• Rüdiger Dorn's Mercado is a big box game due out in March with a confusing description:
In more detail, different market stalls, each with one product, are laid out as panels in the center of the table. Each player has a personal bag containing different coins. On a turn, you draw three coins from it blind and place them at the market tables of your choice. If a player has paid all the necessary coins of a product, they receive the board and thereby increase their reputation. Some tablets bring extra privileges or seals, others bring counterfeit money that might wander into a bag. Who can buy the most valuable goods?
• KOSMOS is refreshing Reiner Knizia's two-player masterpiece Lost Cities yet again with a new look, but it's also releasing Lost Cities: The Board Game in German for the first time. (This title was originally available only from Rio Grande Games in the U.S., whereas KOSMOS had released the similar but not identical Keltis, which won the Spiel des Jahres in 2009 and led to the release of many Keltis spin-offs.)
• In addition to those two titles, in March 2018 Knizia and KOSMOS will release the two-player-only Lost Cities: To Go, which may or may not be one of those Keltis spin-offs in new garb. The current description is vague enough to make things unclear:
Each step you take in Lost Cities: To Go requires a tile in the color of the chosen expedition, but you can place tiles only if they're of the same value or higher than what's been placed previously. Only by finding the right mix of tiles will you stay in front and win.
• Machi Koro Fussball takes the familiar Machi Koro game from Masao Suganuma and changes the setting, with players now being investors who build stadiums, training centers, clubhouses, and more to profit from the upcoming World Cup tournament being held in your town.
• KOSMOS always seems to have one abstract-ish design in its offerings every six months, and the early 2018 offering is Drop It from Bernhard Lach and Uwe Rapp. At first glance the game resembles Kris Burm's Batik, but the game is a multi-round attrition of pieces as you try to force your opponent to play something that sticks outside the playing area. Drop It is doing something else with a similar set-up:
In more detail, each turn the active player drops one of their pieces into the slot of the game board. The player scores points for the highest level that the piece touches and for any special locations that it touches, but if the piece touches anything of the same shape or color, then you score nothing! What's more, certain pieces are forbidden at certain spots on the edge of the playing area.
The Drop It rulebook includes variant rules for simpler play or more variety from game to game.
• The escape room trend is still going at KOSMOS, with the intermediate level EXIT: Das Spiel – Die unheimliche Villa due out in March 2018 and the beginner level EXIT: Das Spiel – Das mysteriöse Museum due out in May.
• As best as I can tell, Grzegorz Rejchtman's Ubongo Solo is not a game, but a collection of 546(!) logic puzzles that use 45 polygonal pieces from Ubongo, Ubongo extrem, and Ubongo Trigo and 50 double-sided task cards to challenge the solo solver, starting in March 2018.