Teasers from Days of Wonder, Elzra, Delicious Games, and Underdog Games | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ On April 6, 2025, Days of Wonder announced “a brand new design” for Richard Borg‘s Memoir ’44, while also stating that this edition will be “compatible with all existing and future expansions”.

More generally, the publisher writes, “This game line is still alive, and we want to thank our loyal players for their unwavering support. Stay tuned, because great surprises are on the way!”

▪️ Days of Wonder then followed up that news with three teaser posts showing what some are referring to as “a Star Wars version of Memoir ’44” — which is a solid guess given that the images bear a “© & ™ Lucasfilm Ltd.” watermark.

▪️ Aron West of Elzra plans to crowdfund a new starter set for the third edition of Catacombs called Catacombs Alpha.

▪️ In October 2024, Delicious Games teased its SPIEL Essen 25 release, and now it’s revealed the final cover of Aquaria — a 1-4 player game from Tomáš Holek — and a short description:

In Aquaria, players represent keen members of an aquarist society who are each determined to have the best aquarium in the club. Each player looks after their own aquarium, which is home to various types of fish and aquatic plants.

Throughout the game players will buy new fish, feed them, and keep their aquaria in tip-top condition. Players will also show how they have progressed in their aquarist studies by how far they have moved on the encyclopedia tracks. Whoever has the most points at game’s end wins.

▪️ In case you thought this post could end without a reference to “tariffs”, in early April 2025 designer/developer Nick Bentley noted that his time at Underdog Games would end after May 2025 as “[t]he owner is shrinking the company to almost nothing to give it the best chance of keeping the lights on during the tariff tsunami. It won’t need new games (I manage our design studio, and design myself), so I’m done.”

That said, new games are already in the can for future release when the time is right. Says Bentley:

Something I’m proud of:

We decided to switch to card games toward the end of last year, and now we have 5 mostly ready to go, plus a couple of non-card games on top.

The tariff situation favors card games over everything else, so I’m leaving the company well-positioned.

I may have worked my way out of the job though, because we have more ready-to-go games than the company will need for quite some time as it slows its publishing pace.

It’s the largest set of ready-to-go games we’ve ever had.

Good for the company’s predicament, but not for mine.

Designer/developer ‪Marceline Leiman was also let go from Underdog, and she created three of those card games, as well as the self-published High Tide, which Underdog had picked up in February 2025.

Leiman’s self-published edition of High Tide