Geekway Mini 2026 Redux

🎲 It Just Takes a Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That...

This last weekend was Geekway Mini, one of the board game conventions I attend every year in which I hang out with friends and play a bunch of new games. The main draw is the Play-and-Win event, in which you try out new games and get registered for a chance to win a copy. There were quite a few heavier games this year, and several popular games that were quite cozy. On the whole it was a very chill con.

Anyway, here's what I played!

Star Wars: Battle of Hoth

I knew I was going to have to play this one because it's exactly the sort of thing my 14-year-old would love. I was a little wary because I don't really get into these kinds of dice-based tactical combat games and because IP-based games can be very hit-or-miss, but I was pleasantly surprised. There's a decent amount of depth of gameplay here, including 17 different scenarios and 4 different campaigns. The units are interesting and the gameplay is pretty well streamlined. You roll hits and misses, but there are hits that are only good on troops and others that are only good on vehicles, as well as a "retreat" die face that forces the defending unit to move back. It suffers from too much randomness: the moves available to you are determined by card draw, and no amount of careful planning can protect you from an extremely lucky/unlucky roll. But it also plays very quickly, which covers up for a lot else.

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor

This is a light-weight tableau-builder. It's a standalone sequel to Forest Shuffle from a few years back, and it seems to have baked in the expansion content and refined the engine of its predecessor. Play landscapes, trees, and shrubs and then attach wildlife to them. Wildlife cards are dual-side, and you pay for cards by discarding other cards. So this is an example of a mechanic I like to call "opportunity cost management," as you end up with a lot of stuff you want to do, but if you try to do everything, you won't finish anything. The other interesting mechanic is that you can draw from the discard pile, to a limited extent, and there are "winter is coming" cards shuffled into the bottom of the draw deck. Once the third one appears, the game ends immediately, which makes the endgame feel a little tense. I liked this one a lot, and a friend won a copy, so I will have opportunities to play it.

Hedge Mage

Polyomino tile-laying game with a gimmick. You are constructing a maze on one board, but then you are navigating the maze being created by the player on your right. Use your mages to "liberate" the sleeping gnomes on your rival's board, and score points based on how many you liberate as well as how many you defend. It's a fascinating game idea, but the balance didn't feel right. If there's one weaker player, the winner will just be whoever is sitting to their right. I do appreciate the fresh mechanic, though.

Skara Brae

... or as we called it, "The Poop Management Game." This is a worker-placement and resource management game where having more resources means you generate more "midden" which is worth negative points and eats up your storage space. Draft village cards in order to gain perks and resources, and then send workers to harvest, cook, craft, clean, and trade. It was designed by Shem Phillips, who made Architects of the West Kingdom—a game that I adore and that he's never really matched. This one comes pretty close, and it was my second-favorite of the con. It's on the slightly heavier side of moderate-weight, and there's a decent amount of variety, but I hope you like bits because there are sooooo many bits. It very badly needs an organizer.

Formaggio

A simultaneous-play worker-placement game about Italian cheesemakers that has a rondel mechanism and point-salad-style scoring. This was my favorite of the con (which is saying something, since I hate rondel games and am pretty "meh" on point salads) and I ended up winning a copy. Yay! It's standalone sequel to Fromage that is also mutually interchangeable with it. You have three workers that you send out to make cheeses and gather resources. The more valuable cheeses have to be aged, so your workers take longer to get back to you (this is tracked by the orientation of the cheese spaces, and you get a worker back when they're facing you... which is as charming as it is gimmicky). Each worker can only make a single type of cheese, so you have to track when they're going to arrive back and coordinate that with which section of the board will be available to you. Fulfill orders, pair with wines, sell to restaurants, and store them in the cheese bank... which is apparently a real thing. Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting this to the table again.

A Place for All My Books

One of the darlings of the con. You are an introvert with stacks of books piled in different rooms in your house. Read them, rest, arrange them, and admire them in order to charge up your social battery so you can leave the house to go into town to get more books. It's cozy, it's adorable, it's utterly charming, and the gameplay is solid. I will consider acquiring a copy, and not just because it reminds me so much of my wife.

Fountains

Move pawns around a track in order to get fountain pieces. Score points for fish, coins, pools, and lily pads. I... didn't like this one. It got surprisingly mean. The two people I was playing with were going for lily pads while I was going for fish, and they kept blocking the fish-scoring space and instead scoring their own lily pads over and over. It wasn't intentionally mean, but I was supremely frustrated by the end of it.

Twisted Trumpets

A light, cozy tile-laying euro-game about designing complicated trumpets. It's reasonably fun, although targeting a younger audience.

Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon

We tried this one out on the recommendation of a friend's coworker, but after an hour and a half we hadn't even gotten through setup and one turn, so we gave up. It wasn't that it was heavy so much as the rulebook was pretty confusing. Also, each game uses three different corporations, which each have their own rule sheet. I think there's a really solid game buried under all this nonsense, and I'd love to play it someday with someone who can explain it to me.

Solar Gardens

Tile-laying game with strong Carcassonne energy that uses a press-your-luck drafting mechanic. It was light and pretty straightforward, but I didn't like the drafting. You have to accept or pass on a tile without having any idea what's coming up in the draft, which feels like it robs the player of agency.

Tricket Trove

Another darling of the con. This is an auction and set-collecting game where the bids you make are part of what is being bid on. It's very charming and has a lot of fans, but I am not one of them. I didn't like the way bidding worked, and I found the set-collecting frustrating because there are a lot of cards that just won't come up in a given game.

Moon Colony Bloodbath

A cooperative deck-builder about keeping your moon colony going amid accidents, hunger, and killer robots. It's fairly light and quick and has a wicked sense of humor, so this might be a good one to break out at parties. You construct buildings to attract colonists (that you then need to feed) and get power-ups. As the game progresses your colonists are slaughtered, which causes your buildings to break down. Once someone runs entirely out of colonists, the base is abandoned and whoever has the most colonists remaining is the winner. Essentially, you are building an engine that is designed to keep you alive as long as possible, which won't be very long because of how much the killer robots are rampaging. I would consider owning it, although it's definitely a "sometimes" food.

Nature

The latest game based on the Evolution game engine. The presentation is phenomenal, but the gameplay wasn't really anything special and the rulebook was a little underbaked. I'd rather play Oceans or even the original Evolution. We didn't end up finishing this one.

Phoenix New Horizon

Dieselpunk worker-placement with a tech tree. It has a huge table footprint between the game board, the worker board, and the player boards. It's decently complex and has a lot of variability (it rivals Clank! in! Space! for the amount of bits you have to put out during setup) and took us a good couple of hours to play. I did very, very badly. But I liked it well enough, and a friend won a copy so I'll get a chance to redeem myself. Also, I like that it's a dystopian dieselpunk game that has no conflict. It's all about building things.

And also...

There were plenty of other games I didn't get to, because either I owned them (Rebirth) or I plan on buying a copy one of these days (Fate of the Fellowship) or I just didn't have the brain-power to learn something that heavy (Luthier). And of course there were the party games for when our brains had turned to mush. Flip7 and Joking Hazard put in an appearance. All-in-all it was a great con, and I'm looking forward to the next one in May!

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