by W. Eric Martin

French publisher IELLO is another company that previews its release line-up for the next year at SPIEL Essen, so let's get a taste for what's coming — and thanks to a distribution deal with Blue Orange Games, IELLO titles will be available in North America once again starting in November 2025 with Little Soldiers, King of Tokyo: Luchador, King of Tokyo: Mindbug, and Popcorn, among other titles.

▪️ Speaking of Little Soldiers, a wargame/party game combo from Florent Baudry and Adrien Fenouillet, IELLO had a scaled-up version of the game in its SPIEL Essen 25 booth, with an invitation to potential players to add their mark to the scoreboard.


Two small expansions for Little Soldiers are scheduled for release in 2026, with each containing new specialists for players to add to their side of the battlefield.

Watch for heavy weaponry amongst your morning cereals...
▪️ Another two-player-only game from IELLO is Bunny Kingdom Town, a Richard Garfield design that riffs on 2017's Bunny Kingdom at a smaller scale. An overview:

In game terms, over four rounds players draft building tiles and location tiles, trying to create large districts while claiming the random assortment of bonus tiles revealed at the start of play. IELLO expects to debut Bunny Kingdom Town at UK Games Expo 2026.


▪️ Veggie Match, which debuted at SPIEL Essen 25, is an updated version of Yukihito Morikawa's 1992 game Harvest, which saw a burst of interest after a 2023 Japanese edition brought the design to the attention of today's players.

In the game, players take turns playing a crop card into an empty field space, with each player having their own field that adjoins others. When three identical crops are in a row, the players who own the fields holding these cards claim them.

Veggie Match incorporates both Harvest and the Harvest: Festival expansion, with simplified rules that allow a player to plant a card anywhere instead of restricting them to their field. Placing the third card in a row earns you a token for completing that crop, and whoever has a majority of tokens earns bonus points.

In theory, you could purchase a second copy and play with up to twelve people since the fields are marked with two symbols in six colors.

▪️ In early 2025, IELLO released an edition of Regicide for the European market, and in 2026 it will release another game featuring a largely traditional card deck: River Rats, a 1-4 player co-operative poker game from Mathijs Jansen, Robin Stokkel, and Four Suit Studio that IELLO's Roger Anthony-Gerroldt described as Regicide meets The Gang.

Players collectively build a poker hand each round, using their individual powers and each suit's power to better their odds as they try to face down the river rats, giving them enough debt to send them packing before all of you are forced off the boat and into the river.


▪️ The 2-5 player game Emergency Exit Only is a new edition of Toru Ii's 2022 dungeon in memory from locogame.

Players take turns laying down one tile in a shared stack, with the arrows on those tiles determining where everyone in the group is going. You try to mentally track that path, and if you think the group is lost —perhaps because you've circled back on yourself — you can play a "lost" tile to exit that round. If you escaped at the right time, great, but if you jumped ship when you should have kept running, you'll be punished.

Additional constraints can be added each round to increase the game's difficulty.


▪️ A new edition of the Diamant: Caution and Betrayal expansion will be released to match the graphics in the 2024 base game.

▪️ IELLO now holds worldwide rights (outside Germany) to Yusuke Sato's TimeBomb, so its version of the game, Time Bomb: Moriarty vs. Sherlock, will now be available in North America instead of Don't Mess with Cthulhu.

▪️ IELLO will add more titles to its line of traditional card games from around the world, with updated versions of Scopa and Tarot with new art.

▪️ HiiFuu is a new edition of Yozaemon Matumoto's 2021 trick-taking game ヒーフー!! from Thomasson Toys with the only difference I'm aware of being a change in player count from 4-5 to 4-6.

At the beginning of each round, you discard some of the cards dealt to you, then you play a classic trick-taking game with no trump in which you must follow suit, if possible. The twist is that you must win exactly two tricks to score — and the longer you wait to win your two tricks, the more points you earn! But the longer you wait, the more you risk never being able to take the lead. Naturally, the number of tricks in a round will force at least one person to go scoreless.


▪️ POCK! is a lawn game from Rémi Mathieu and Max-Tobias Walter due out in Q2 2026 that Anthony-Gerroldt describes as playing like a combination of Kubb and Tumblin' Dice.


▪️ IELLO continues to expand its jigsaw puzzle line, with some titles including internal puzzles that need to be solved. Of particular interest to gamers might be three new puzzles that feature art by Jakub Rozalski.



▪️ Almost done...

▪️ IELLO's LOKI game line for children will have four new entries:

• The Rookies, which is akin to The Animals of Baker Street for younger players.
• Boo Party, a memory game in which players try to reveal costumes that they're allowed to get.
• Cric Crac Kroc, which is a new edition of Yoshiteru Shinohara's 2013 game Crossing.
• Nono's Puzzle Cubes, a co-operative design by Marie and Wilfried Fort in which an adult reads a story with a child, with the child finding the right puzzle cube face in order to assemble the story. Only six of the nine cubes are included in the story's image, with misleading images on some of the faces, such as the two at the lower left of the box, which initially appear identical but are not.



▪️ King of Tokyo: Duel – Baby Gigazaur was originally available as a tournament prize, but it will be released via retail outlets in 2026, with the expansion coming in a paper envelope.

A new set of dice for King of Tokyo: Duel will be available for those who don't like to share, and the 100th monster to be released for the King of Tokyo line — appropriately titled "The 100th" — will introduce a new monster-specific victory condition to King of Tokyo: Duel. Each time you keep an ! in your role as "The 100th", you discard two cards from the power card deck, and if the deck is empty, you win! Nice to see Richard Garfield adding a Millstone strategy to this design...


▪️ Finally, IELLO has four other projects in the works, with two being part of a new game line by Yohan Servais, who has previously designed Unlock! challenges and created IELLO's Guilty game line. These titles should debut at the FIJ game fair in Cannes in 2026.

The other two will remain a mystery for now...aside from this poster IELLO shared in its press room.