SPIEL ESSEN 2026 - Anticipated Games!

About Queen Alice, from BoardGameGeek:

Queen Alice is a Mid-Heavy Eurogame all about building engines to improve your actions. Alice has received a strange call for help. Some words written backwards have appeared on the mirror in her living room: "Alice, we need a new queen". Surprised, but without hesitating for a moment, she touches the mirror and realises that her hand can pass through it. Following her hand, the rest of her body is pulled to the other side of the mirror... In Queen Alice, you belong to the 'Court on the Other Side of the Looking-Glass' and your mission is to prepare Alice's coronation banquet. Whoever does the best job will become the new Queen's right-hand person and therefore win the game. To achieve this, you must convince the different chess pieces that inhabit this world to help you with the preparations. You will have a key influence on Alice's coronation. Depending on the color of the pieces that help most with the banquet, Alice will be crowned the White Queen or the Red Queen, or maybe even both! Will you manage to pull the kingdom's strings in your favor and have Alice crowned with the color that best suits your interests? Will you become the most influential person in the new era of Queen Alice? Queen Alice is a game inspired by Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, using some of its characters and part of its narrative centered on chess and its pieces. However, we have created our own story and it is not intended to be a representation of the one Lewis Carroll presents in his book. In your turn you will activate the different actions using chess pieces and their well-known movements with a card-driven system. During the game, you will obtain passive and instant benefits and take enhanced cards to your hand, which you will use to improve the actions when activating them. This is what we call the "Chess-building" system. But you will find the most thrilling part of the game in the "race" for the color crown: only part of Alice's Wishes (objectives which will score you victory points) will be accomplished (and scored) during and at the end of the game, so you will have to choose your actions wisely and advance accordingly the Influence on Alice to become Red or White Queen, while keeping an eye on your opponents who may choose to influence the opposite color! -description from the publisher