Glimmerdeep Preview — Stress-free tile placement and engine building

Years before I joined GamingTrend, at the first WashingCon (a D.C. board game convention) since the pandemic hit, I met Winsmith Games and got to play their first (and at the time, only) game, 10 Gallon Tank. The simple I-Cut-You-Choose set collection game was a hit with my friends, and I still occasionally bring the copy I got signed with me to my Saturday game group. Since then, Winsmith has worked with 25th Century and Smirk & Dagger to release more successes in Junk Drawer and Adventure Party (which GT actually covered back in 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auJzdqStLuk). I met them again at PAX Unplugged and found that Winsmith is ready to crowdfund their second solo endeavour: Glimmerdeep, an asymmetric flip-and-write engine builder about mining and excavating tunnels to house your faction.

Glimmerdeep is a much larger, deeper (pun intended) game than Winsmith has published before, but I absolutely loved what was included in their preview. Right off the bat, the cute art of these animals working in their forges or mines sucks you into the cozy world of these cave-dwelling critters and sets the vibe for the game. This is not a cutthroat game, and there are only a few moments of serious tension when you’re playing, making the art quite fitting. While the components aren’t finalized in the preview copy shown in these pictures, the art itself is pretty well locked in.

The core gameplay is pretty simple; over the course of five rounds, players will excavate their map, build Workshops (which convert resources into more/better resources) and Forges (which convert resources into points), and activate their various production abilities. The excavation should look familiar to anyone who has played a flip-and-write tile placement game before: players draw from their own identical (but randomized) deck of cards and draw the corresponding shape on their map. However, in Glimmerdeep, players are not only able to flip/mirror the shape, they can also overlap it onto already excavated areas and even skip parts of it if necessary. After playing a lot of flip-and-write games all about struggling to fit the puzzle-piece shapes together, it felt freeing to be so flexible with the tile placement. Of course, it’s still better to use as much of the shape as possible since that means more resources collected and space available to build, but players never need to stress about finding exactly the perfect piece to fill a gap. And building space is very important, as each Workshop and Forge takes up excavated spaces on the map, 2x2 and 2x3, respectively, and buildings cannot be adjacent to each other. Balancing clumping excavations for building sites and spreading out for resources is a key part of mastering the game.

Guiding players’ decisions are the different maps used in each game and the asymmetric faction boards. The factions are where Glimmerdeep really shines, as they all feel quite different to play. While the Gildtails will often spread themselves out quite far to meet their ever-increasing demand for gold, the Dustwhiskers reward players for excavating a large warren of “useless” dirt spaces. These factions all have a Calling, or an innate mechanic for scoring extra points, and a set of Traits that come in pairs for 3 levels. At the start of rounds 2-4, each player will choose which of the current level’s Traits they want to take. Traits vary from passive effects to once-per-game abilities, additional production phase options to end-game scoring options. None of the options seem bad, so each decision feels impactful and can drastically alter your playstyle for the remaining rounds.

Finally, each map is shaped differently and has unique features to further adjust your playstyle for the game. In Bioluminescent, players want to build next to the glowing mushrooms for points, whereas Trade Routes has exactly that—trade routes that score points for making a contiguous path and offer extra production abilities.

I already mentioned it, but I’m happy to say it again, I really loved this game. It’s simple, yet scratches that engine-building “turn things into more things and points” itch while being highly replayable with the different factions and maps. I’m already keen to see how each faction feels from map to map (do the warren-loving Dustwhiskers struggle to make Trade Routes work for them?), and I can’t wait for the final release so I can try the remaining factions and maps, since the final game will include eight different factions and four total maps for players to explore. Anyone else interested in Glimmerdeep (which you should be) can join Winsmith’s newsletter at https://www.winsmithgames.com/newsletter-form or follow the project page at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winsmithgames/glimmerdeep and await its Kickstarter launch in February 2026.