Grab Your Popcorn, and Get Ready for IELLO's New Games in 2025

by W. Eric Martin

Let's continue the reports from SPIEL Essen 24, focusing this time on the 2025 release schedule of French publisher IELLO, which is distributed in the U.S. by Flat River Group and in Germany by Hutter Trade. Each year in Essen, IELLO puts together a media showroom, and I'm happy to share pics from that show. Note that all components and graphics depicted are not necessarily final.

We'll start with what IELLO plans to be its biggest release of the year: Popcorn, a 2-4 player economic management game from Victor Saumont that will debut at either Gen Con 2025 or SPIEL Essen 25:

In Popcorn, each player manages their own movie theater and tries to show the best combination of movies in order to attract guests to their seats.

The game plays out over nine rounds, and in each round you may acquire a new movie, build or upgrade your theater, and use advertising to attract new guests — then it's showtime, with you drawing guests at random from your bag to see who has shown up. Place guests in the right seats to activate special powers; match them with the right movies, and you get a movie bonus as well, thanks to their enthusiasm for your good taste.

Reminder: Non-final graphics, as with all images in this post
After watching films in your theater, guests might be spirited away to other theaters thanks to ads presented by those theater owners...but you'll probably do the same to them, too.

The bonuses from a movie get worse the longer it runs, so be sure to bring in fresh films to keep guests on the edge of your seats. After all, happy guests can help your theater win awards in town; more importantly, they can keep the "popcorn" piling up in your coffers, and whichever theater owner fills their popcorn box the best wins.

In the lower-left theater, you can see four bonuses to the left of The Godmother, and when you match guests with this movie, you choose the bonus you want, then slide up the audience tile to cover the bottommost bonus, which represents the audience becoming less eager to see this film over time.

• While you looking at Popcorn, you might notice that only two bonuses remain in the green theater for the debut title "King of Tokyo". Are audiences tiring of seeing giant monsters beat on one another? IELLO sure doesn't think so based on other releases coming in 2025, such as the Bookwyrm, a promotional King of Tokyo monster that will be available exclusively through bookstores.

• If you saw my 2023 write-up of IELLO's forthcoming titles in 2024, you might recall a poster that featured 88 King of Tokyo monsters. That number has jumped over the past twelve months, with Bookwyrm being monster #98.

Monster #99 will the Globe Smasher, one of four monsters included in the King of Tokyo: Tournament Kit, which will debut in Q1 2025. The other monsters are Lynxote, Scheggiatron, and Marhanagy Szürke, which used to be exclusively distributed within (respectively) Spain, Italy, and Hungary.

The King of Tokyo: Tournament Kit is designed to facilitate organized play, with components included to run a 16-person tournament or two 8-person tournaments. These components include 16 buttons and 18 promo cards, specifically six copies each of three new cards, which can also be used as prizes. IELLO plans to refresh the Tournament Kit every two years.

• King of Tokyo monster #100 will be...The 100th, which is decked out in IELLO's colors — yellow and black — and which will first be available in Q1 2025 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the company.

• Also coming in 2025 is King of Tokyo/New York: Monster Pack – Luchador, the fifth title in this series and the first in five years following Cybertooth in 2019. Like previous monster packs, this consists of multiple elements that can be added to your games individually or together. First, the monster Luchador enters the ring, with or without power cards depending on how you play King of... games.

Second, the expansion introduces "challenge mode", with each monster donning a mask at the start of play. If you damage a monster in Tokyo (or New York) and that monster doesn't retreat, you can challenge them to a one-on-one match. Each of you will play a challenge card face down, and other players can contribute challenge cards to one side of the match or the other. Whoever pulls off the best wrestling move — a "Giant Powerhouse perhaps? — wins the match and takes the other monster's mask, which is worth 2 VP as long as you hold it.

• Richard Garfield's King of Tokyo: Duel will get a small expansion in the form of a Baby Gigazaur monster card that will be packaged with new power cards. This item will be available exclusively as a tournament prize for the first six months of its release in 2025, then it will be made available for retail purchase.

• On Nov. 8, 2024 in France and in 2025 elsewhere, IELLO will release Time Bomb: Undercover, a new version of Yusuke Sato's Time Bomb co-designed by Quentin Schoemacker in which 4-8 players are divided into three teams, with Agency trying to stop a bomb from going off, the Organization trying to destroy the world, and the Shadow trying to manipulate everyone else in order to snip the final wire on the bomb.

Each player has an ID badge in the lower-right corner of their card, and at certain times you might reveal your ID to a neighbor — but some roles (Viper, Ace) are double agents, and the Shadow can choose an affiliation as it suits them. Location cards revealed each round introduce twists to gameplay as players keep snipping wires bit by bit.

• IELLO released Yann Dupont's Piña Coladice in France in July 2024, and the game will come to the U.S. in 2025. Each turn, you roll the five dice up to three times, ideally then claiming one of the coasters in the 4x4 grid. The earlier you claim a coaster, the more points it's worth — and if you place four of your cocktail markers in a line, you win instantly.

• Taiki Shinzawa's LUZ is in a similar situation, debuting in France on October 11, 2024 and coming to the U.S. in 2025.

In this trick-taking game, you know the colors of the cards you hold, but not their numbers, with your neighbor having arranged your hand with each suit going from high to low, then giving you those cards to hold. Each round, you bid on the exact number of tricks you'll take, although you can fudge that number by one, with you scoring fewer points should you hit either target.

Nice image progression on the cards!
• In 2022, Korean publisher Playte released a new version of Manfred Reindl's Skull King: Das Würfelspiel — a trick-taking dice game combination — under the name Mino Dice. IELLO has already released this title in France under the same name, but when the game debuts in the U.S. in 2025, it will be called Mythical Dice to avoid any chance of someone overhearing the name and thinking it's a dice game about tiny fish.

• IELLO's deduction game series Guilty will receive a new entry in 2025 with Guilty: Fontainebleau 1543 from Jérémy Fraile, Eliette Fraile, and Yohan Servais:

The royal court in Fontainebleau reeks of conspiracy, and it's up to you, René Bianchi, perfumer to Catherine de Medici, to get to the bottom of things. You must use your flair, medical expertise, and appetite for intrigue to find out what is preventing the crown princess from conceiving an heir — and fast.

To start Guilty: Fontainebleau 1543, you'll read the introduction, then place the specified cards on the table. Choose a card, then turn it over and read it. What will you find there? And behind reading, you might have to put your skilled nose to the test with scratch-and-sniff cards that bring history to the present.

Time will keep passing, possibly leading to surprises as you become immersed in the French royal conspiracies of the 16th century, which are based on historical facts. Conduct your investigation, card by card, but time is short and your choices have consequences...

• The party game Canoe Rabbit Bat Peas? was the most "work under construction" title that IELLO showed at SPIEL Essen 24. This party game for 3-10 players from Justine Vanhuffel and Louise Blaise has players work in teams to give clues to their teammates that sound like nonsense, but which will ideally converge in meaningful words or expressions when they repeat the clues aloud.

In the category of gastronomy, you have a two-word phrase, with each word having two beats
• Little Soldiers — a wargame/party game combo from Florent Baudry and Adrien Fenouillet, based on a concept from Cédric Barbé, that was originally intended as a Gen Con 2024 release — has been moved to 2025/2026 to give the company more time to streamline the design as a family-plus game instead of something more complex.

• IELLO distributes Restoration Games' Unmatched line in Europe and Asia, and it expects to release Unmatched: The Witcher – Realms Fall and Unmatched: The Witcher – Steel and Silver in Q1 2025, with Unmatched Adventures: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles following in Q3 2025.

IELLO also plans to release Unmatched: Acrylic Sidekicks Pack 4 in November 2024, with this set featuring minions from Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze.

• For the past couple of years, IELLO has encouraged SPIEL attendees to graffiti a long exterior wall on its booth. Here's a section of that wall I snapped on Sunday evening after SPIEL Essen 24 was over, and everyone was heading for the door:

Zoom in to see a thousand messages from gamers around the world