• We'll begin with MEKHANE, a 3-8 player game from Roberto Grasso that plays in 30 minutes and that will likely benefit from a video overview that demonstrates in more detail what's being described insufficiently in words below:
At the end of the game, one of the gods wins the game if their favorite character has survived.
• MEOW is a 2-6 player card game from Reiner Knizia that doesn't sound like it has much going on — which reminds me of Knizia's LAMA, which also sounds like nothing but which was indeed something. Here's what we know about the game for now:
Each game is divided into three rounds, and each round is divided into nine turns. On a turn, each player plays one cat card, then the player who played the most valuable card wins one award token. Keep in mind that not all awards are positive! At the end of the game, the player who collected the most points wins.
• At Spielwarenmesse 2019, BGG recorded a teaser video with Cranio Creations about a new edition of Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling's 2004 game Maharaja. This edition is now moving toward publication in 2020, with new graphics, new components, and other changes:
During the game, players take the role of priests who travel to different cities in India, building statues and shrines dedicated to their favorite Gods to expand their worship. To do so, they are assisted by several characters with different abilities. Every year, the Maharaja, the great king of India, will change his residence and players will receive rewards according to their Gods' worship value. At the beginning of each year, players plan their actions in a secret phase to be played simultaneously.
At the end of the seventh year or when a player builds their seventh statue, the game ends, then the player with most prestige wins.
Aside from the new graphics and components and from players now building statues instead of palaces, this new edition of Maharaja includes new characters to use during the turn that change turn order, additional ways to earn victory points, an additional bonus each time you score a city after the Maharaja's visit depending on the assistant you chose, and additional modular rules that can be added during the game and in the final scoring.
• The 2019 title Mystery House: Adventures in a Box from designer Antonio Tinto will receive an expansion in 2020 with Back to Tombstone:
• Other titles coming from Cranio Creations in 2020 include Machination, a design from Matthew Dunstan and Phil Walker-Harding in which you occupy a vehicle-dismantling depot and need to chose the right cars to pile up in your warehouse. Try to be the fastest player to fulfill common objectives to receive the best bonuses, while respecting your stock requirement.
• Finally, we come to Golem from Flaminia Brasini, Virginio Gigli, and Simone Luciani, with the publisher noting that Gigli and Luciani's Grand Austria Hotel inspired some of the mechanisms in Golem. Here's a quick take on it: