Grab Eels, Feel Corners, Determine Weights, and Predict Which Hat a Duck Should Wear | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

Tokyo Game Market opens on May 17, 2025 for two days, and as is the trend for that show, publishers are starting to reveal their upcoming games roughly a month prior to their release.

▪️ Wriggle Roulette is a 2-8 player game from Jun Sasaki and Bruno Faidutti, with this being their second title for Oink Games following 2023’s Whale to Look.

Here’s an overview of this 20-minute press-your-luck game:

In Wriggle Roulette, players take turns reaching into a bag filled with eel- and snake-shaped wooden pieces, trying to pull out as many eels as possible — but if the number of snakes grabbed by all players exceeds the limit, a “snake outbreak” occurs, and the player who grabbed the most pieces loses all of their eels.

Wriggle it, just a little bit

You want to grab more than everyone else to score big, yet a snake outbreak would be devastating. Will you grab a bunch? Just a few? Or back out entirely? Read your opponents’ expressions and control your own greed to make the right call.

▪️ A second title debuting from Oink Games is Thomas Sellner’s Petiquette, a 2-6 player about intuiting the best order for chapeau-bearing critters:

Humans are curious creatures. Even when cards are randomly lined up, we can’t help but find patterns…and ideally we’re thinking along the same lines.

Each round in Petiquette, players look at a line-up of five random cards — with cards showing one of three animals that is wearing one of three hats, with a number from 1-5 at top — and try to find some logic or pattern within them. Each player secretly chooses the card they think would most properly fit into that pattern. For example, if the sequence is “red, red, yellow…”, you might feel that yellow should come next. If it’s “dog, cat, bird…”, then maybe dog feels right…but what about “dog, cat, dog, cat, bird”? No single answer is correct, but if someone chooses the same card as you, you both earn points.

The choice is clear in this promotional image

Petiquette can be played either competitively and co-operatively.

▪️ Japanese publisher itten will have a two-player game from Ronald Halliday called Hits & Outs that streamlines a game of baseball down to the battle between pitcher and batter:

▪️ I slipped in covering two itten releases in late 2024, with one of them being Four Corner Detective, a ridiculous concept from Yoshihisa Itsubaki that is beguiling:

An itten representative showed me a mock-up of this game at SPIEL Essen 24, and it was bizarre to try to interpret what I was feeling. The game cover shows the numbers 3, 4, 5, and 8, and these numbers correspond to the four possible “roundnesses” of the cards, with you attempting to guess the four numbers in the correct order. (The notch on the card gives you the starting point for your digital journey.)

▪️ The other late 2024 release from itten was Gravity Three, a set of three games for 2-3 players from Masayuki Ikegami and Yoshiaki Tomioka. The main elements in the game are three sets of weighted tokens, with each set being a different color and the tokens being numbered 1-5, with 5 being the heaviest.

In the memory game, you turn all the numbers face down, then on a turn you pick up three tokens one by one, not being able to repeat a color, then choose one of the tokens to keep. After three rounds, everyone reveals their three tokens, and whoever can make the “strongest” three-digit number wins, with a three-of-a-kind beating a straight, which beats any other three-digit number.

Another game is a bluffing game in which players take turns rolling a die and placing a token from their reserve that matches the weight they rolled onto a stack. Each other player in turn lifts the stack to see whether they think the player added the correct weight to the pile, calling them out if they doubt the placement.

In the third game, you use the box bottom to create a teeter-totter, then use cardplay to assign tokens to spots on the box to try to tilt it onto your side of the table. As I’ve said before, I think itten specializes in making playable art…although I’m not sure the baseball game falls into that category.

▪️ At Tokyo Game Market Spring 2025, Kenichi Tanabe of COLON ARC will release Alfheim Fairies, a 2-5 player game in which each player drafts tiles bit by bit, placing them in rows of 2-4 tiles in an interlocking grid to try to complete specific sets in order to place the corresponding fairy, which will score them points.