by W. Eric Martin

New Year’s Eve is now two weeks in the past, but we can still talk about party games, yes? Surely we’ll have some need for them at future events prior to December 31, 2026? Working on that assumption, here’s a sampling of new and upcoming party games:

▪️ In Q1 2026, R&R Games will release “Normal” Human from designers Jasper Beatrix, Phil Gross, and Bobby West, and this 4-16 player game seems squarely in the R&R mold, while riffing on Spyfall and A Fake Artist Goes to New York.

One player is secretly an alien amongst all the humans, and you want to help the alien escape detection from a government agent. Each round, the agent leaves the room, everyone other than the alien receives a task to act out, then the agent enters the room and tries to spot the alien, who must quickly figure out what the normal humans are doing and try to fit in. R&R Games shared this image to convey the nature of “Normal” Human:

Yep, that seems like an R&R title, all right. To get in the right spirit, start playing at 1:00 a.m. at a convention when you’re slightly out of your mind from lack of sleep.

▪️ Coincidentally, Bitewing Games will crowdfund a Kasper Lapp design titled Totally Human in its Q1 2026 crowdfunding campaign for Reiner Knizia‘s Gold Country.

How do aliens need to act like humans this time?

▪️ In 2026, Austrian publisher 1 More Time Games will release One Word Away from designer Markus Slawitscheck.

This 2-8 player game carries an element similar to 2021’s Last Message from Juhwa Lee and Giung Kim and will be available solely in German upon launch. Here’s the quick take:

Whether playing co-operatively or in teams, on a turn you write down three clues to try to help your fellow players guess a secret word, but before they can do so, one of your clues will be erased by either a die roll or the other team. Can you construct your clues so that they’ll still be able to guess correctly?

▪️ GOAT, a.k.a. Greatest of All Time, is a December 2025 release from Matt Fantastic, Blaise Sewell, and Dolphin Hat Games that plays somewhat like a reverse charades in that everyone knows what you’re performing and they can influence what you do.

Each of the 3-8 players takes a turn as the actor, drawing three action cards, then placing one on the table. Each other player gives the actor a modifier card in secret, then the actor reveals as many modifiers as they like and performs the not-charade.

After each person has acted, everyone votes simultaneously for which performance they thought was best, with that player earning 2 points. Each player also scores 1 point for each of their modifiers chosen by an actor…which suggests that the best approach to winning is to choose no modifiers when you act since that only helps others score, but that would run counter to the spirit of the game, so don’t do that.

▪️ To continue the pattern of party games that remind me of other games, we come to Tic Tac Top, a 3-7 player game from Simona Greco and Marco Rava that Explor8 will release in a combined English/French edition in March 2025.

Your goal is to mind meld with the round’s active player and think like they do. More specifically, the leader will reveal a theme card and a list of twelve words or phrases related to the theme. In secret, the leader will rank seven words from this list in order from most to least relevant, while everyone else fills a tic-tac-toe grid with nine items from that same list.

Once everyone is finished, the leader will read their list from top to bottom, with each player circling an answer they wrote when the leader says it. If you’ve circled three items in a row first, let everyone know as you earn bonus points for matching the leader best. Each line you make is worth 1 point, and since the leader listed only seven items, you can score at most 5 points, aside from the bonus.

The leader scores based on how quickly someone created a line and how many lines the player with the most lines created. I would imagine you play until each person has been leader once, then tally each player’s score.

The tic-tac-toe element of matching others calls to mind Martin Ang‘s JinxO, which I reviewed in July 2025. The gameplay itself is not similar — only the scoring, which recalls one of the first games most people learn.

Side note while talking about this game: Swiss publisher Game Factory will release Dito!, a German-language edition of JinxO, in Q1 2026.