Musoka Studio is a new publisher based in Paris that plans to release both original games and new editions of games that debuted in Japan — and Musoka has announced eight releases for 2024, which sounds mightily ambitious.

• SPLIT is a 佐藤 雄介 (Yusuke Sato) that debuted in 2021 from 新ボードゲーム党 (New Board Game Party) and is being re-released in co-ordination with Jelly Jelly Games.

SPLIT is a real-time puzzle game for up to ten players in which cards that depict four- and five-block polyominoes are scattered on the table, then a shape card is revealed and players race to identify two polyominoes that would create that shape when combined with no overlap.

• Jelly Jelly Games released Word Drop from 千原ジュニア (Chihara jr) in 2023, and this design will also be co-released by Musoka in English and French in 2024. In this party game, you’re assigned a random word and must use it within a three-minute conversation, presumably at the same time that everyone else is trying to say their word. Other players have three guesses to name your word, but you have a partner to help guide the conversation so that ideally you don’t sound like an AI spouting gibberish sandwiches.

• The Jelly trio is completed with Charge & Spark, a two-player game from Akiyama Koryo and Korzu Yusei with only sixteen cards in which you use card effects to first reduce your opponent’s life to zero or reach a goal.

• Designer Akira Yasunaga self-published HANIWA in 2023, and the Musoka Studio version keeps the original art. In this game, players take turns placing tiles in their own 3×4 grid to claim happiness dice in the columns, while also trying to hit 8 when summing across a row to gain an additional bonus.

The other four titles in the 2024 line-up are credited to Pascal Bernard, designer of 2019’s Time of Legends: Joan of Arc, although these titles look far more streamlined:

• In Festi’vibes, 2-4 players want to attend festivals that will leave them with a positive experience, but everyone is playing secret event cards on the various festivals while also committing their face-up festivalgoers — some with special powers — to the various shows, and only after the columns have been filled will you discover who had a good time.

• Boba Life has you trying to combine drink components to satisfy customer orders, which is something we’ve seen a few times, so more details are needed. I had hoped that the game would be about animating boba drinks to serve as companions, but alas, no.

• Players in Happy Corgi move their dogs through a park comprised of action cards, trying to complete activities to gain hugs.

• In Versailles Request, 2-6 players use dice to complete petition cards, earning the favor of Louis XIV by gaining Court of Versailles cards.