10 Best Light Board Games at SPIEL Essen 2026

0:00 And we're back for another year. I didn't want to go sit in front of my board game shelf because this is all stuff that you want to see at Spiel Essen. So, first off, we're going to go with the light games worth hunting down this year. First up, Bloom Kingdom. I love this game. I picked it up at Berlin Brettspiel. Beautiful, beautiful art. It is a shared tableau builder. The cards that are left in your hand at the end of the building of the tableau are how you're going to score and you're going to score based off of the tableau. But, everybody is contributing to that tableau, so that could change drastically. Very cool. Friedemann Friese is back with Fishing number two. So, this is just like Fishing one. However, there are more buoy cards in this version. Um the rule book is easy to understand how those buoy cards work, as well as there is now a wild that is represented by a blowfish and it has a very, very high value.

0:53 However, the same core mechanics are the same where you don't want to overfish, otherwise you're not going to get some of the new good fish that are um in the pile. So, get your hands on that one. Flip Tunes season two. This is available on Board Game Arena and available already in North America, but if you haven't picked this up yet, this is very good. I'd highly recommend combining the two of them together and if you can, get the big red button expansion, which means once in the entire game, you're going to hit your big red button and just redraw your entire hand because sometimes you just get a karate hand. From Saashi and Saashi, their latest game is Railway Porters. I picked this up at UKGE. Very cool. Nice and light push your luck game, although it's not really push your luck because there's no reason not to push your luck. Just keep going till you bust. You'll still get lots of points. Um but, very cool. You're just going to be placing the dice that you roll onto your board trying to maximize the amount of points you get by how you place the dice.

1:46 Next up is Can't Win. This is another Japanese trick taker. They are very popular. Um this one, however, is going to each turn going to place out a condition that will not allow you to win the trick. Um so, it's giving you that variable trick-taking power, um but very cool and really neat kind of video 8-bit game art. From Korea Board Games is Capsule Collector. This one is also really neat, and I have played it, and I own this one. Thanks for sending them for sending that along. This one is kind of a tableau builder. So, you're going to draft the cards from the center. You have to take all of the capsules of the same um type, and whichever type that you took them from is the action that you're going to be able to do. One of those actions is to open up. However, you only get to open up the tableau based off of what is in the same column and row that is touching it. Um otherwise, you're going to have to uh try and swap things around to get your tableau in order. The trick here is that when you take those cards, they have to be placed in order, 1 2 3 4, 5 6 7 8, 9 10 11 12. So, that tableau is a fixed size. You don't get to decide where to put it.

2:50 Next up is Pop Art. Um I was really excited for this one. I know when I first heard about it, and then I didn't hear about it for a while, and now it's back. Um they've got it produced. This is a vinyl card layering mechanism game where you're going to be pattern matching in order create this lovely little pop art. It does have color-blind friendly icons so that you know when things are lining up correctly. Uh however, most of it is an art-based game, so it might not be the greatest for color-blind friendly. However, it looks really cool. Next one is Minikin City. This is from Simone Luciani. They have made a smaller game. I love all of their bigger games, so I'm actually really cool to see this take on trick-taking that they have done. Um so, it's got got a really cool little aspect to it. I would love to get my hands on a copy of this. However, it is Cranio Creations, so it will take a little bit to get here.

3:36 Same with Fugu, the latest from Helvetiq. It will take a little bit to get to Canada. Um however, you can play it now on BGA. It's really cool. You have this uh row of cards, and you're basically going to revealing a card, placing it, and then you're you're to try and take a card. But where you place that card is just kind of like um that Hanabi style of trying to get things in order so that you can keep going. And so the longer you can go, the more points you have the potential of getting. However, also that card happens to have pattern matching rules for how it's going to score. So like the blowfish wants to be alone, uh and the octopus wants to hide behind coral reefs. So that one's really cool. This last one, I was not a huge fan of it, but a lot of people have been uh talking about it. I I imported this from Japan and then of course it released cuz it's Synapses, which is a Canadian company, I think. Um uh but this is Circadia. Here you are trying to um set collect. However, when you set collect and you take the cards, you have to take um the cards and place them in your tableau at the equal or higher number than what you already have. And then you're going to exchange that set for the point cards. When you take the point cards, they have to alternate between day and night point cards. And so if you're ever stuck and you're not able to get the day or the night point card, you're going to have to take the five-pointer card instead. So, those are 10 games that you can check out that are nice and light this year at Spiel Essen 2026. Tune in next week and we will talk about more Essen titles. All right, see you then.