by W. Eric Martin

Some of these GAMA Expo 2025 reports will feel more like database updates and housekeeping, but that's because part of what I do at conventions is poke for updates and get an idea of when people can see things. Along those lines:

▪️ Drew Wehrle of Wehrlegig Games says that Molly House cleared U.S. customs just before that trade show opened, so the game will be shipping to crowdfunding backers in the United States imminently, a.k.a., in March 2025, after which copies will be available for purchase on the Wehrlegig website.

Co-designer Cole Wehrle notes that retailers can also purchase copies of the game directly through Wehrlegig, but "[w]e won't know if we have enough copies to enter distribution until much later this year".


▪️ With that project nearing completion, Wehrlegig plans to bring its next release — Hell Raisers in Kanawha County from Luke Evison and Matilda Simonsson — to crowdfunding in April 2025 for release in 2026.

▪️ Sardegna, a new version of Stefan Dorra's 2005 game Kreta, was released by Korean publisher Playte in 2024, and now publisher Crafty Games has brought this old-school German design with lots of player interaction to the U.S. market.

In Sardegna, each player has a hand of character cards, and on a turn, you play one, then carry out its action. You place and move five different types of tokens on the game board, occupying provinces. Two scoring cards are face up, and when any player plays a certain character, all provinces touching the intersection depicted on that card score individually based on the sum of each player's influence in each province, then another scoring card is revealed and all players return all character cards to their hands.

▪️ The next Crafty Games release will be Tabriz: The Card Game from designer Randy Flynn, who previously worked with Crafty on 2025's Tabriz. Here's an overview of this 2-5 player game that a Crafty rep says will be crowdfunded "soon":

▪️ In August 2024, Tim Fowers of Fowers Games crowdfunded Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip, co-designed by Skye Larsen.


While previous Burgle Bros titles have had nods to the past, both in graphics and setting, Burgle Bros 3 has moved your team of burglars to "a future dominated by AI and oppressive corporations". A future, you say?

In this cyberpunk setting, players now work together to bring down corporations, with the "flip" of the title carrying through to different game elements. Players can keep their character in disguise to avoid being detected by some parts of the corp's security, but you take only three actions in disguise compared to four actions, an ability, and a single-use special move once you switch to your burglary gear.

Room tiles are double-sided, and when you pull one from a bag to reveal the space you're exploring, you assign one side face up based on the current situation of the game, although some tiles can be flipped during play. Your long-term goal: Find program cards to disable the ICE guarding the safe. To help do that, you can gain info from corp workers who never get an hour off no matter what time of night it is.

The crowdfunding campaign included a "Runner" expansion of five characters from Null Signal Games' Netrunner card game, with separate cards and new actions for those characters.

▪️ Speaking of runners, Fowers Games has released a second printing of Moritz Dressler's two-player game RUN, which debuted in 2023. An overview:

▪️ This release was preceded by the debut of Fowers' word-building game Typewriter in late 2024.

You use double-sided plastic tiles akin to real typewriter keys to create words, which boosts the meter on your playing board based on the value of the word, with your meter looking like the keys of a typewriter. Bonus actions that you've reached on your meter allow you to bank a letter from your word (making it worth points at game's end), star a banked letter (making it worth more), double the value of a tile, and much more.

After you create a word, you must flip all the tiles that you haven't banked, then claim a new tile from the central "offer". Some tiles have actions on one side of them, so those actions get re-charged after two turns (flips), assuming your don't bank the letters when the action is face down.

▪️ Tim Fowers also has a digital game coming in March/April 2025: Peggy's Farm, which he says can be described as akin to a combination between Peggle and Stardew Valley.