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Travel to Gold Country, Return to Las Vegas, and Await the New Condottiere

tonyheth January 1, 2026

▪️ U.S. publisher Bitewing Games has revealed its next collaboration with designer Reiner Knizia: Gold Country, which this being a re-implementation of 2012’s Spectaculum that has been “reworked from the ground up”, according to Bitewing’s Nick Murray. “Compared to Spectaculum, Gold Country has core rules changes, new gameplay concepts, and new maps that all crank this experience up to eleven.” Why is “eleven” our highest experience rating? Not sure since we have lots more numbers available, but eleven it is!

Here’s an overview of the game’s setting and what you do during play:

Eureka! Gold flows like an endless sea in the rich hills and forests of California, and countless would-be prospectors have flocked to the lush landscape to stake their claim and make their fortune. Gather your pick axe and pan, scout the land, and invest in the richest mines to collect the most gold!

Each turn in this stock market manipulation game, you develop mining companies, buy and sell shares of those mining companies, spend your money on powerful abilities cards, and more! Gold Country enables shared incentives, encourages tactical pivoting, and rewards strategic foresight amid its simple rules and challenging decisions. The game ends once all the gold veins have been discovered, then the richest player wins.

Gold Country will be crowdfunded in January 2026 for release later in the year.

▪️ In mid-2026, U.S. publisher WizKids will release Bruce Glassco‘s Marvel: Remix the Cosmos, which is a standalone game that can be combined with 2022’s Marvel: Remix, which was a licensed spinoff of 2017’s Fantasy Realms, which has also been released in editions featuring Greek legends and Star Trek.

All of these remixes aren’t surprising given the open-ended nature of the design. You start with a hand of seven cards, and on a turn, you draw a card — from the Remix deck, the villain deck, or the discard area — then discard a card. Once ten cards have been discarded, the game ends, and everyone scores their hand as long as they hold at least one villain and one hero/ally.

From whatever you’ve been dealt initially, you want to craft a valuable hand of cards, but what’s valuable depends on the interaction of everything you hold. Once you’re familiar with the game, you can get a sense of what others hold by what they discard — and that can clue you in as to what might not be available for you.

This new set includes characters such as The Fantastic Four, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain Marvel, Silver Surfer, Doctor Strange, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Venom, and Doctor Doom.

▪️ German publisher Ravensburger will release yet another version of Rüdiger Dorn‘s dice game Las Vegas in 2026, with this edition keeping the basics of the 2012 original, adding a couple of elements from 2014’s Las Vegas: Boulevard expansion, and changing a few details of play.

The game lasts three rounds, each carried out the same way. Next to each of the six casinos lay out two bills from a deck that contains bills valued from $10k to $100k.

Each player — with six being the maximum player count — has seven dice in a single color, with one being larger than the others and counting as two dice. On a turn, roll all unplaced dice, choose a single value that you rolled, then place all dice of that value on the casino of the same value.

Take turns until all dice have been placed. For each casino, whoever has placed the most dice on it claims the most valuable bill, then the player with the next most dice takes the other bill — but if two or more players have the most dice, then you remove those dice from play and re-evaluate who has the most. After three rounds, whoever has the most money wins.

A “one-armed bandit” can be added to play as a seventh casino, also with two bills to be claimed. When placing dice, you can place all dice of one value that hasn’t yet been placed on this casino. When resolving ties on this casino, whoever has placed the most pips wins, with a further tie broken by whoever has placed the highest single value.

▪️ To dip into role-playing games for a few paragraphs, Steve Jackson Games is crowdfunding a second edition of Greg Costikyan‘s Toon RPG, which debuted in 1984 and had a deluxe edition released in 1991 that I recall selling while working in a game store at the time. Amazing to see a second edition of this come to market more than forty years after the original!

For those who don’t know, Toon is inspired by classic Saturday morning cartoons — do kids these days even know what those are?! — with players taking the role of a customizable character that can be any creature or object, whether real or imaginary, the player chooses. Have you dreamed of being a lobster telephone? Now you can make that dream come true!

Pick me up as I’ve got something to say…

Toon: Second Edition is an entry-level role-playing game that contains more than a dozen adventures that await your silliness.

▪️ In the comments on a Bluesky thread, CMYK dropped word of a new edition of Dominique Ehrhard‘s 1995 game Condottiere: