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The spotted nutcracker, grass frogs, and more are waiting for you and offer you a unique opportunity to collect points in an original way that is related to the landscape and interaction with your neighbors.

Do you play a card to score more points, or do you use the opportunity to deceive your opponents? Find the card that allows you to strike a balance between these two objectives, and victory will be yours!

• Another upcoming Helvetiq title — Odin from Gary Kim, Yohan Goh, and Hope S. Hwang, due out in January 2024 — has even less information available: “Odin is a simple and dynamic game with quick rounds and far-reaching decisions. Be strategic, collect the cards that best suit your strategy, and carve your way to glory to become King or Queen of Valhalla.”

• To follow up an earlier November 2023 post, German publisher KOSMOS has previewed more new game releases for the first half of 2024, such as Anno 1800: Die Erweiterung, which adds additional ship tiles, island expansions, and population tiles to Martin Wallace‘s Anno 1800: The Board Game.

• Lucky is a dice game for 2-6 players from Drew Richards in which you’re once again splitting booty on a pirate ship and trying to end up with the most loot in your pocket, but to do so, you must risk it falling into the hands of others:

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You all take turns placing your treasure cards in the middle of the table. Now the person whose turn it is rolls up to five dice, depending on the number of cards on display that are to be won. If the roll succeeds, the treasures from the center or those of the other players become their own. Treasures are never safe from the others, though, and can be stolen again…

• One of Us from Johannes Berger and Julien Gupta falls into the “majority wins” category of party games, but it’s not clear from the publisher’s description how this 3-7 player game differs from others: “Who do you think of whenever you see a cat? And who do you think of when you see a sparkling diamond necklace…or a leek? All you have to do is agree with the majority of players, and you’ve already scored a point together.”

• TowerBrix is a co-operative game from Simon Thomas for 1-6 players that works as follows:

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Over the course of the game, you build a tower out of bricks, with the cards in your hand telling you who has to fulfill which conditions — but each person knows only their own tasks and cannot tell the others about them. During the building process, the aim is to find out which conditions must be fulfilled in order to successfully complete the round.

TowerBrix features different levels of difficulty and additional missions.

• Finally, KOSMOS is continuing the “Masters of Crime” series from designers Lukas Setzke, Martin Student, and Verena Wiechens with three new titles. These games put you in the role of shady characters — members of the New York mafia in 2021’s Vendetta, and part of a gang of art thieves in Stillleben — and you use the materials in the box as well as information online to play.

In Masters of Crime: Mosquito, you’re on the hunt for a legendary Latin American treasure and must figure out how to outwit the powerful secret organization “Mosquito”, which is one step ahead of you and wants the treasure for itself.

In Masters of Crime: Inkognito, you’re on the side of the law this time, specifically an undercover agent with the FBI who embeds themselves in a maximum security prison in Brooklyn to discover who killed a gang member that had become a police informant.

In Masters of Crime: Tiefenrausch, you’ve built secret drug network on the “Isla de Cubaidos”, but international superstar Dayana — who comes from that Caribbean island — has vanished, and you need to figure out what’s happened to her before the police search party arrives and inspects your island.