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Wingspan Pocket has just been revealed as a smaller, travel-friendly version of the family-friendly birding board game – and you'll be able to pick it up in just a few weeks.

Although it uses similar gameplay and comes from the same designer, Wingspan Pocket "distills the Wingspan experience down to a lighter, shorter, card-driven game" according to the official description. It'll be available to buy from publisher Stonemaier Games this July 15, 2026, followed by a wider retail release in late August.

While we adore the original here at GamesRadar+ and gave it four-and-a-half stars in our Wingspan review (putting it in contention with the best board games ), there's no denying that it's a chunky critter. It contains a flock of playing pieces and takes up a lot of space on the table, so isn't exactly easy to stuff in a suitcase. Wingspan Pocket is the opposite, however; it's a card-based game that sees players activate just one row of cards per turn rather than an entire board of birds. These all provide benefits as usual, but each card is double-sided with food on one side and a bird (one of 106 from around the world) on the other. That means you've got to weigh up what to play, and when.

A flock of 'Span games

(Image credit: Samantha Nelson) This is the fourth main 'Span' game to date; Wingspan was followed by the draconic Wyrmspan and the fish-based Finspan. You can usually find them, and Wingspan's many expansions, for less on Amazon .

I'm a huge fan of this idea. I'd argue that the series stands amongst the best family board games around ( Finspan became my summer obsession last year, for instance), but they're not the easiest to get into… or travel with. A more accessible, portable entry-point fills that niche, and it means we can take the experience with us. That means Wingspan doesn't have to stay home this summer if you're going away.

There's certainly an appetite for portable games like this. More of them are emerging from the woodwork with each passing year, and they usually make a point of streamlining things without compromising what made the original so beloved. I played Catan On the Road once and am now recommending it to everyone , for example.

Will you be picking up Wingspan Pocket, or migrating to something else?

If you want something with a little more bite, a Kingdom Come: Deliverance board game with all the gritty RPG elements fans love is on the way from the award-winning developers of Codenames and SETI .

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Good morning. There’s nothing like a heat wave to welcome in July. The newsletter is off for the holiday tomorrow, and I’m off all next week. Talk to you when I’m back!

The presidential fitness test is officially back

Almost a year after President Trump signed an executive order to revive the presidential fitness test, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the structure of the new test alongside WWE star Triple H at a Monday event. Ultimately, it looks similar to previous iterations: core strength, cardio, and upper-body strength categories, each with two exercises to choose from. Benchmarks, set by age and gender, are competitive. (For example, girls 14 and older who choose a mile run for their cardio test need to hit 7:59 for the top tier award on the test.)

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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Apple will reportedly refresh its iPad Pro line in early 2027

The main change is likely to be a new chipset, but it's uncertain whether the M6 or M7 will be used

It's also very likely that these will be extremely expensive tablets

It will soon be a year since the last iPad Pro models launched, but if you were hoping for successors this year, you’re probably out of luck, as a new report suggests we won’t see new models until 2027.

According to reputable Apple tipster Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg (via MacRumors ), the company will launch new 11-inch and 13-in iPad Pro models in ‘spring’ 2027 — presumably meaning sometime between March and May.

Apparently, their designs won’t be changed much, but the internals will be updated, with a new chipset and potentially a vapor chamber to help keep them cool.

However, which chipset they’ll use remains uncertain — the iPad Pro 11-inch (2025) and iPad Pro 13-inch (2025) both have an M5 chipset, so we’d expect at least an M6. But according to this Bloomberg report, Apple will debut its M7 chipset “as early as the first half of 2027.” So if that’s out in time for the next iPad Pro’s launch, there’s a chance it will be included.

Either way, this should be a very powerful tablet, but if it does launch with an M6 chipset only for Apple to announce the M7 soon after, that might make it less desirable than it could otherwise be.

A pricey prospect

Apple's latest iPad Pro now costs more than it did at launch (Image credit: Future/Jacob Krol) The bigger concern about the next iPad Pro, though, is how much it might cost. The ongoing RAM crisis recently caused Apple to raise the prices of many of its devices , including iPads, and since the 9-month-old iPad Pro 2025 has shot up in price, there’s no doubt that 2027’s iPad Pro models will launch at a very high price too.

Exactly how high is uncertain, though. For reference, the iPad Pro 2025 series now starts at $1,199 / £1,199 / AU$1,999, so the iPad Pro 2027 will almost certainly cost at least that much. But if RAM prices keep increasing, then it’s feasible that it could cost even more — especially with inflation and a new chipset.

So, you might want to get saving — or just make do with your old tablet for a while longer, especially if you upgraded in the last few years.

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There are no new titles on the bestseller roundup this week, but there is a difference worth noting: not only is Theo of Golden on all five of the biggest bestseller lists, but it’s #1 on every one of them. This kind of consensus is rare, and it’s even more surprising given that it came out in 2025.

This list continues to lack diversity on many levels, including being disproportionately by white authors. Some Independent Press Bestsellers you should know about are The Clock House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji and translated by Ho-Ling Wong, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia

Ononiwu Kaishian.

To get these numbers, we look at The New York Times , both Combined Print & E-Book Fiction and Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction lists; Amazon Charts, both Fiction and Nonfiction; Publishers Weekly ; USA Today ; and Indie Bestsellers, Fiction and Nonfiction, both Paperback and Hardcover.

Books On All Five Bestseller Lists:

Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

Whistler by Ann Patchett

The Deal by Elle Kennedy

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

The Divorce by Freida McFadden

Books On Four Bestseller Lists:

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir ( Publishers Weekly, USA Today, NYT, Indie Bestsellers)

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman ( USA Today, NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers)

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett ( USA Today, NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers)

Books On Three Bestseller Lists:

Strangers by Belle Burden (NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers)

The Land and Its People by David Sedaris (NYT, Amazon, Indie Bestsellers)

The Mistake by Elle Kennedy ( Publishers Weekly, NYT, Amazon)

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books .

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Google Home Speaker users are reporting early issues

The voice assistant is taking up to 60 seconds to respond to requests

Google has said it's working on a fix, but there hasn't been any updates

Google has only just returned to smart hubs with its new AI-powered Google Home Speaker, six long years after the company released the Nest Audio — and users are already running into issues.

It’s been barely a week since pre-orders were shipped and those who’ve been excited to test out the upgraded Google Home Speaker have been let down with the device’s performance.

The crux of the issue is the voice assistant itself, which many users say takes a while to respond to their commands. A slew of Reddit posts highlight the same issue, agreeing that the speaker can take between 30-60 seconds before responding, and others have experienced audio cutting out altogether.

Google Speaker 2026 from r/googlehome

While we don’t know how widespread these lagged responses are, the top comment in the Reddit thread above says it’s happening globally. Whether this is the case or not, it’s birthed a lot of frustration among those who have spent good money on the new device — “I’m returning mine” one user writes , while another says “I really hope Google puts more effort into things”.

Looking at the user reactions, it appears that this issue is also prevalent in older devices like the Nest Audio and Nest Mini , so it’s not just the new Home Speaker that’s going through the ringer. Thankfully, Google is doing something about it.

Amidst the backlash, the official u/GoogleNestCommunity replied to the Reddit post with the following; “We're aware of an issue causing increased latency or timing out. We are working on a fix ASAP and will circle back once this is resolved. Thanks for your patience”.

Though Google’s acknowledgment provides some sort of reassurance that a fix is on the way, the company hasn’t provided any details on how it intends to address the issues or when users can expect to see an improvement. At this rate, it’s still a waiting game, but this isn’t the only run-in with criticism the Google Home Speaker has faced since its launch.

Repairability could be hindered

When Google officially announced the new Home Speaker in October 2025 , I was thrilled to see a new speaker was on the way just as much as the next person, but there’s one setback which an early unboxing video addresses .

The Google Home Speaker has a fixed power cable, meaning you can’t disconnect it like you can with the majority of the best smart speakers . It may sound like we’re splitting hairs here, but the unboxing video highlights the repairability problem that comes with not having an unpluggable power cord.

These issues aside, the Google Home Speaker isn't totally devoid of positives. According to the same unboxing video, the speaker’s accompanying app has a lot of appeal and the overall audio quality is pretty solid — so it’s nice to see that Google has adhered to its 360-audio upgrade promises.

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We have unfortunately been barrelling towards a digitised future for some time now, but Sony's latest news that PlayStation will be fully digital by 2028 has heightened fears that players have about ownership and the inability to preserve art. The fear is so palpable that even Hideo Kojima has commented on the situation now.

"Eventually, even digital data will no longer be owned by individuals on their own initiative," Kojima says in a social media post . "Whenever there is a major change or accident in the world, in a country, in a government, in an idea, in a trend, access to it may suddenly be cut off."

1/2Eventually, even digital data will no longer be owned by individuals on their own initiative. Whenever there is a major change or accident in the world, in a country, in a government, in an idea, in a trend, access to it may suddenly be cut off. August 5, 2021

This has been a very real fear for quite some time now, with the Stop Killing Games being one group to lead the charge against a lack of consumer protections, although its latest bid for rule changes unfortunately fell flat in front of the European Commission:

"The Commission considers that at this stage it cannot propose a legal obligation to keep videogames playable after they stop being provided commercially. This is due, also, to existing intellectual property rights. Under EU copyright law, rights holders enjoy exclusive rights over their creations."

Players are (quite rightly) worried that without physical media their beloved games, or any kind of art, can be ripped away from them at a moment's notice. "We will not be able to freely access the movies, books, and music that we have loved," Kojima adds. "I would be a have-not. That's what I'm afraid of. This is not greed."

(Image credit: Amazon Games) Unfortunately, it's not uncommon nowadays for a fairly popular game to go the way of the dodo and kick the bucket while still having somewhat of a dedicated fanbase. Late last year Amazon cancelled MMO New World despite it having concurrent player peaks of 60,000 strong.

More recently, we've watched that sad demise of Destiny 2, as Bungie announced its decade-long story would be wrapped up in its biggest ever quality-of-life update which was released at the start of last month. Servers are still up, but with no future updates, the cheating and matchmaking will only get worse from here.

We're certainly walking into unstable and under-legislated ground, and PlayStation's latest decision furthers that uncertainty by removing the choice of physical games players used to have. Perhaps the Video Game History Foundation is right, maybe the only way forward for true ownership and preservation of videogames is piracy .

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