More substantively, says Gimmler, "We have four new character cards (quest cards) and two new treasure cards (item cards). We have hard cover books inside. We changed two spells and did a complete new game board, which will make it easier to see which player selected which spell. We also have five little figures (acrylic glass) inside. I also changed the end of the game so that it ends after a fixed number of rounds. Those are most of the changes."
If you enlarge the press image below, you'll see the changes on the new game board, with spell icons laid out on the board and the player figures placed on the spells that they chose – which should make it easier to resolve all the spells since you don't have to remember who chose what.
• Designer Wolfgang Kramer mentions on his website that a new edition of Heimlich & Co. is coming with a new "Top Secret variant" that results in a "significantly shorter playing time" with otherwise no changes to the game play. That said, Heimlich & Co. wasn't on AMIGO's list of Nürnberg 2012 releases, and Kramer mentions that the game uses the new AMIGO design, so this might be something for the latter half of 2012.
• French website Tric Trac reports that Stefan Feld's Trajan has been picked up by Gigamic – which is somewhat bizarre given the rest of the Gigamic line, but perhaps this move foretells future shifts toward game-ier releases from the French publisher.
• Spanish publisher nestorgames has released Hello, Dolly!, a two-player game themed around collecting one's sheep but without any cloning-based game mechanisms. Missed opportunity here...
• German publisher intellego holzspiele has two new titles from Reiner Knizia – who has more than a dozen on the Nürnberg 2012 Preview so far – those games being Gravitas and Singapur. No real details on the game play, but gosh darn if those intellego releases aren't purtier than all get-out.
• I've seen mentioned on a couple of German gaming sites – such as Spielbox here and Ratgeberspiel here – a new game titled Zug um Zug Deutschland, aka Ticket to Ride: Germany, with the description mentioning that this will be a full game and not an expansion pack along the lines of the recently released Ticket to Ride: India/Switzerland. I've asked Days of Wonder for details on this release, starting with whether it really exists, but given DoW's previous responses to information leaks ahead of an official press release, I expect little more than a "no comment".
Update: And I've received the official "no comment" from Mark Kaufmann at Days of Wonder. So now we wait...