• Ravensburger has revealed some of its 2024 German releases, with Kasper Lapp‘s That’s Not a Hat receiving a “pop culture” edition that features new items you are sure to forget as you pass gifts around the table and try to remember who has what. (We’re naming this title That’s Not a Hat: Pop Culture to match the publisher’s approach, even though the words “Pop Culture” don’t seem to be on the box. We can revisit this approach once the game has been released.)

• Ravensburger will bring the trick-taking game Skull King from Brent and Jeffrey Beck back to the German market after Schmidt Spiele first released the game there in 2014.

• Ralf zur Linde‘s HIT is a deck-building take on Pachisi and other such racing games, with cards now controlling the movement of your pawns instead of dice.

The brief game description doesn’t explain how you build your deck, but my guess is that when one of your pawns is hit and sent backwards, you add a new card to your deck for compensation — and the depicted board is smaller than a regular Pachisi board to encourage more hitting, and thus more deck growth and late-game power moves. We’ll see!

• Zur Linde is also the co-designer of Avanti! with frequent designer partner Stefan Dorra. Here’s the pitch from the publisher:

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Time to go on vacation with your friends in Avanti! — but you will find out where you are traveling with the camper only if you combine the clues as to where you are NOT going! Whoever solves it fastest wins the most points…

Old and new

• Another small game coming from Ravensburger is Robert Brouwer‘s Kuhhandel: Festival, which shares the “bidding for cows” aspect of Rüdiger Koltze‘s long-lived Kuhhandel from 1985, but gameplay details remain a mystery for now. Here’s what we have on this 2-5 player game:

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Summer is here, and with it the festival season. All the cows from near and far are on their way in Kuhhandel: Festival, where good business and lots of auctions await. The new double auction brings extra excitement to the game, and the copycat is also there to stir things up. Are you at the party of the year?

I’m amused by the tagline on the cover: “Eine Kuh macht muuuh / viele Kühe machen Mühe”, which essentially translates to “A cow goes moo / many cows are hard work”, but I’m wondering whether Germans would be rolling their eyes at the wordplay, similar to how I want to smother anyone who refers to a cat as “purrfect”.

• The echoes game line from Matthew Dunstan and Dave Neale continues with echoes: Das Orakel, with players listening to mysterious noises and voices associated with the themes on 24 cards so that they can put them in the right order and why visions of an old fishing boat on the Mediterranean are plaguing a woman in Greece.

• The Sagaland Mitbringspiel from Michel Matschoss and Alex Randolph will be re-issued as Sagaland: Time to Wish, that is, as a tie-in with the Disney movie Wish, although players will still be trying to find a particular thing hidden under a tree, as in the original game.