GAMA Expo 2025: Wardens, Spooktacular, Word Colony, and Space Lion 2: Leon Strife | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

I’m nearing the halfway point(!) for my coverage of GAMA Expo 2025 — or at least I think I am. Hard to tell since I’m zapping pictures from my hard drive and tearing pages out of my notebook as I go to try to keep the road ahead as clear as possible. In any case, onward!

▪️ In the first half of 2025, the North American branch of Pegasus Spiele will release Word Colony, a game from Dorian Sărmășan that Romanian publisher KARPATHIC first released in 2021. Here’s an overview of this 2-4 player game:

Word Colony combines the pursuit of trivia with the challenge of a word game thanks to more than 440 trivia questions with multiple choice answers. Each question appears on a card that also displays a letter and its value when scored.

On your turn turn, select a card from your hand and read the question, plus the possible answers, to the table. All other players secretly vote on which answer they believe to be correct, and each player who identifies the correct answer draws a number of cards equal to that card’s value. If no one chooses the correct answer, instead you cards equal to that card’s value.

Finally, you can score points by spelling words onto the table in front of you with the letter cards in hand. If you have enough cards, you may spell multiple words and score multiple times on you turn; when you spell multiple words, you use the last letter of a previously spelled word as the first letter of the new word. If anyone has only a single word in front of them — instead of a colony of at least two words — another player can steal that word (and its points) by colonizing it with a second word.

Play to a pre-determined point total.

▪️ At the same time, Pegasus Spiele will release Word Colony: Around the World, an expansion that contains 90 letter cards with new trivia questions that focus on distant locales, extraordinary structures, and far-away places. Six “booster” cards are included to add more special powers to gameplay.

Additional Word Colony expansions — Human Body, Fantastic Animals, World Gastronomy, and Inventions & Inventors — are forthcoming.

▪️ Word Colony Kids: My First Words is another Sărmășan/Pegasus Spiele release, with players racing to answer questions to collect letter cards and build words.

▪️ Other titles coming from Pegasus Spiele North America are MESOS, a Cranio Creations publication from Yaniv Kahana and Simone Luciani released in February 2025); Ludonaute‘s Living Forest Duel from Aske Christiansen, due out sometime in 2025; and three titles from Deep Print Games — Roaring 20s from Leo Colovini, Under the Mango Tree from Karl Lange, and Rival Cities from Andreas Steding — all due out by Q3 2025.

▪️ I covered Chris Solis‘ Space Lion 2: Leon Strife from Solis Game Studio in a February 2025 post, and you can see above some of the cards in this two-player game in which you play cards into your base for their effect or onto outposts to fight for control. Cards level up over time, and you can compare the three levels of a card above.

Space Lion 2: Leon Strife is being crowdfunded through early April 2025 for release in 2026.

▪️ D. Brad Talton, Jr. of Level 99 Games says that Kickstarter fulfillment for his game Spooktacular is on target for mid-May 2025, with the game reaching retail outlets afterward. Here’s an overview of this 1-5 player game:

It’s Halloween night, 1986, and the all-night Spooktacular Film Festival is running in full swing in the midst of a wild thunderstorm. Suddenly, lightning strikes, overloading the theater’s power circuits and releasing a hundred years of cinematic monsters from the silver screen. As one of those monsters, YOU are now free to wreak havoc. Terrify and devour unsuspecting moviegoers in a race to become the most terrifying monster of all time!

In Spooktacular, play as one of twenty movie monsters, each with their own way of playing the game. Easy to understand rules are the base of the game, and everything else you need to know is right on your monster board. Tons of variability and devious monster abilities to discover will keep you coming back to the theater…

Non-final Wardens cover▪️ A reprinting of Dead by Daylight: The Board Game is underway, so the game should be in stock again before too long.

▪️ In August 2025, Level 99 Games plans to crowdfund Wardens, a 5v5 tabletop miniature-skirmish game from Talton for two players in which the miniatures are not mini at all, but rather three inches tall.

As is often the case for a L99 title, Wardens features characters with a wide range of unique abilities, with attack styles along the lines of Talton’s earlier BattleCON and Exceed designs. Players will choose characters, then take their character-specific decks and shuffle them together with non-character specific cards.

Players move the characters within a grid of sorts on their tabletop, with one player taking an action with a character, then the opponent responds with an attack from one of their characters. If you can control progress points — that is, locations — in the playing area, you gain special actions, with the long-term goal being to take out the shields that protect the opposing throne.

Wardens can also be played with teams of two players facing off against one another, with each team fielding three wardens. Preliminary rules are available online, along with a Tabltop Simulator mod.

Talton apologizes for his hasty painting work demonstrated here