Build a Happy City, Mix Qwixx Colors, and Identify Who's on Your Secret Squad

To follow up on my preview of Phil Walker-Harding's flip-and-write game Super Mega Lucky Box from Gamewright, I thought I'd highlight other titles coming in 2021 from this U.S. publisher.

• Part of Gamewright's 2021 line-up is English-language editions of games previously released elsewhere, with the splashiest such title (as least in my eyes) being Happy City from the farther/daughter design team of Toshiki and Airu Sato.

In 2018, this team released Happiest Town at Tokyo Game Market through their own Sato Familie publishing brand, and BGG interviewes them for a game overview:

Now French publisher Cocktail Games has licensed the design, developed it further, then licensed its version to multiple publishers around the world, something it's done previously for titles such as Hanabi and Imagine. Here's an overview:

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Become the mayor of your own mini-metropolis in Happy City! Buy buildings to attract residents, increase their happiness, and earn an income because you'll need money to grow, but in the end only the satisfaction of your citizens counts towards your final score. Strike the perfect balance to build the happiest city in town!

Happy City includes rules for two ways to play: a family version and an "expert version" that features more interaction and strategy.

• Another licensed game coming from Gamewright is Steffen Benndorf's Qwixx Mixx, which German publisher NSV originally released in 2014.

Why the seven year delay for this expansion to the wildly successful game Qwixx? Because Gamewright almost never releases expansions for its titles, and when it does, those expansions have consisted of one or more promo cards available at conventions or sold via hobbyist outlets like the BGG Store.

As far as I know, Qwixx Mixx will be the first expansion from Gamewright ever to have a retail release. Gamewright is a mass-market publisher with one foot in the world of hobbyist games, and expansions don't fit its MO — yet Qwixx has been so successful for so long that the publisher can break its own rules to bring this item to the U.S. market.

• Urtis Šulinskas' Hedgehog Roll, winner of the 2020 Kinderspiel des Jahres, is another title that Gamewright is bringing to the U.S. market. In this game, players can play competitively or co-operatively, using a Velcro-covered "hedgehog" ball to pick up items from the forest floor and move it toward home.

• I'm unsure whether Chicken Chicken is an original release or not. The description below sounds like another memory game I've run across, but my recall of memory games is not great. (Insert joke here.) Here's how this 2-8 player game works:

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Count your chickens before they hatch!

In Chicken Chicken, reveal cards one at a time, keeping a mental tally of the eggs. Be the first to slap the pile when you think the total equals five — but chickens, foxes, dogs, and others get mixed into the stack to fowl up your count. The more characters you add, the more eggciting the game! Win three rounds and you rule the roost!

• Coffin Full of Zombies appears to be Barrel of Monkeys with modern theming, but Gamewright hasn't posted the rules, so that's all I can tell you at the moment.

• Finally, we come to Secret Squad from designers Markus Slawitscheck and Arno Steinwender, with this being a new version of the 2018 party game #no secrets from German publisher moses. Verlag, with maximum player count having been increased from six to ten, along with other minor changes. Here's how to play:

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In each of the three rounds of Secret Squad, all players are secretly assigned a color squad, either red or yellow. To start the round, a card is revealed that has a yes/no question in red and a different yes/no question in yellow. All players answer "yes" or "no" to the question corresponding to their secret color by placing a token on the "Yup" or "Nope" end of the card. Two other cards are then revealed, with players answering them in the same way.

Using these clues, you want to identify someone — anyone! — who's on your squad. Everyone raises a finger, and on the count of three, you point at someone who seems like a good fit. (In a three-player game, you might be alone, and if you think you are, you point at yourself.) Everyone then reveals their squad affiliation, and if you guessed correctly, you score points; you also score if someone correctly identified you as being part of their squad.

You then reshuffle the squad cards and play another round. Whoever has the most points after three rounds wins.