Geekway has been on my bucket list for years and years. A well-regarded board game convention only a handful of hours from my home in Nashville, and the birthplace of the “play and win” library? It seems like a no-brainer. I was finally able to attend, and now I’m adding my thoughts to those of Kevin Brantley, who attended Geekway in 2025.
Full disclosure: in addition to being a gamer, I’m also a convention organizer with ten years of running Nashville Tabletop Day under my belt. While I did want to do some gaming, my main reason for attending this event was to observe the Geekway team and processes to find ways to improve my own event. So be aware my thoughts about the event are going to be colored by “event organizer glasses”.
Arrival and Initial Thoughts
Geekway runs from Thursday morning to Sunday evening, although I could only attend Friday afternoon to Sunday. After arriving in St. Louis, checking into my hotel, and driving over to the St. Charles Convention Center, I arrived at the gaming hall around 1pm.
Registration
Registration was smooth, with pre-printed badges displaying a barcode (more on that later). The badges were full-color, double-sided, pre-printed, laminated, and came with a high quality lanyard. By the time I arrived on Friday, they were already out of lanyards, but thanks to a kind soul, I was able to get one of her extra lanyards before I left on Sunday.
Signage
The signage around the convention center was great. Banners from vendors, pre-printed informational signs, and even television screens with live schedules were everywhere. That made finding what you wanted and getting there a snap. Geekaway even printed a “newspaper” style handbill featuring a map of the venue, schedule, and information about shuttles, food trucks, and their policies.
Vendor Hall
As Kevin mentioned in last year’s article, the vendor hall at Geekway is small but mighty. The main vendor hall featured industry heavyweights Miniature Market, Stonemaier Games, Capstone Games, and Allplay, along with more niche companies. There were also two adjacent vendor rooms across the hallway with smaller publishers. I even got a photo op with Chris Porter from Chris Couch Games and Marc Specter from Grand Gamers Guild, and another one with a long-time friend, Todd Rowland, from Level 99 Games.
Don’t Go Alone
Given that my main focus was information gathering, I’ll admit to being a bit overwhelmed when I first entered the main gaming hall. It’s probably about half the size of a football field, and was full of people happily gaming.
This is when I realized I’d made a mistake.
I didn’t do any upfront planning, other than making arrangements with the Geekway staff to chat with the man who runs their play to win. I didn’t schedule any events; I didn’t coordinate plays ahead of time using their Slack or Discord channels, or their recommended Meeple Meet app.
I’m used to either smaller events like Nashville Tabletop Day or Tennessee Game Days (500 and 900 attendees respectively), or attending much larger events with a group of people. These are events where I know people, and I feel confident walking in and easily jumping into a game. So I underestimated how hard it would be to join a game.
This is totally my fault; and yet…
Gather Your Party
Geekway prominently advertises the ability for attendees to arrange games. They have Slack and Discord channels, and also prominent signs for the Meeple Meet app. But I never once was able to jump into a game using any of these communication channels. If you’re like me, you don’t want to wait for Friday at 4pm, or Saturday morning at 11am…you want to play a game now.
But I found that “gaming now” to be surprisingly hard when you’re all alone. Here are some observations I had about getting a group together.
Online Networking
While I found the Slack channel to be great for general communication, the Discord app felt strangely empty the few times I opened it. But the biggest disappointment was the Meeple Meet app. The interface felt like something from ten years ago—bland as white rice, unintuitive and confusing.
An app like this doesn’t work if you’ve only got a few people (out of 3,500) using it. And every time I opened the app to scan through games, I only saw a dozen or so listed. And most of them were for advanced time slots. I even tried adding a few games of my own, but never got any bites.
I’ve got a high bar for software you want me to install. So if this is your recommendation, it had better be good. In my opinion, the Meeple Meet app is a failure. It’s trying to be an ad hoc social network that only lasts for the duration of the event. That’s just not enough time to build up a network of people listing games to play. As someone who used to work for a social networking company, you must have a critical mass for it to be effective.
Table Signage
Like many other conventions, Geekway makes liberal use of “Players Wanted” and “Teachers Wanted” signs. Looking at Kevin’s pictures from last year, the signs had a large white laminated sheet prominently displayed about 3 feet off the table surface.
This year’s signs were 3D printed letters with a solid color and no background. While I admire the use of new technology to problem-solve, the new signs were much harder to read and notice from across the room. That said, this was the main way I was able to jump into games. I simply walked around the hall looking for these standups, then checked if it was a game I was interested in. I also attracted several people to games I was setting up to play. This is low tech, but VERY convenient; it’s my preferred way of finding gaming slots.
These challenges aren’t unique to Geekway; in fact it made realize that I could be doing a better job at Nashville Tabletop Day to help new players find games.
Play and Win
Geekway has a massive gaming library, with what is easily over 1,000 titles. This library contains classics, hard to find or out of print games, and everything in between.
But the jewel in their crown is the Play and Win library, which is maintained in a separate room. Using some basic math the organizers determine how many total games they want to give away (total attendees divided by 4 = total games), then divide that further into the number of distinct titles they want to offer (total games divided by 6—often the number of games in a carton). This year they had around 850-900 games to give away, across 150 or so titles.
Big respect to the people managing these two libraries. I know from personal experience how hard it is to collect, label, carry around, and check in/out, this quantity of games. And they’re dealing with a scale that dwarfs my libraries.
Checking out any game was as simple as scanning the barcode on your badge, and then the barcode on the game you wanted to play. Returning the games was also just as easy…one attendant scanned your game and it was immediately checked back in.
But adding an entry to win a game was surprisingly more complicated. After returning a game at any point before Sunday, the person who checked out the game could use one of 5 kiosks in the Play and Win room to register a play. But they were also responsible for submitting the plays of every other person who played with them. That means you either needed to know that player’s name or their badge number. It worked, but it was clunky.
I was also surprised that there was no way for me to log in to their system to see a list of games I’d checked out or registered to win, short of using one of the kiosks. And even with the kiosk, I’m not sure it would show games I’d checked out from the main library.
Critical but not Negative
If you made it this far, you might think I didn’t enjoy my time at Geekway, but that’s not the case. Everyone I chatted with was friendly and approachable, and the Geekway staff were extremely helpful. The accommodations were great, with lots of room to spread out, including the main room, side rooms, and even tables set up in hallways or out of the way nooks.
The most important thing to consider when going to an event like this is to be prepared. I fully acknowledge that I could have done more in advance to make my gaming experience fuller and more enjoyable. But that’s just not who I am. I prefer to go with the flow and be spontaneous. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out well for me.
If you’re attending with a group of friends, or are willing to schedule ahead using any of the community connection apps, then your time at Geekway will almost certainly be well spent.
Games I played
While gaming wasn’t my main motivation, I did get in some bangers. Probably the best game I played was Rainbow Blvd.; an upcoming title from designer Adam Wyse and new publisher Steelwing Games (headed by former Lucky Duck owner Scott Morris). It’s a family weight game about building rainbows around town. The components are crazy cool, and the game is breezy, with some clever design choices.
- Wondrous Creatures
- Tenby
- Cargo Empire
- Rainbow Blvd – An upcoming release from brand new publisher Steelwing Games
And I also had a few that slipped through my fingers.
- Barrage – Perhaps I was naïve to think I could arrange a game of this weight without having at least 1-2 people lined up ahead of time.
- Automania
- Lightning Train – This was in the Play and Win library, and I saw quite a few people playing this one.
