⚡ You're burnin' up the quarter mile...
It's that time of year once again where Kurt spends an inordinate amount of time at a conference playing board games. There were some new titles, some returning favorites, and a whoooooooole lot of people. This year, instead of trying to play everything that looked interesting to me, I went a little deeper on fewer titles. I would have loved to try out some of the heavier games, but while I had the desire, I had not the mental fortitude to learn the rules ahead of time. Alas. Better luck next year. The themes for this year seemed to be trains, trains, tableau-builders, and more trains. Seriously, there were I think six different train games here, including Ticket to Ride and two that just started with the word Railroad.
Anyway, without further ado, here are the new-to-me titles that I played at Geekway To The West 2026!
Lightning Train
This the was the first game I played, it was easily my favorite of the con, and I won a copy in the Play & Win drawing. So it was a strong start to the weekend! I don't usually enjoy train games at all and would have given this one a miss if someone hadn't told me it was designed by Paul Dennen, who also designed the Clank! games that I'm quite fond of.
Lightning Train is a bag-builder. Functionally it's the same idea as a deck-builder, except you're drawing tokens from a bag rather than drawing cards off the top of the deck. Some tokens provide you resources that you use acquire stronger tokens and new contracts that give you access to build in new parts of the map. The rest of them are train tokens that you use to build stations, build railroad lines, industrialize, blow up mountains, and so forth. It's a train game, so there's some pick-up-and-delivery as well, but the main focus is contributing lines to the Transcontinental Railroad.
Because it's akin to Clank!, it has entirely too many bits and bobs; Paul Dennen and Dire Wolf Games seem determined to randomize every single element of a game setup. It's not without its problems and suffers a bit at low player counts, but the gameplay loop is sooooooo satisfying that I kind of don't care. I played it five times at the con and am itching to get it to the table again already!
Pirates of the High Teas
Set collection game where you are tasked with matching dishes with teas in order to provide the best tea service to your pirate captain. It's very precious and a little too simplistic for my tastes. I bet there are some ten-year-olds that would absolutely love it, though. I also appreciated the punny names in some of the dishes, like "cannon-oli" and "ahoy-sters."
Solar Titans
Small-box deck-builder with a take-that mechanic. My 14-year-old really liked this one. You start with an 8-card ship. On your turn you will acquire new pieces to the ship, ways to move pieces around, and ways to fire off your ordnance. Whoever destroys their opponent's Command Center wins. I enjoyed it, although it's a little fiddly and it got less enjoyable after multiple play-throughs. It also did not work well at all as a three-hander. 1-v-1 or 2-v-2 only!
Citizens of the Spark
Tableau-builder with variable setup. Shuffle together 8-10 sets of cards representing citizens. Draft citizens to add to your city and then activate them, usually to gain "sparks" a.k.a. victory points. Anyone else can activate the same citizen if they wish, on your turn, but citizen powers get stronger the more you have in your population, and activating them removes them from play. It's got a charming aesthetic and I really enjoyed our first game, which was the "first game" setup for four players. We tried other player counts and setups and it got rather more aggressive and frustrating. There's a lot to like about it, but probably not one I'd add to the collection.
Threaded
It's a game about sewing! It comes with a little cross-stitch kit so you can make your own first-player marker. It's got a charming, cozy little aesthetic. And it was one of the heaviest games I played this weekend! This is a worker-placement contract-fulfillment game that has a unique "needle" mechanic that forces you to queue up your threads in order to use them. There are a lot of limitations you have to work around in order to finish tapestries. The thing is, your tapestries don't score points. You only get points from them based on the contract cards you've taken, of which you have a limit of four. Getting contracts and threads that align with available patterns can be tricky, because the threads that are available are extremely random and your storage space is quite limited. Because you place all your workers before resolving any of them, and because pattern claiming is in the last section that resolves, it's quite possible to set yourself up to score a pattern only for someone else to take it at the last second. Ask me how I know. I enjoyed it and would like to play it again, but it's a little bit of a brain-burner.
Magical Athlete
I'm kicking myself because even though I played this three or four times I never remembered to take pictures. Check it out on BGG if you want to see what it looks like.
This is a party racing game that feels like a stripped-down party-game version of Dodos Riding Dinos. At the game start, everyone drafts racers who will each participate in one of four competitions. The race itself is simple: roll a die and advance that many spaces. The racers, however, have game-breaking powers that get invoked throughout the race. The Leaptoad, for example, skips over any other racers. The Hare (of "The Tortoise and..." fame) gets +2 to his die roll but skips his turn if he's in the lead. And those are not even the wildest of them. The game has a retro children's entertainment aesthetic and I really enjoyed. The game is quick, light, and chaotic. We'll probably acquire a copy.
Sanibel
Here's another charming game about nature from Elizabeth Hargrave (designer of Wingspan). It's a set-collection and tile-laying game in which you walk from your beach chairs to a lighthouse and back, collecting shells and stuffing them into your bag to score points. Turn-order is determined by whomever is farthest back (a la Tokaido, if you know that game), so you can race ahead to get the stuff you need, but you'll sacrifice turns to do so. There's quite a lot of nuance to the scoring, which gives this surprising depth. I rather liked it.
3 Chapters
Fairy Tale trick-taking and tableau-building. Sort of. The game is divided into three eponymous chapters. In the first chapter, you're drafting cards. In the second, you're playing them. Anything you play goes into your tableau, and in the third chapter you score your tableau. I love trick-taking games, but I didn't care for this one, because it's not really a trick-taking game. Sure, you get points if you take the trick, but you're really trying to combo off other people inside of the trick and then against your own tableau during the final chapter. A lot of people I played with thought it was great, it just wasn't for me. I don't want trick-taking with fairy tale creatures. I want it with hobbits, gull-darnit!
Steam Power
Pathfinding with pick-up-and-delivery and the word "steam" in the title, so it must be a train game. It was... kind of dull, honestly. And the presentation was a bit lackluster as well. Not just that it was ugly—which it was—but that the large pieces on the small board made it difficult to parse what was going on, visually, and the clusters of cities created some confusion. There are better train games than this. And I don't even like trains games, as a rule.
Diatoms
On other end of the spectrum, the presentation here was gorgeous, inspired by the real-life practice of wealthy Victorians of making art out of cultivated algal blooms. No really. This is what rich people had to do for fun before the post-war board game renaissance in Europe. Anyhoo.
Under its bright and shiny exterior, Diatoms is a combination of two different tile-laying games. In the first, you're collaboratively laying algae tiles in order to create resources. Then, in the second, you're taking those resources and laying them out in a grid to score pattern-matching, variety, and color points. It's definitely in the family of easy-to-learn but also fun-to-replay gateway games like Azul. I don't know if I need to own a copy, but I would definitely play it again.
Hot Streak
Another chaotic racing game from the same publisher as Magical Athlete. Who'd a thunk it? In this one, there are four mascots racing chaotically up the football field, and the players are degenerate gamblers betting on who is going to win. There is a known racing deck, meaning all players have some idea of what the outcome is likely to be (although there's still a great deal of randomness in it) but the players will also add cards to the deck to sway the outcomes. Because if you're going to be a degenerate gambler, you might as well play dirty, amiright?
This one also had a whole section of the rule book dedicated to what happens to you based on your score at the end of the game. They're all pretty funny, but one stand out was $47. Per the book: it is illegal to have $47; you are exiled.
Xenology
Euro-style point-salad with a high degree of complexity and a really tight economy. You are aliens researching a planet. You propose your research to the elders, then go to said planet to collect specimens, then you fulfill your research and transfer that knowledge to the data bank. You also need to clean up evidence, board spacecraft, use devices, thaw out your coworkers, and so forth. And everything costs cubes. In fact, most of the game was spent figuring out ways to get more cubes so you can actually accomplish things. It is, in fact, possible to soft-lock yourself out the game if you're not extremely deliberate. And in the spirit of a true point-salad game, it ends and you feel like you haven't accomplished anything to a meaningful degree.
I don't know if I liked it or not. But now that I understand it better, I very much want to try it again.
Castle Combo
We finished out the con with a light, small-box tableau-builder. Buy nine cards from the available rows and place them in a 3x3 grid in order to maximize their scoring potential. Many have powers that they activate when you place them. My oldest liked it enough that we will consider buying it.
In Conclusion
There were other games we played, but those were the new ones. There were other big games at the con that I passed on because I've played them before: Formaggio, Fate of the Fellowship, and Finspan come readily to mind, but there were others that don't start with F, I'm pretty sure.
Thanks and happy gaming!
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