New Game Round-up: Lewis & Clark Sail Again, Formula D Gets New Tracks & Dirty Pigs Await Your Attention in Putz die Wutz

Scharfe Schoten (a.k.a. "Hot Peppers") is a trick-taking game in which players predict their tricks — but instead of predicting the number of tricks they'll take, they have to state the color that they think they'll get the most or least tricks of. Since all cards show their color on the back, the players have more information than usual. In addition to cards in hand, the game includes a common supply of cards, some of which can be added to the tricks to make it easier to reach a player's goal. This strategy might backfire, however, if cards of the wrong color make it into a trick and you're aiming for a low score in that color.

During each trick, you must follow suit, even with the special trump cards. This also makes it difficult to correctly predict which tricks you'll get. In the end, the player who comes closest to his predictions wins.

In Putz die Wutz (a.k.a. "Scrub the Pig"), twelve "dirty" pigs are placed in a square on the table. They have 1-6 spots of "jam" in one of four colors on their back, and they are looking in different directions. The active player rolls three dice that determine the color and the number of spots of the pig that must be cleaned next. (The third die adds or subtracts one spot.) The players quickly look for this particular pig, then race to snatch the piece of soap lying in the direction that this pig is looking. If this particular pig isn't visible, they must instead snatch the "jam jar" in the middle of the square. If the first player who grabs something grabs the correct item, he turns the pig so that it looks toward him; if the pig was already looking in his direction, he instead takes the pig tile. The player who has collected the most pigs at the end of the game wins.

Just in time for the witching hour, the vampire, the witch and the headless butler have arranged to meet in the ballroom of the villa Schauerstein — but why has the mummy shown up here? And where is the witch?!

In Gruselrunde zur Geisterstunde, players first construct the villa, placing the walls in the box, then sliding cardboard characters on their cardboard "wands" through some of the ten slots. This villa then has a light placed inside it before a roof is added. Each round, a player is challenged to place two characters into the center of the villa. This player moves two of the wands so that the characters inside the villa are pushed forward; she then peeks through a peephole to see whether she's correct, and if so, she gains a scoring token after other players get to verify the characters. After a player collects her third token, finish the round so that everyone has the same number of turns. Whoever has three tokens wins!

Gruselrunde zur Geisterstunde includes a variant in which each round the active player is challenged to place three characters in the center of the villa (instead of two), and opponents guess whether or not this player was correct. After the active player pushes in the character wands, each opponent secretly places either a "yes" or "no" token in hand, then they reveal them simultaneously. If the active player was right, she gains two scoring tokens while each opponent who guessed "yes" earns one; if she's wrong, then each opponent who guessed "no" earns one token. The winning threshold in this variant is 8-10 tokens, depending on the number of players.