Geekway 2011

The Geekway 2011 came and went a week or two ago. I wrote up a Geeklist on the BGG if you want to read all about it. I don't really feel like re-hashing it, so I thought I'd just kind of summarize so random Things of No Interest. First off, Jay, Christ, Jay, and Jeff do a great job with this Con. Over the last 5 years, this has really gotten bigger and nicer without sacrificing the things that are so great about it. I really enjoy seeing and playing games with the folks I've met over the years. The library has plenty of games, and the play-to-win table always has a good selection of games. Speaking of the Play-To-Win table - we didn't. Neither Nathan nor I managed a prize (from the PTW table nor door prizes) for the third or fourth year running. The whole damn group from Omaha managed to win door prizes within the first day or so. We thought he had a good shot at Battles of Westeros since we had 4 of the 10 entries, but no luck. On a side note, the limited number of figures for the game has got me seriously considering painting the set. I resist as much as I can since I'm terrible about finishing once I start this.

New Games
Here are the new games I learned:

• Stone Age - pretty standard worker placement / gather resources to turn into points.
• Yomi - this was the hit of the Geekway for me. It is 10 decks of cards that let you play a souped-up rock-paper-scissors battle. It is fast and a load of fun.
• Zombie Dice - this is a five minute press your luck dice game.
• Ilium - Another middle of the road Knizia. He's done better
• Mutant Chronicles: Siege of the Citadel - this is a two-man-squad mini's board game from back in the day. Nothing special here.
• Cargo Noir - this is a nice family game that seems like it plays best with three.
• Tikal II: The Lost Temple - this was pretty disappointing. None of us cared for it. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really fun either.
• Battling Tops - this was a 20 minute diversion run one night. I will admit it was more fun than Beyblade my son plays.
• Nightfall - easily the worst game of the con (until I played Innovation). There seems like there should have been a couple of cool things, but there just were not.
• Code Omega - a puzzle game ala Ubongo, but I don't think it was as good.
• The Resistance - another really good game, this is like Werewolf "lite"
• Aargh!Tect - not sure this is a great game, but it was fun enough dancing around and grunting like a caveman.
• Princes of the Renaissance - I get the same feeling after playing most Martin Wallace games for the first time. Its interesting, but I'd have to play it again to know for sure if I care for it.
• Innovation - its a Civ card game with none of the elegance and speed of 7 Wonders. It also suffers from the same issue the Through the Ages does - the rich get richer and the poor suffer the whole time.

The Trade Table
The Geekway Trade Table runs like this: random person starts and picks a game. Whomever's game is picked gets the next selection and so forth. This year I had 4 entries: Wok Star, Arkham Horror bundle, bundle (Trias, Feurio, Clans), Command And Colors Exp1. The Trias bundle was taken like 3rd, I pulled Wok Star off the table and then took Grind. I pulled the one game because there wasn't a whole lot actually submitted that I wanted. When the C&C:exp got taken, I grabbed Arkham back and a bundle that had Blue Moon City in it and called it a day. I don't know if the recent glut of crap in the game market or what skewed my interest in the submissions, but I just didn't see much I wanted. And though it wasn't part of this trade table, when I got home I traded Indonesia for a complete first edition set of Yomi.