by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Thames & Kosmos, which releases KOSMOS-brand games in English in the United States and elsewhere, has revealed its 2025 line-up, with the headline title being EXIT: The Game – Adventures on Catan, a new design from Inka and Markus Brand that both extends their wildly successful EXIT game series — with more than 25 million copies sold worldwide across the 30+ titles in the series — and ties into the thirtieth anniversary of Klaus Teuber's CATAN.

Here's an overview of this 1-4 player game, which will be released in Germany (by KOSMOS itself) in Q2 2025 and in North America in June 2025:

▪️ Other EXIT titles seeing release in English are:

• EXIT: The Game – Family: 2 Escape Adventures, co-designed by daughter Emely Brand and due out in Q2 2025
• EXIT: The Game – The Venice Conspiracy
• EXIT: The Game – Kids: Midnight Spooktacular
• EXIT: The Game – Advent Calendar: The Intergalactic Race

Note that for all titles in this post without a listed due date, that item is due out in Q4 2025. (Thames & Kosmos gives "Fall 2025" as a date for most titles, but "Fall" doesn't mean the same thing in all parts of the world, so I've gone with Q4 instead.)


▪️ Thames & Kosmos has several English-language editions coming for KOSMOS titles already available in Germany as of 2024 or due out in the first half of 2025...with one exception. Those titles are:

• Australis, from Leo Colovini and Alessandro Zucchini: Ride the Eastern Australian Current with your sea turtle while growing coral and tending to fish. Check out my December 2024 overview for more details. (Due out Q3 2025)

• The Crew: Family Adventure, from Thomas Sing: This game features the same concept as Sing's The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, with players co-operatively completing missions, but instead of playing a trick-taking game, they play a version of Mau Mau/Crazy Eights by playing number on number or color on color.

• TowerBrix, from Simon Thomas: This design seems more in the spirit of The Crew, with players secretly getting mission cards that they all try to fulfill while everyone collectively builds a tower of blocks without talking to one another. That said, the game lacks a timer or notion of failing other than you thinking that you fulfilled your mission, then being wrong, so you might want to add that should you need a threat of punishment to spur you on.


• Caesar & Cleopatra, from Wolfgang Lüdtke: This card game debuted in 1997 and has now sold more than 350,000 copies, with the two players competing to influence and collect Roman senators. You take turns placing influence cards under five groups of senators, and after each player's turn draw a senator from the bag to see whether a vote of confidence takes place in a group or whether all the senators return to the bag.

• One of Us, from Johannes Berger and Julien Gupta: Which player do you think of when you see a shark? Who matches an electric guitar? Each round, players simultaneously reveal the color of one of the people at the table. If the majority agree on a person, you score the card; score at least ten of fifteen cards to win.

• Dice Words, from Tim Phillips: This title hasn't been announced in Germany. Each player has seven letter dice, and each round you're challenged to create a word, with you being able to re-roll your dice up to two turns — but beyond that you want to include the letters rolled on separate ice dice as much as possible in order to score more points.


• Masters of Crime: Mosquito, from Lukas Setzke, Martin Student, and Verena Wiechens: Using existing apps and websites like Google Maps or Wikipedia to gather information, you are trying to find a legendary treasure in Latin America ahead of the secret organization "Mosquito" that wants the treasure for itself.

• Marbleous, from Mads Fløe and Kåre Torndahl Kjær: Draft a card, then roll the 2-3 marbles into your grid, trying to make groups of three or more to pop them and score, possibly making another group to score when you remove the first ones. Use bonus markers to drop an extra marble in the grid when it best suits you.

• Ingenious: Single-Player Travel Edition, from Reiner Knizia: One title you might notice missing from this list is Einfach Genial 3D, which KOSMOS released in Germany in late 2024 and which I reviewed in December of that year.

That game isn't on the Thames & Kosmos release calendar, but the publisher will release this solitaire logic game, which came out in Germany in July 2024. For each of the two hundred challenges, you lay out specified tiles on marked locations, then figure out how to fit all of the other tiles in the grid so that all of the colored symbols are in their proper spots.