Game Store Day's 297 shops, an Emmy nomination for Werewolves, and Pili Pili at Luxembourg's café tables

The desk covers 30 September to 2 October 2026, with one story from 29 September folded in and dated where it appears. Across those days a retail initiative grew large enough to shift publishers' calendars, a 25-year-old social deduction game collected a television award nomination, and two designers wrote down how they found their games.

GAMA's Game Store Day has 297 retailers signed up for its second edition on 7 November, already past last year's final total with more than a month left to run. Nearly 60 tabletop publishers have committed games to the Publisher's Box, the $179 crate that participating shops buy without knowing exactly what is inside. Leder Games, CGE, Blue Orange, Capstone Games and Bezier Games are among the 59, another four are waiting to take part, and further publishers approached GAMA after submissions had closed. 1

Allplay has gone further than the shared box. It is making 4,900 copies of its new game Woo available only to retailers taking part, with chief operating officer Joe Wiggins saying the company had been looking for ways to work closer to its brick-and-mortar partners. 1

The reason a publisher buys into this is the reason to pay attention. Jamie Mathy, a GAMA board member who owns Red Raccoon Games, says hobby shops are fragmented by ownership style, product mix, customer base and area of specialism, which leaves publishers guessing where to put marketing money meant for retailers. A shop willing to spend $179 on a box whose contents it cannot see has already sorted itself into the engaged end of the trade. 1

Last year stores had less than eight weeks to prepare. This year they have had roughly four months, which is the change Mathy credits for the sign-up numbers. He puts the long-term ambition at 500 participating shops — about 10% of the estimated 5,000 hobby game stores in North America, and a number that would show publishers the date has moved past being a one-off novelty. At 1,000 shops, roughly 20% penetration, he would call it "amazing". 1

He also turned down the comparison GAMA itself invites with Record Store Day, where exclusive product has become the draw rather than a bonus: "I don't personally think Game Store Day needs to become Record Store Day for games." Individual shops are building their own programmes around the date. Oddwillow's Game Haven in Wisconsin has partnered with its local library for button-making, storytimes, miniature painting and game demos, and Lookin' For Games in Pennsylvania is combining its first Game Store Day with a 24-hour gaming fundraiser for Extra Life benefiting Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. 1

Season two of Loups-Garous, the Canal+ competition built directly on the rules of The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow, has been nominated in the Non-Scripted Entertainment category at the International Emmy Awards, which honour television first produced and aired outside the United States. The show's first season drew more than two million viewers at its 2024 launch — at the time the best opening for a new Canal+ creation — and 15 million views in total, according to the game's publisher Asmodee. 2

The number that matters to a designer is the one from the game shops. During the show's launch week, sales of the physical game ran 150% higher than in the same week a year earlier. 2

The screen rights have travelled further than France. Banijay struck a multi-territory deal last year covering the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Nordics, the Netherlands, Israel, Mexico, Brazil and India, and a German edition's first season passed five million streams before its second returned this month. Asmodee runs the same route with its other properties: Netflix holds exclusive global rights to Ticket to Ride across film, television and other formats, and took the first screen adaptations of Catan across scripted and unscripted television, film and animation. 2

Luxembourg's hospitality association Horesca and the country's largest board game club, Spillfabrik, have named the trick-taking game Pili Pili their board game of the year. Horesca represents about 2,900 hotels, restaurants and cafés, and runs the Bistrospill award with Spillfabrik to put modern hobby games back on the tables of bars and bistros. 3

The competition is a design brief in disguise. Spillfabrik preselected the games, screening for titles that are easy to explain, compact enough for a café table, playable by several people and interactive enough to carry a social evening. Publishers submitted 76 games; five finalists survived — Udo Peise's Auf die Eier, Kei Kajino's dnup, Antoine Bauza and Théo Rivière's Oh My Socks!, Jannik Walter's Sneaky and the winner. 3

Pili Pili comes from Ben B and Jean-Baptiste de Ghellinck, the founders of the French party game publisher ATM Gaming, which Asmodee acquired this year in a deal worth up to €250m. Players predict how many tricks they will take each round and take penalties for missing the target, while mission cards rewrite the rules as the game progresses; the whole thing runs about 20 minutes. Participating venues receive posters, simplified rules, printed beer mats and activity suggestions, and the organisers now argue a café needs nothing more than a small shelf or a clearly marked box of chosen games. 3

Renegade and Hasbro renew their licence. Renegade Game Studios will keep making tabletop games from Hasbro properties, with new editions of its Transformers, G.I. Joe and Power Rangers roleplaying games moving to rules compatible with the revised fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Those three will launch first on BackerKit before a trade release, and the licence covers M.A.S.K., My Little Pony, JEM and the Holograms, ROM the Spaceknight and the board games Axis & Allies, Diplomacy, Heroscape, Robo Rally and Ikusa. Renegade's roleplaying line is also narrowing for 2027: it will stop publishing World of Darkness games with White Wolf. 4

GAMA Expo opens registration for its first Baltimore year. Registration has opened for GAMA Expo 2027, running 25–29 April, about two months later than this year's 1–5 March dates. The organisation moved a year before its Louisville convention contract expired, a decision it has put at over $300,000, which it expects to recover through savings and incentives in the new city. 5

The Bake or Break designer diary, published on BoardGameGeek on 30 September, opens behind the counter of Cafe Storybook, a picture-book café in Osaka. Its designer had been running board game nights there and wanted a game about the specific chaos of a busy café, where everyone is helping and everything still slides. 6

The mechanism is simultaneous action selection. Everyone chooses an action in secret and reveals at once, so the comedy arrives when three players prepare the same order while the ingredient nobody touched goes missing. Two constraints shaped everything else. The rules had to be simple enough for a child to follow, while the decisions stayed meaningful for the experienced player at the same table — someone reading the other hands and choosing the action they think everyone else will skip. The illustration, by the artist COPECO, was picked so the finished thing reads like a picture book. 6

The development note is the part to carry off. Playtests with family, friends, customers, staff and other designers pushed the rules toward simpler, and the finished game is simpler than the earliest prototype while sitting closer to the original idea. Bake or Break is live on Kickstarter. 6

Stonemaier's Jamey Stegmaier took a routine from Matic Robots co-founder Mehul Nariyawala — ask "why?" three times in a row to reach the root of a problem — and pointed it at playtest feedback. A tester reports that a card was useless. The first why gives you "I never used its ability"; the second gives you "the ability was too expensive to activate." That third answer is the one you can act on, and Stegmaier notes the best playtesters hand it over unprompted. 7

His business example shows the same chain doing work on a design limit. Asked whether Wingspan Pocket should get an expansion, the question resolves into the game's iconography: abilities are printed as icons, the icon system caps how many unique abilities the box can hold, and no amount of demand for more cards moves that ceiling. 7

Forest Shuffle: Smoky Mountains is the third standalone in the Lookout Games series, designed by Kosch with art by Toni Llobet and Judit Piella, for two to five players in about 60 minutes. Its new terrain cards are built around water: they can be played on their own or tucked beneath trees as universal water, which gives the familiar flora-and-fauna scoring a new connective layer, alongside large species such as black bears and bobcats. 8

Fugu debuts at SPIEL from Helvetiq, designed by the father-and-son team of Flavio and Riccardo Foches, one to four players in 25 minutes. Hands start face-down, and every card drawn from the centre is slotted in ascending order and turned face-up, revealing the card beside it. Your hand's shape becomes public one card at a time, so the puzzle is what you can still hide. 8

Wild World is Chilifox Games' Essen release, designed by Eilif Svensson, Åsmund Svensson and Viljar Opdal Svensson, for one to four players aged 14 and up over 45 to 90 minutes. Three rounds, three workers to start, and a turn that comes down to placing a worker in one of five realms, fighting a monster, or moving a placed worker to the island to rest. 9

Repeated plays moved the review table's attention off the worker placement. Every creature card has four uses: it can sit at home supplying elemental symbols, travel for board bonuses and end-game points, be sold for gold, or be spent against a monster. Cards picked up with one plan kept getting reassigned to another, which is where the real decision lives — the worker spaces hold the game together, and the cards are what it is about. 9

Two systems change how a table plays. The round has no fixed number of turns: it ends once every player has at least one worker parked on the island, so anyone leaving early shortens the round for everyone else and forces the table to count workers. And the placement is forgiving, since losing a space sends you down a costlier route rather than wrecking the plan. The group's favourite count was three players, with four working best among people who already know the game, because every personal board is something extra to read before your next turn. The habit to watch is analysis paralysis — placing a worker is quick, and everything available before and after it is not. 9

One date comes straight off this desk: Game Store Day lands on 7 November, and 297 shops in year two — with publishers now queuing for the space in the box — is the number to watch if you are weighing whether a retail-only edition is worth printing. Bake or Break's Kickstarter campaign is open now.