After a long weekend of hard work, sweat and a ton of incredible food, the Global Game Jam 2026 in Leeuwarden has come to an end and we would like to share some of the key moments and highlights with you.
The Global Game Jam Leeuwarden took place from Friday the 30th of January to Sunday the 1st of February and had a whopping 26 participants which split up into 8 different teams. This year was at a new location: in the canteen of the old Cambuur stadion, a unique space we had not jammed in before. Luckily, the location was a hit: with 3 rooms, the teams had enough space to unleash their creativity. Only thing that was complained about: the cold, cold canteen.
The Jam was also slightly shorter than usual, resulting in a couple of games being close to being finished. But overall the time constraint did not seem to effect the results too much: almost all games were playable to some extend or had something to show like art, a solid concept or music.
Every year has some standouts. This time around there was a team building a mobile app, another that opted to work in Gameboy Studio by himself, a team that created a game inside a game and one Jammer even worked on a tabletop game. There was also a dating-sim with 7(!) different endings.
Regarding the theme being ‘Mask’: some teams took it quite literally. Like one team, that made a game where you have to equip different masks to weave through different groups of fantasy creatures, another where you don’t know what player you are whilst waltzing through a masked ball and one where play as a luchador wrestler that can fight various masked opponents.
Creative ideas and hard work aside, the catering was, again, on point! With enough food to last us a couple days, the delicious breakfast, lunch and dinner was more than enough to sustain and fuel the Jammers throughout the weekend! And to top it all off, the Jam concluded with an awards-ceremony where, uh, well let’s just say beautiful shirts were rewarded to the teams.
Here’s a list of the games made during the Jam!
If we look back onto the GGJ 2026 Leeuwarden, we can say that it was a great success. On behalf of the DutchGame.Dev organisation, we’d like to thank all the jammers for an amazing weekend full of fun and creativity. We hope to see you all next year!
3 February, 2026