GAMA Expo 2025: Yokohama Duel, Hacienda, Kinfire Council, and Up or Down? | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

I worry sometimes that my presence at GAMA Expo 2025 was a box-checking exercise: Visit as many exhibitor booths as possible, snap pics, take notes, and don’t stick around longer than 4.25 minutes because there’s lots more to see. Hustle, hustle, hustle!

And yet that’s kind of why I was at the show — to get an overview of what’s coming out over the next year or so from those publishers in attendance. Here’s another ladleful of info to keep emptying my bowl:

▪️ At Gen Con 2025, Synapses Games plans to debut the second edition of Hisashi Hayashi‘s Yokohama Duel, a two-player only adaptation of a larger game that was first released in 2018, long before it was the cool thing to do…but a few years after 7 Wonders Duel, so it was still kind of on trend.

▪️ Another second edition on display in the Flat River Games booth was Donald Duck in Happy Camper, a Wolfgang Kramer and Daryl Andrews design that Maestro Media released in early February 2025 and that is a re-working of 2002’s Goldland from defunct German publisher Goldsieber Spiele.

Non-final front cover

▪️ Moving to the Capstone Games booth, we come across another Kramer design, this one being Up or Down?, a co-design with Michael Kiesling that ABACUSSPIELE released at SPIEL Essen 24.

And hooboy, does this edition have a different look from the original! ABACUSSPIELE went with the idea of cards representing pages in a student’s notebook, with the pages getting more and more doodled on over time, that is, as the numbers went higher.

Capstone Games changed the setting to what would be the third tallest building in the world behind the Burj Kalifa and the Shanghai Tower, with players now collecting cards in a 126-story building.

The gist of the game is that each turn you place a card from hand between the closest two cards numerically, then draft one of those two cards and add it to one of three rows of cards in front of you, with each row either going up or down in number. If you can’t place a card, you have to remove a row, then start a new one, with you trying to get lots of cards in a single color in a row in order to maximize that row’s score.

▪️ Can I squeeze a third Kramer title into this post? Yes, I can — thanks to Pandasaurus Games‘ plans to release a new edition of Kramer’s 2005 game Hacienda before the end of 2025.

At last I think it’s the 2005 version of Hacienda. Perhaps this is actually a new edition of White Goblibn Games‘ 2019 second edition of Hacienda.

More details to come since practically no details where on display at GAMA Expo 2025, other than the presence of cartoony animals, which is, shall we say, both unexpected and predictable.

▪️ Incredible Dream Studios crowdfunded Kevin Wilson‘s Kinfire Council in early 2024, and it’s on schedule to be delivered in July 2025 and debut at Gen Con 2025…but of course a lot could change over the next four-plus months, so we’ll see. (I think every publisher is casting bones, reading the tea leaves, and hoping for the best in this unstable economic landscape.

The look of the game has changed since it was displayed at GAMA Expo 2024, so here’s an overhead shot of the game’s final graphics.