GAMA Expo 2025: Ape Town, Feed the Kraken, Shadow Ninjas, and Disney Villainous Unstoppable! | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

Time to keep marching through the GAMA Expo 2025 halls three weeks on(!) from when it took place. It would be more expedient to embed a camera in my forehead and livestream everything, but then I’d never be able to wear a hat again, so I’ll stick with this approach:

▪️ Canadian publisher/distributor Outset Media has licensed Reiner Knizia‘s Ape Town from Austrian publisher Piatnik and plans to debut the title in Q4 2025, ideally at PAXU 2025.

In February 2025, Outset released Clans and Glory, a Gabriele Bubola and Leo Colovini title that German publisher HUCH! debuted in late 2024.

Outset has picked up other titles over the years that I never noticed previously, such as Don Eskridge‘s 2019 game Spies & Lies, which I covered at the time and which Outset released in 2021.

▪️ Shadow Ninjas is a one-vs-many game for up to five players from Kedric Winks, with the one player controlling two guard dogs and the other players controlling a set of ninja tokens, most of which show a shadow ninja on its reverse side and one or more of which show a real ninja.

Players take turns rolling dice and moving their tokens — the dog player moving only the dog tokens and the cat player(s) moving any of the ninja tokens. If a dog gets line of sight on one or more cats in the labyrinth, then you reveal those tokens, with real ninjas being eliminated from play and shadow ninjas being returned to the starting area. If the dogs eliminate all four real ninjas before a real ninja steals a koi from a pond in the dog’s area, the dog player wins; otherwise the koi thief wins.

▪️ Guildlands is a tile-laying game for 2-6 players due out in Q3 2025 from Ken Boyter and Kedric Winks in which various clans, such as the gardeners, score in particular ways, and you’re trying to place, rotate, and move tiles in order to maximize your score.

▪️ Inter-Galactic Plumber is a 2-6 player game along the lines of Hey, That’s My Fish! in that players claim space debris over the course of play, ideally stranding opponents where they can no longer collect tiles for points.

▪️ Feed the Kraken is a 5-11 player game from Maikel Cheney, Dr. Hans Joachim Höh, and Tobias Immich that German publisher Funtails released in 2022.

Players secretly take the role of sailors, pirates, or a lone cultist, with the sailors trying to reach land, the pirates the Bermuda Triangle, and the cultist the spot that will raise the Kraken and liberate everyone…from their life. Each round, the captain chooses a lieutenant and a navigator, after which the crew can spend guns to mutiny, with a new captain then being chosen. The captain and lieutenant give their movement orders to the navigator, who doesn’t know who gave which cards, but who chooses and carries out one of those orders. The cultist can convert others to the cult as the game progresses.

Outset Media will release Feed the Kraken in North America in May 2025.

▪️ Ravensburger revealed the final cover of Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons just ahead of GAMA Expo 2025, but had nothing on display for this game at the show.

▪️ Also on display was the Burgundy collection and a mock-up of Mycelia: Prisma, an expansion for Daniel Greiner‘s 2023 title Mycelia that’s due out in Germany in September 2025.

▪️ Filippo Landini‘s Gloomies was one Ravensburger title that was on display. Here’s an overview of this 2-4 player game that will appear in Germany in March 2025 and in North America later in 2025:

In the first half, you play cards to strategically place flowers on the board in rows, setting yourself up for good bonuses, then draw new cards. Once that’s done, your discarded cards become your deck for the second half of the game. Play cards to strategically harvest flowers from rows, once again trying to set yourself up for good bonuses. In the end, you receive points for your harvested flowers and any Gloomie decoration orders you’ve completed.

▪️ Finally, here’s a look at the components of Disney Villainous Unstoppable!, which was announced in February 2025: