by W. Eric Martin

▪️ To kontinue the Knizia koverage, in 2025 U.S. publisher Allplay plans to release Merchants of Andromeda, a new version of Reiner Knizia's 2000 game Merchants of Amsterdam that's been extensively developed by Bebop designer Robert Hovakimyan.

Here's an overview of this 3-5 player game:

▪️ Another Allplay release, this one due out in August 2025, is Alibis, a 2-6 player co-operative game from Yusuke Sato that's a new version of Nigoichi, which Japanese publisher JELLY JELLY GAMES released in 2022.

To this release I say, "Hooray!" I played Nigoichi in 2023, loved it, added it to the BGG database, and wrote a loooong overview of the game, simply because I wanted to share the game with others. Nigoichi features my favorite aspect of party games: trying to generate clever clues, while simultaneously figuring out the cleverness of others. (Admittedly I'm not much of a party person, so quietly cerebral parties appeal more to me than loud shouty ones.)

Here's my overview of the earlier game:

It's not clear from the Alibis game page what's different about the gameplay other than the setting, with players each round now looking at a line-up of supervillains. You learn that two of these suspects are innocent, then come up with a one-word clue to give to your fellow law enforcement officials so that together you can identify the lone culprit who lacks an alibi.


I'm unsure why you wouldn't just share information openly with your colleagues, but perhaps all of the supervillains have super hearing, so you need to speak only in clues instead of giving names. <<Insert hand-wavey game justification stuff here.>> Whatever the case, I'm delighted that I'll be able to play this game again, although sad that the anthropomorphic numbers have been axed.

▪️ Another August 2025 release from Allplay is Twinkle Twinkle, a 2-4 player game from Ammon Anderson.

Here's an overview:

▪️ In 2025, Allplay will also release is Corné van Moorsel's Waddle, which is clearly derived from van Moorsel's self-published 2007 release Gipsy King, a game I loved more than anyone else in my then game group.

In that earlier game, you set up a playing area at random from the board pieces, then determine the turn order, after which the game has no randomness. On a turn, you either place a caravan next to the lowest-numbered lake or move your turn marker to the start of the line for the next lake. If all but one player passes, the remaining player fills all spots around the current lake. When all the spots at a lake are filled, you move to the next lowest-numbered one.

Once all the spots are filled, whoever has the most pieces around a lake scores points equal to the number of fish in the lake. Additionally, each player scores points for their caravan groups, with larger groups scoring more points.


You then clear the board of caravans and play a second round, now starting with the highest-numbered lake and counting down. Twice during this round, you can place a double caravan on a space.

Waddle seems to retain this gameplay, but with players now placing penguins instead of caravans, which will probably be more appealing to the public at large, especially since I'm sure that Allplay will offer a wooden penguin add-on bonus for those who prefer their birds be three-dimensional.

▪️ Allplay has two new titles in its tiny card game line, with Slambo being a 2-4 player game from Ryan Richford in which you're playing cards and trying not to go above or below a certain total at risk of being pushed out of the ring.

For The Emperor is a two-player game from Whitney Loraine in which players compete for control of seven battlefields, with each warrior adding its strength and ability to your side of the battle in a quest to claim more battlefields than your opponent.

▪️ Finally(?), Allplay crowdfunded a quartet of games in Q4 2024 that will see release in mid-2025:

• A new edition of Reiner Knizia's classic 1999 card game Money!
• Peter C. Hayward's Vegas Strip, with players bidding in casinos that may (or may not) be corrupt, with you knowing a bit of that info.
• John D. Clair's Ruins, which is a new edition of his 2017 game Custom Heroes.
• Dan Schumacher's tile-laying game Oddland, in which you place flora and fauna tokens to score on the landscape created.
• And as a last-minute addition to that campaign, a new edition of Gil Hova's 2017 game Wordsy, which must shamefully be represented in this post with a 3D image instead of the superior 2D covers used for all other games.