Geekway to the West 2021 - Part I

 Geekway to the West 2021 - Part I

So a couple of weeks ago, I got to attend Geekway to the West. Geekway is a small gaming con in St. Louis (actually, it happens in St. Charles, just across the Missouri River from St. Louis; but it's about a half hour away, so it's close enough) that features a couple of small vendors, but is really just an opportunity to access the Geekway Library of board games and do a lot of gaming for several days. I attended Geekway back in 2015 or 2016 with my buddy Biff and met my friend John there, and that's where I learned about Descent: Journeys in the Dark. And so began that particular torrid affair with a game for five or so years. But at the time, I went to Geekway without much notion of what I might want to play, so it wasn't a wasted experience, but it wasn't the one that I necessarily anticipated. For that reason, I hadn't been back in years. I hit a stretch wherein I *knew* what I wanted to be playing, so my attending Geekway to the West didn't make a lot of sense to me.

However, I was all about Geekway this year for several reasons. The primary reason is because ever since deciding to try my hand at game design a couple of years ago, I've tried to spend more time playing new games, as well as picking out games featuring mechanics with which I'm not familiar. I've spent more of my time anticipating the games that the wider gaming world is also anticipating. Not necessarily because I think I'll like them or because I want to design games like the new ones I play, but because I want to learn more about emerging game mechanics. Also, not for nothing, but there's a good chance I find a new game or two that I really end up enjoying (and Geekway absolutely satisfied this objective, as you'll read down below!). Also, my game collection is sizeable enough, and it's far cheaper to buy a ticket for Geekway to the West to try a bunch of new games rather than buying them all and hoping that I get to them. Over the course of two days (I missed the con on Wednesday and never got back for an evening session), I played 8 new games (including finally getting Oath to the table - I wrote a review of Oath here!). That's nothing to sneeze at. 

Addtionally, Geekway is a local event, and the more time I spend living in and loving St. Louis, the more important it becomes to me to support local organizations, businesses, and undertakings. Especially when Geekway started taking some flak for mandating that any attendees provide proof of vaccination, but also mask throughout the event. As soon as I saw the e-mail announcing that decision, I wrote them to say that for every future Geekway, even if I can't make the event, I'll be purchasing a badge. Because I respect and value the hell out of organizations that make the hard decisions in the interest of better serving and protecting their community. Finally, Geekway does a cool thing called "Play to Win." They have a list of game titles they produce before the actual event. They maintain multiple copies of each of those titles in a separate game library, and attendees can check each game out for a couple of hours (one at a time), and after playing them, upon returning a game, players can review it with a 1-5 star system, then share whether or not they're interested in possibly winning a copy of that game. Though I rarely win something like this, it's win-win, given that I get to play games in which I'm interested whether I win a copy or not. In the case of this year's Geekway, there were several titles in which I was interested, but one in particular that I really wanted to get my hands on: Now or Never, by Red Raven Games. Now or Never is the highly anticipated conclusion to the trilogy of Arzium Storybook Series (preceded by Above and Below, and then Near and Far). I would love to complete that collection of games, and getting it early would be even nicer!

This isn't Geekway's usual logo, but I love this shirt!

Going into this year's Geekway, there were a couple of games that I was convinced I *had* to hit, and then there were other games in which I was interested, but not necessarily locked on. The complexion of this changed when I found out that my good friend Chad had scored some last minute tickets to Geekway and we'd be able to coordinate our time there. He's got a much more encyclopedic knowledge of board games, both old and new, and he's got a solid finger on the pulse of the gaming market. Also, he's already introduced me to several games that I would've otherwise been unlikely to discover, so I trust his taste with regards to games I *should* try, as well as games he thinks I might dig. So in our messages, I mentioned that Dune: Imperium, Fast and Furious: Highway Heist, and Now or Never were all on my list of games I wanted to play and possibly win. I'd heard quite a lot about Dune, my friend Josh said that F&F was stupid but fun, and I already mentioned Now or Never. I also knew I wanted to finally get Oath to the table. Geekway didn't have that one, but I'd bring my own copy, as well as a couple of other things if we had a tough time making decisions.

Chad answered that Anno 1800 would've been on his list, but he had already pre-ordered it. He had Dice Miner, Genotype, Hallertau, Now or Never, Pendulum, and Witchstone on his own list. So we've already got some crossover - terrific! Out of everything Chad had named, I really only knew anything about Genotype, and the rest were of less interest to me. But I'm often flexible when it comes to games, so I was up for just about anything.

Day one, we're there first thing. Get our badges and head straight for the Play to Win room. We want to knock as many of these out as we can stand early before they're flying off the shelves or we're struggling against rules fatigue. Our first choice was an easy one, as Now or Never was on both of our lists. Or rather, it should've been easy, except the game wasn't there. Turns out it was a last minute cut, and so wasn't an option. Bit of an inauspicious start to Geekway, but that's the way that goes. I just assumed it was a causality of the supply issues plaguing the games industry, causing all sorts of delays.

I wasn't in a rush at this point, so I flipped the choice to Chad and he thought we'd start light with Dice Miner. It's a dice drafting game and I wasn't really expecting much, to be honest. But it's a fun game and a strong design! Even the Hazard dice can score you points, which is just one more way to give agency to the players in a game centered on the random nature of dice. Basically, each player is a Dwarf returning to a mountain once ruled by a dragon, but now deserted. Over the course of 3 rounds, players draft dice from the mountain to add to their own hoard. You score points based off the dice in your hoard at the end of each round. It's simple, straightforward, and great fun. It's got enough intricacy that it doesn't *just* feel like dice chucking. I jumped out to an early lead because I was able to convert quite a bunch of cave-in Hazard dice into points. But Chad had a big second round to catch up and be just a few points back. By the time our scores were tallied at the end of the third round (the end of the game), Chad had edged me by 2 points. It was a lot of fun to play and this is one that I actually found myself hoping I'd win through the Play and Win.

After Dice Miner, we kept chipping away at Chad's list, choosing to break out Planet Unknown while it was still on the shelves (we knew that Planet Unknown would be a popular choice on the Play to Win shelf, especially as it was the deluxe edition of the game).

My experience with polyomino games is very limited because I'm just generally not very interested in them. It's not like I've played a bunch of bad ones and so am turned off to them in general; it's just that they don't fire my imagination the way many other games do. But as I say, I know it was high on Chad's list, so I was up for playing it because I knew he wanted to. Plus, again, I'm here to play new games and explore new mechanics not just as a gamer, but as an amateur game designer.

Chad had read the rules for Dice Miner, so it was my turn to read them and teach. I started reading the rules and quickly learned that not only were they well-written, but the game is intuitive enough on a number of levels that the design encouraged quick learning so first plays would be more enjoyable. Basically, each player gets a planet board as well as a company board. There are two options here: keep the game symmetrical with planet and company boards, or flip them over for asymmetrical options. The game makers suggest playing with the symmetrical boards for the first game, but Chad and I have played enough games that we wanted to try it with the asymmetry. I appreciated the components, but didn't love them. I thought maybe everything was a bit busy. But honestly, I came to appreciate the components (especially the polyomino dispenser; that thing is amazing!) and I learned that I was wrong about things being busy. It really feels more intuitive than it looks once we were playing. I ended up having a ton of fun with this and was pleasantly surprised that I wanted to win this one! Chad was playing as Cosmos Inc. and could take more advantage of picking up Lifepods in a way I couldn't as Wormhole Corp. So whereas he did a good job of picking them up, I spent a lot of time just burning them down. I think my conflagration expanded to Meteorites as well, which was reflected in our final score. He beat me 61-52, so it ended up being fairly close, but he had me beat on the Resource Tracks, Lifepods, and Meteorites, and that was just too much for me to overcome. I doubled his Objectives score, which helped keep me in the game.

Overall? Lots of fun, and I quickly became very enthusiastic about the possibility of winning this one.

We thought this was a good time to grab some lunch and then ease ourselves back into the games with something a bit lighter. My friend Josh had said that The Fast and the Furious: Highway Heist was silly but lots of fun, so I thought it was worth a shot. So we set that one up after lunch and dug in.

You can see the components are fun and the game looks fairly straightforward and simple. That said, the rules are not written brilliantly. It took me awhile (longer than it should have, it felt to me) to really parse through the rulebook and figure out exactly what we were doing. We ended up randomly selecting a scenario and landed on the scenario with the tank (which works out, since that was supposed to be the "starter scenario"). By the time we were through the rulebook, it sort of made sense, so we got started. We had a couple of questions as we played, but were able to find clarification on everything. So that's a point in its favor. But ultimately, after doing several points of damage to the tank, we decided that we had played all we needed to play and didn't need to keep playing. Particularly as a cooperative game, we arrived at the conclusion that we mostly just needed to keep taking the same two actions and we'd notch a win. There wasn't anything that felt very creative or fun about it once we reached that point. So we cleaned up and decided neither of us was interested in winning this. I think there are plenty of people who might find it fun, but there just wasn't enough depth that made me want to come back to this. It sort of felt like Horrified to me, in that even though the scenarios are different and there's asymmetry amongst the abilities of the playable characters and adversaries, players still basically take the same actions. I think Horrified handles it better and I'm much more interested in the theme of monsters than I am in The Fast and the Furious (I haven't seen any of the movies), but still, I find myself drawing parallels between the two.

After we returned Highway Heist, we decided to try Genotype. My buddy Max had backed this on Kickstarter awhile back because he's a gaming scientist and it spoke to him, so it had been on my radar as something to try. I really appreciate games that really honor their source material, so I was really interested to see how the designers had made choices that tracked with the science behind said source material.

It always takes me a minute to start playing a game like this. The rule book was good overall, but there's a decent amount going on here and I can't always see exactly how to get from the beginning of the game to the end. Leads to some analysis paralysis. It usually helps to have a couple of people go before me in a first play so I can get a better idea of the structure of a turn. But I was definitely overthinking this - there really are only so many options in each turn/phase. From a learning standpoint, I appreciated this, because it let me get a handle on how the game is played more quickly. However, it also felt a bit limited in terms of repeat gameplay. That may have been an unfair conclusion to draw after only one play, and honestly, I'd be perfectly happy to come back to this one! We had fun playing it! We just felt as though it didn't quite have the depth we were anticipating or wanting.

In the end, I had one really bad turn wherein I basically couldn't do anything because I'd forgotten the order of operations and was sort of stuck in the mud because of it. Chad beat me by quite a lot (though that wouldn't be my biggest loss of the day, as I was soon to discover...), and while we had fun, we felt like there was sort of a "right way" to play the game and score points. It didn't really feel like there were multiple paths to victory, which is something we both tend to look for in games. Again, I'm happy to play this again and learn that I'm wrong! It's a really pretty game and I love what they're trying to do! But by the end of the game, we did feel as though our turns were a bit prescribed. I'm happy to revisit this one, but I didn't sign up to win it.

Genotype was not the last game of the day, as I still had yet to take my largest beating on the game table. Check in on Part II of my Geekway recap (coming this week!) to see in which game I got my ass handed to me, and whether or not I reclaim at least some measure of my pride on Day 2 of Geekway to the West!