• I’ve recently covered 2024 releases from Ravensburger (here), KOSMOS (here and here), Helvetiq (here), and AMIGO (just a smidge here). Which other European publishers are previewing their release calendar?

How about frechverlag, a German book publisher founded in 1955 that started releasing games in 2020 under the brand TOPP? Gamer, BGG user, and Central and South American game fan Hilko Drude is a product manager at frechverlag, and I feel his influence on some upcoming titles, such as Alejandra Pini‘s Blockits, which was first released in 2022 as Juanito Blockits from Argentinian publisher El Dragón Azul.

Here’s an overview of this 2-4 player game:

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Blockits is a roll-and-write game of managing blocks, both placing them in rows and using them to block others!

Image: Mael Morholt

Each player has an individual game board, and each round you place the figure rolled on the die in your game area, either to complete one or more lines or to maximize the number of blocked spaces. You also want to create specific figures to score more points, but the game boards rotate from one player to another, which might complicate your plans.

• Another early 2024 release is Drachentanz from Taiwanese designer DuGuWei, who self-published it as Bomb the Dragon in 2020. Here’s how to play this 2-6 player game:

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Drachentanz is a celebration of the Hakka people held in Miaoli, Taiwan during the Lantern Festival. Players in the game bomb the dragon by throwing firecrackers to win the blessings for themselves!

To play, shuffle the 19 dragon-body cards, lay out as many as dragon-body cards as players face up between the dragon-head card and dragon-tail card, then you shuffle the 45 firecracker cards and deal three cards to each player.

Original graphics

Each turn, players simultaneously choose and reveal a firecracker card from their hand, then place the firecracker onto the bomb zone by the dragon-body cards in order. When the total firepower next to a dragon-body card equals or exceeds the vitality point on that card, whoever played the most recent card wins it. If not enough dragon-body cards are available to fill up the vacancies of the dragon body, the round ends immediately. Record each player’s blessings (points).

Continue playing rounds until someone has collected at least 50 points.

• Similarly, frechverlag will release Vegetable Stock from Zong-Ger and Good Game Studio in Germany as Veggie Crash, which is probably due to Germans not using the word “stock” in two ways as English speakers do. (The game’s original title in Taiwan was Small Farmer.)

This 2-6 player game plays in 10-15 minutes, and win or lose I’ve had a blast with it. Here’s how the game works:

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Vegetable Stock is a simple card game about vegetable economics. Each round, reveal one more card than the number of players on the table. Each card has three vegetable icons on it, with vegetables coming in five types. Players take turns choosing one of the cards and placing it in their harvest pile face down. The price of the vegetable(s) on the card not chosen goes up — but if the price goes too high, it crashes, although it can rise again next round.

After six rounds, determine your score by multiplying the number of each vegetable you have harvested by the final price of that vegetable. The player with the highest score wins!

• Sara Perry‘s A Gift of Tulips from Weird Giraffe Games will become Eine Tulpe für Dich (“A Tulip for You”) in frechverlag’s January 2024 release.

As with Veggie Crash, Eine Tulpe für Dich is for 2-6 players, and you’re collectively manipulating the value of items on a market, although now you’re messing with tulips…and you’re not just keeping them for yourself.

Tulips come in four types, and two of them are initially valued above the others. Each player starts with one tulip card in front of themselves, placing a second card face down into a “secret festival” pile. On a turn, a player draws a card, then:

• Keeps it, scoring points if that type is currently ranked third or fourth,
• Gives it to another player, scoring points based on that tulip’s rank and value, or
• Adds it to the secret festival, either face up to adjust the ranking of the tulip types or face down.

Image: Eric Yurko

Then the player draws a second card and chooses a different action than before. When the deck runs out, shuffle the secret festival cards, then reveal five of them and adjust the ranking of the tulips, if needed. Whoever has the most and secondmost cards of the highest three types scores their cards.

• To circle back to South American publishers, in February 2024 EMF Verlag will release Clever wie Archimedes, a German version of Reiner Knizia‘s Arquimedes, which debuted in 2021 from Brazilian publisher Adoleta Jogos.

This real-time game is aimed at younger people, with 2-5 players racing to use mathematical operations — addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division — to rid themselves of cards as quickly as possible.