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Cover not final▪️ Norwegian publisher Chilifox Games is trying to get the jump on others by announcing its SPIEL Essen 26 release at the start of January. Here’s an overview of Wild World:
What makes Wild World stand out is the freedom and flexibility baked into every turn. You may perform a number of different free actions — placing cards to strengthen your engine, traveling through realms for rewards and prestige, or discarding for resources — allowing each turn to unfold as a meaningful puzzle. Every card has multiple uses, and clever sequencing often triggers reward chains that lead to explosive, satisfying combos.
At the heart of the game are the mighty monsters guarding the world. Defeating them will give you permanent abilities, immediate bonuses, scoring conditions, new workers, and prestige, but reaching them requires smart planning: evolving creatures, upgrading your potion-brewing, unlocking stronger foes, and assembling the perfect moment to strike.
Wild World is co-designed by Eilif Svensson, Åsmund Svensson, and Viljar Opdal Svensson, with father and son Åsmund and Viljar first starting to work on this game two years ago when Viljar was twelve. In his designer bio, Viljar writes, “I have played games since I was 5-6 years old, and I like thematic games with a combination of strategy, multi-use cards, and combat. All these things you find in Wild World, and I am very satisfied with the different realms and creatures.”
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One of the player boards, featuring non-final art
In more detail, the game is played on a shared board, while each player has a unique personal board for one of the five realms. Players start with three workers, and when placing a worker can in either order take these actions:
• Purchase one of the two cards available in the realm where that worker was placed, gaining the associated reward for that purchase.
• Resolve the realm’s main action: gain coins, gain cards, unlock areas of your player board, brew potions, or evolve creatures.
The multi-use cards can be discarded for coins, added to your engine for its effects, placed in your travel area for rewards and endgame bonuses, or used to conquer monsters — which is, the publishers note, the heart of the game. Players draft monsters at the start of play, so everyone knows which monsters are in play, the rewards they provide, the scoring opportunities available, and so on.
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▪️ Another 2026 release that gives you a chance to catch monsters is Kraken, the debut release from designer/artist Sébastien Monnier through his Studio Agrume studio in Québec, Canada. Here’s an overview of this 2-8 player game that plays in 20-30 minutes:
The game features action cards, attribute cards, sabotage cards, and fish cards divided into different environments: lake, sea, river. Managing sabotage and maximizing bonus effects are key to success. Multiple tactics are viable: boosting your gear, slowing down your rivals, or outright stealing their resources.
Monnier plans to debut Kraken in Q1 2026. I asked him about accusations of AI-generated art being present, and he said, “No AI art assets were used in the creation of Kraken… I relied entirely on my own background and experience as a 2D and 3D graphic designer to create all the visual elements of the project myself, from the earliest concepts to the final designs… For the final design, I made all the cards on Illustrator to keep this vectorized style that I love.” He did say that he uses ChatGPT “to correct my bad english”, and as a monolingual U.S. resident who has used Google Translate for years, I can appreciate this use.
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