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Adventure with William Attia in Greylune, and Pit Scorpions against Pandas in LEDA

tonyheth December 19, 2025

▪️ Designer William Attia has released only a few games since his debut in 2005 with Caylus, but the impact of that initial design will always have gamers paying attention to what he does next — and at SPIEL Essen 26 publisher Sorry We Are French will release Greylune, which re-uses the core of his 2013 game Spyrium in a new play experience.

In each of five rounds, players will first place workers one by one on city streets between buildings — that is, cards — in a 3×3 grid, then remove those workers one by one to activate or acquire neighboring cards. Each player switches from placing to removing when they choose to do so, with you earning money for each worker already in an area when you place a worker there.

When you remove a worker, you must pay a cost based on the number of other workers in that area in order to activate or acquire a card, which will allow you to obtain objects, gain traveling companions, upgrade equipment, and so on. With these objects and companions, you can go on quests.

You’ll also gain strength and magic, resources that you’ll need to pay certain costs, with movement being another “resource” as traveling farther results in better results from completed adventures. Scoring also depends on your ability to meet the endgame conditions of your companions.

▪️ Another SWAF release coming in 2026 is LEDA, a two-player only game from Pierrick Libralesso, Renaud Libralesso, and Yoel Sayada. Here’s an overview:

In the forgotten realm of Leda, the great species have awakened: cats, pandas, sharks, scorpions, and many more. Each animal clan has developed its own civilization, language, and ambitions. Through a strange energy grid pulsing in rhythm with the world, they build, evolve, clash — and seek to impose their vision of the future. In this world balanced on a knife’s edge, war is not everything; cunning, adaptability, memory, and deep bonds with nature are the keys to triumph. Who will carve their name among the legends of Leda?

LEDA is an asymmetric card game in which each player embodies an animal clan with its own rules, objectives, and playstyle. Each player begins with a 4×4 grid of basic tiles, which they will modify during the game by upgrading them and playing clan cards onto them. On each turn, the action tile determines a zone of the grid to activate, triggering the effects located in that zone. Players must optimize their activations, manage their food (the main resource), and improve their engine in order to fulfill their clan’s unique victory condition — all while racing for military victory!

▪️ What’s more, Fabio Lopiano and Nestore Mangone will add to their 2024 game Shackleton Base with the Below. Within. Above. expansion adding a new Indian space agency to the game, along with three new corporations to shuffle among the seven already available. They are:

• Lunar City, which focuses on attracting civilian settlers to the Moon.

• Undermoon, which introduces an advanced excavation system, allowing players to dig tunnels beneath their existing structures.

• Zenith Works, which permits players to collaborate with a powerful construction conglomerate to build shared infrastructure.

▪️ On December 12, 2025, Gigamic released Qomet, a two-player game from Fabrice Puleo that joins other “Q” titles in the publisher’s abstract strategy series such as Quarto and Quoridor.

Each player has seven tokens, and on a turn you either place a token of your color onto an empty space on the board or slide a token along one of the lines leading from its current space. If another piece is on the space you’re moving to and it has an empty space behind it, then you push that piece with your move.

If you place four of your tokens in a square of any size, with the tokens being connected by straight lines, you win.

▪️ Another Gigamic title recently on the market is the October 2025 game Archéo from Thomas Favrelière and Adrien Pédron that’s for 1-5 players aged 5 and up.

In this co-operative game, each player starts with a wheelbarrow, with a number of shovels around the game board that you set up randomly with four layers of tiles. On a turn, you use the “suction cup” shovel to “dig” up a tile, trying to avoid rocks that will wreck one or more of your reserve shovels and ideally finding fossils or a valuable egg. To win, collect all ten stars worth of treasures before you run out of shovels.