals of the same type connects the two paired goals (black and white drops) or the three triple goals (three flower icons).
- Fewer than three tokens remain in the bag.
In the former situation, whoever has collected the most of this animal type behind their screen wins. In the latter, whoever has the most sets of all three animals wins.
Upland & Prairie is due out in September 2026 in both the UK and the United States.
Dino Battle!
You'll find very different animals walking the hexagonal lands in Dino Battle!, a new version of 1993's Die Schlacht der Dinosaurier from Stephen Baker and Roger Ford, with Anthony Howgego serving as co-designer on the new release.
In this game for 2-4 players, you command a tribe of dinosaur-riding cavemen and are fighting for dominance of the land. You want to seize arcane glyphs scattered across the ravaged landscape to claim their mystical boons for your people. Harness the crackling power of mighty energy crystals to devastate your enemies with relentless speed and ferocity, and hoard precious blood fruit, a rare resource in this cursed wasteland.
Six dinosaur species are included in the game, with miniatures sculpted directly from artwork by Mihajlo Dimitrievski, a.k.a. The Mico. To win, you want to trample enemies beneath your towering Brachiosaurus, outflank and outnumber your opponents with your ruthless Velociraptors, and control sacred shrines with your powerful T-Rex and hunt your enemies to extinction.
Publisher Rebellion Unplugged plans to demo Dino Battle! at SPIEL Essen 26, with a crowdfunding campaign scheduled to run on Gamefound.
XCOM: The Miniatures Game
In April 2026, Modiphius Entertainment teased XCOM: The Miniatures Game with a logo and nothing else, but ahead of Gen Con 2026 opening on 30 July, the UK publisher released some info for the game, while opening pre-orders for this design based on Ivan Sorensen's Five Parsecs From Home: Solo Adventure Wargaming. Modiphius writes:
The 280-page core rulebook allows players to lead an elite team of XCOM operatives as they fight across different missions to build XCOM and defeat an alien threat.
The hardback, full-color standalone core rulebook features tech, research and base-building options, campaign and single-player modes, and 33 mission types, including "terror site", "combat patrol" and "UFO crash". Rules also include the ability to play PVP matches with opposing alien or operative squads, or let one player take control of the aliens in the campaign with "Alien Commander" mode, as well as incorporating content inspired by the XCOM video game's expansions, including advanced tech upgrades, MEC Troopers, and the EXALT faction.
Game components available include miniatures of operatives and two sets of aliens, a dice set, a reference card pack, and an acrylic token pack.
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