by W. Eric Martin

Early 2026 releases from German publisher Schmidt Spiele have started appearing on retail sites, but the company hasn’t posted its own info yet, so let’s summarize the offerings for now while we wait for rulebooks, something Schmidt has been good about posting over the years These titles are all listed as March 2026 releases:

▪️ Inka and Markus Brand‘s Noch mal! celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2026 — just like their EXIT game line — and to celebrate the Brands and Schmidt will release Noch X-mal!, a 1-6 player game with the same gameplay as the original release — using colored and numbered dice, cross out columns and colored areas on your personal player sheet — but adds new areas in which to score as well as “an innovative pass track”.

▪️ After 2023’s For One: Kniffel and 2024’s Kniffel 7, Reiner Knizia has another dicey offering in this game line from Schmidt — Kniffel: Das Duell. In the game, players want to roll the familiar combinations with their five dice to claim areas, score points, and win this tiny tug-of-war game.

▪️ One Mind is a 2-8 player game from Sophia Wagner that may or may not be co-operative. Hard to tell from this description, but aspects of the gameplay are clear:

▪️ Markus Slawitscheck‘s 2-4 player game Morty Sorty Magic Shop leans into the established look of The Quacks of Quedlinburg, with wizards handling anthropomorphic ginger in an overly familiar manner. However, in this game you’re not a wizard (or quack) yourself, but are instead organizing goods in the shop for those customers.

To do a good job, you need to arrange the best jars on the top shelf, then the next best jars, and so on, with the numbers on the jars always increasing from left to right. The game features “many different scoring options and shelf configurations” for variability and for retail workers past and present who love a good planogram.

▪️ In 2019, Schmidt Spiele released Ken Gruhl‘s Cahoots (review) as Tippi Toppi, and in 2026 it will release a follow-up design from Lars Ehresmann titled Tippi Toppi: Hoch hinaus!

In Cahoots, you are collectively trying to satisfy all the goals in the game such as “all cards even” or “two adjacent pink piles” by taking turns playing numbered and colored cards onto four piles. Tippi Toppi: Hoch hinaus! works similarly, but now you and up to three other players will be trying to satisfy goals by placing numbered and colored domino-style tiles into a tiny play space that will force you to stack smartly.

▪️ Matsch Party by Martino Chiacchiera and Carlo Molinari is for 2-4 players aged 5 and up who like to get muddy while staying clean. By using cards, you move pigs around the farm to collect clumps of mud. The more mud you collect, the dirtier your pigs and the faster you fill your collection tiles.

▪️ Kullerwürfel is both the name of this Christoph Cantzler and Anja Wrede design and the main feature inside the box: a dice encased in a soft rubber ball. Rules for three games are included, with players aged 2 and up rolling the ball as they wish, turning an entire room into a gaming table of sorts.