Ares Games will release the English edition of Balconia on February 4th: the first of a partnership with Armenian game studio Red Cat Games, Balconia is a light, 2-player tactical game where players build a 3D apartment complex block by block, balancing strategy and luck to meet balcony-scoring conditions. Another title in partnership with Red Cat will follow later this year: Perfect Mismatch, a fun party game that will test your associative thinking, is scheduled to be released in May 2025.

Balconia’s blend of spatial strategy, tactical decisions, and the playful theme of apartment life makes it an engaging, quick-to-play game for both casual and experienced gamers. The players try to fulfill the preferences of quirky residents. Some love flowers, others adore cats, while some just want peace. The goal is to score points by arranging blocks to meet the scoring conditions of the balconies facing you.

Each turn, one player selects a building block, while the other decides where to place it in the grid. The first player starts by revealing a building block and choosing which two adjacent sides will be available for scoring. The other player then picks one of those sides and places the block, ensuring it’s adjacent to previously placed blocks. Players take turns choosing and placing blocks, working to strategically align scoring elements on their side of the building while restricting their opponent’s options.

Balconia is designed by Paul Schulz for players aged 10 and up and is perfect for quick head-to-head play – a game lasts about 20 minutes.

The next game by Red Cat to be published in English by Ares Games is Perfect Mismatch, a casual game where 2 to 8 players are challenged to guess words from a card using unusual associations of attributes as hints. Is there anything that is equally square and non-stop? Or extremely herbal, but not verbal at all?

Each turn, one player takes the lead and describes a secret word as precisely as possible by swiping beads toward the attributes on the two sides of a tablet – romantic or problematic, fingerless or fragile, wearable or helpful, extremely entertaining or not washable, and so on… Meanwhile the rest of the players should hurry to vote for their chosen word. The faster they are, the more points they will get.

Designed by Alexander Peshkov, Perfect Mismatch can be played both in competitive or cooperative modes, in about 20 to 30 minutes, sharing plenty of laughs while discussing hilarious attribute combinations and the associations they trigger.