Month: December 2024

My Top 12 Games From Boston FIG!

Boston FIG 2024 was pretty good! It’s the first time the event has been held in person for quite a while, and it was held at the Boston Cyclorama.

Fun Fact: The Cyclorama was used to hold a giant 3D painting of the Battle of Gettysburg. There’s a incredible history to this building, but this is a gaming blog. So instead of talking about the history of the Boston Flower Exchange, let’s talk about games.

As with previous write-ups, I’ll mostly be talking about the games I saw and liked.

Being entirely indie games, there were a lot of games I didn’t find fun, or didn’t particularly speak to me this year. I won’t be talking about them. There’s no value in ripping into a small project that’s just not for me. There were also a pretty decent number of games I didn’t get a chance to play, including a bunch of the award winners, so those also aren’t on this list.

In no particular order, here are some things I saw and liked!

Abracabattle

Abracabattle is a clever tableau builder where you build a set of spells to attack your opponent. Those spells trigger off dice rolls, and the last wizard standing wins.

I didn’t play Abracabttle at Boston FIG, mostly because I got a chance to sit down and play it last weekend at PAX Unplugged. My opinion hasn’t changed since then. I did, however, spend a fair amount of the show sending folks to Abracabattle booth to give it a shot.

Here’s my take from PAX Unplugged:

“Last year Abracabattle was a game with strong core elements, that didn’t quite have the right cards for its gameplay. Now, it feels like a full game, with a few reworked systems, new items, and a MUCH stronger set of cards. I’m really excited to see where it goes.”

TLDR: If you can play Abracabattle, you should.

Also, Abracabattle won the Best Game in Development award!

Cappy & Tappy

My notes for Cappy & Tappy read “Place Tetrominos to build routes for your friend, 2D platformer” and honestly, I think that’s all you really need to know for this one.

Cappy & Tappy Victory

It’s clever, it’s interesting, and I’d have stronger feelings on it if I’d played more. As is though, I’d suggest just going and playing the version on itch.io if you want to give it a shot.

I didn’t see this during my play time, but it looks like at higher levels the pieces have obstacles and boons on them?

Oasis Blitz

Oasis Blitz is a 3d platformer with the gimmick is the ability to do a sort of “dolphin dive” through dirt. It feels incredibly smooth, and if my description of the movement doesn’t quite make sense, their itch.io page does a much better job of getting the idea across with a few choice GIFS.

It gave me sort of Sonic the Hedgehog/Neon White vibes. If this sounds neat, I’d just go play the demo.

Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword

Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword is what you’d get if you combined Getting Over It and Deepest Sword. It’s an interesting, if somewhat frustrating mechanic. Unlike Getting Over It, though, Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword seems more focused on sets of puzzle rooms, and less focused on being a rage game.

Rage Games aren’t quite my favorite, so I liked this change of pace. Controls felt a little wonky, but that’s probably to be expected with this genre.

Breaking News

The best way I can think to describe Breaking News is as sort of weird WarioWare style style game where you primarily interact by smacking a TV with your arrow keys. Frankly, it feels rude to try to simplify the mechanic to that extent. But the short version is that you are watching television, and by smacking the television different directions, you change reality.

See, that sounds more confusing then the WarioWare thing.

Regardless, it’s interesting, and quite weird.

Murder is Game Over

I have a sort of perverse fascination with RPG Maker from a technical perspective. The trade off of being able to make something very quickly, while being unable to get the engine to do exactly what you want is interesting. The result is that when I see full, completed projects made in RPG Maker, like Murder Is Game Over from HitherYon games, I’m always curious ask how they did it.

There’s actually a whole series of Murder is Game Over games. The game they had at the show was the demo for their most recent release, the Blackinton Curse. From what I understand, they’re a series of murder mystery adventure games.

Someone’s Y

I love social deduction games. I loathe word games.

Someone’s Y, a social deduction game about determining who at the table has the hidden role of being the dangerous not-quite-vowel Y, puts me in a bit of a bind.

The result is a game whose structure I enjoy, but whose mechanics I can’t really interact with effectively. I don’t do a good job when it comes to keeping track of letters in words.

It has a print and play version, and is part of a set of 6 other games from MILLRAT Studios. Even if this wasn’t for me, it makes me excited to see the other 5.

Between Realms

I’ve talked about games that demo well at conventions before. Between Realms is not one of those. In fact, it might be the sort of game that demos really badly. Its creator describes it as “Magic: The Gathering meets Everdell“.

It’s strangely themed, complex to play, and uses cards for everything, and I would have never heard about it if I hadn’t gone to Boston FIG.

I’m going to keep an eye on this one, because I think I’d like it better if I had more time to sit down and really play a full game of it. That said, trying to play it after a few hours of other demos, it kind of just fried my brain.

Starline Hill

Starline Hill is interesting. It’s a semi-abstract piece placement game about trying to create patterns by placing stars. Its selling factor is its unique manner of repopulating space on the board once you’ve removed your own pieces to score patterns.

I’m ambivalent on Starline Hill. I think it’s a very solid game, but it’s not a game for me. I would both play more it, but I’m not rushing to back the Kickstarter.

For folks who really enjoy abstract strategy games like Othello, Go, and Connect 4, I would recommend taking a look. There’s something very clever here. It’s just not quite my cup of tea.

Rock Paper Smash

Rock Paper Smash was actually the first game I demoed at the show, and it’s probably the one I’ve thought about the most since then.

The short version is that it’s Super Smash Brothers, but all attacks are coded to either Rock, Paper or Scissors, and when attacks clash, the winning item attack resolves.

I want to make two quick notes here. First, the game has been updated significantly from the version up on the Steam marketing page, and two, it’s much more interesting than its premise might imply. Many of the characters have unique movement abilities completely unrelated to the RPS mechanics.

It’s just a very fun, very clever little game, and I’m really excited to see the full release.

Co-Operatives Puzzle Room

Co-Operatives is a bit of an odd one. It was in the tabletop section, but it isn’t really a traditional board game. Instead, it’s a Boston based set of escape rooms. The catch is that the team is split and placed on either side of a wall, and each side has information the other side needs.

I had a great time playing through one with a set of very kind strangers, and would absolutely do another one. If you’re in Boston, and looking for something to do, here’s their website. This is the sort of thing I recommend if you like tactile puzzles and fiddling about.

Tumblesteeds

Quick disclosure on this one: I was helping demo at the booth, so I’m not exactly a neutral third party here. I’m not involved in development or anything, but I have playtested this a few times at the Upper Valley Game Designers meetups.

Tumblesteeds is a roll-and-write about filling up your pastures of horses before your opponents do. It’s an in-development title from Resonym, and while it’s not finalized, I think it’s neat.

Wrap-Up

This was only a small subsection of the games at Boston FIG. I didn’t get a chance to play a bunch of the final award winners, including Sent By The Gods, Sincerely, Robin, or Thar It Rolls. There were also some award winners like Skydiver that I actively did not enjoy. And that’s fine! Not every game has to be for me.

I’m hopeful that Boston FIG can continue to run events. It’s a good space for smaller projects, and to see things I’d otherwise never quite get a chance to look at.

PAX Unplugged 2024 – Day 3

Ed Note: I promise I’m going to add photos to this at some point this week, even if it’s not right now.

First, a few quick notes: Unlike my other posts, I’m not actually writing this on day 3. Unlike Friday and Saturday night, on Sunday I never got a chance to sit collect my thoughts.

So instead, I’m piecing it together after the show from the business cards I grabbed, screenshots on my phone, and other small notes.

Everything described here is something that happened, but there are also things that did happen that I forgot, because I am completely fried. Mostly in a good way! But still fried.

Morning

Despite being the shortest day of the show, Sunday is probably the day that I played the most games.

First I played Scallywagers, a pumped up version of Liar’s Dice. It’s interesting, but having picked up a copy, and gotten a chance to play some more, it’s tough to recommend. The game is trying to solve the question “How do you improve Liars Dice?” but its solution is a bit lacking. More on that in a future writeup hopefully.

The second game of the day, War of Beasts, was also an attempt to revise a classic game. In this case, the card game War. And again, their design prompt is more interesting than the final product. It might have been intended for kids. I played a few times, and it felt like luck was the primary deciding factor each time.

I also got a chance to see the current state of Super Battle Mon, which was exciting! I do want to note that I’m a Kickstarter backer for this game, so I’m not a neutral voice here, and I want this game to succeed.

That said, with 12pm approaching, it was time for food.

Afternoon

After finally getting a chance to grab lunch at reading terminal for the first time this weekend, I continued across the showfloor, and found myself in front of Dragon Dice, a collectible dice wargame.

I sat down at the Dragon Dice booth mostly because they had chairs. Starting up a demo, my opponent proceeded to have the single worst run of luck I have ever witnessed in a war game. Before I had even taken my first turn, my automatic counter attacks had wiped out a sizable portion of their army. The result is that I’m not really sure what to think of the game.

The next booth with chairs was a pick-and-pass drafting game called Pride of Ninja. I quite liked Pride of Ninja. The game has a couple twists on the standard pick-and-pass game. One is that you draft cards into slots either face up, or face down, and their are a limited number of slots of each type. Cards also care about if they’re face up or not during scoring, so there’s some interesting signaling there as well.

The last show floor game of the day for me was String Railway. I’ll be honest, I’m little bummed I didn’t get a copy of this one. It’s a game about trains, but the train lines you place are actual pieces of string. I wouldn’t quite call it a physical dexterity game. But when so many game are regimented by grids and sheets, there was something freeing about just trying to carefully place rope.

The last game of the day was Abracabattle. It was one of my favorite designs from UnPub in 2023, and the designer Josh Finkel was kind enough to show me the current version. There are a whole bunch of changes and improvements, but the big thing I really want to call out is how much better all the synergies and elements feel. Previously, snakes were the only card type that had synergies, and felt like they provided both a strategy. But now Cheese and Air card types are also incredibly fun.

Last year Abracabattle was a game with strong core elements, that didn’t quite have the right cards for its gameplay. Now, it feels like a full game, with a few reworked systems, new items, and a MUCH stronger set of cards. I’m really excited to see where it goes.

Breakdown

No, not that type, though I was feeling a bit like that by the end of the day. I mean the sort where you pack everything up, and go home. I helped some friends take down their booth, and it’s always fascinating to see everything come down, and get stored for the next event, and to watch a hall full of wonders turn into an empty expanse of concrete.

I also found random cookies in a cookie bucket. Are those the reason for my current state? Possibly, but I doubt it.

Missed Connections/Final Thoughts

There were a fair few things I wanted to try out, but didn’t get a chance to see. I’ve been very curious about Ironwood since I saw it last year. I love asymmetry, and it just generally appealed to me, but the wait time was always a bit too long.

Similar feelings about Gnome Hollow. There were only two tables, and while I’ve heard good stuff, it’s hard to tell if it’s marketing hype, or actual enthusiasm.

I never got a chance to really do any Lorcana either, even if I did pick up some singles.

Finally, I wish I’d gotten a chance to try more things at the night market. It was great to be able to get in, and even get the few items I did, but I would have loved to play more weird stuff.

Overall, this was a good if very, very busy PAX.

Save travels, and as always, more writeups to come in the future. If you want to know about those as they come out, please consider following me on Bluesky.

Indie Games Night Market @ PAX Unplugged

I had a skeleton of this article written up before last night. I figured it would be a fairly simple thing to fill in a few details, double check some numbers, get some quotes and call it a day.

Less than 37 minutes into the Indie Games Night Market, there were still hundreds of folks in line just to get in.

Multiple games had already sold out.

Hosted by New Mill Games

So I scrapped that draft, and started over.

The Event

The Indie Games Night Market was “small” market event within PAX Unplugged, organized and hosted by Daniel Newman of New Mill Games. It was for games that would otherwise never go to production or distribution.

The reasons for that were as varied as the games themselves:

Propaganda is a game about tossing dice and then using photo framing to try and sell yourself as the underdog. The game’s core mechanic and unfortunately topical theming made it difficult for the designer, Chris Lawrence, to pitch it to publishers.

Lab Meltdown is a real time co-operative game with a lot of components. Designer Amelie Le-Roche, who assembles her games out of garage, said it would have been impractical for her to produce more copies than she needed for the Night Market.

In Memory Of is a collaborative storytelling experience about holding a funeral for fictional person. The designer, Tony Tran, felt like it would be too sad an experience for a mass market audience.

And some games, like Skyline, a 1-4 player co-op visual puzzle game, were never made to be distributed at all. Max Seidman and Mary Flanagan made Skyline as a research tool over 10 years ago, and the Night Market proved to be a solid opportunity to dust off and hand-craft a fun game that otherwise wouldn’t have been published.

This is just a smattering of games and reasons, but the Night Market let all of these designs, that might otherwise not have seen the light of day, have a chance to shine.

The Results

It’s hard to see this first event as anything but staggering success. There were over 20 games, and slightly under that many designers. There were some pain points, but both attendees and designers clearly had a huge amount of enthusiasm for the idea.

Folks had started lining up at 6:00 to get in, and by the time 7:00 rolled around, there were five or six stacks of lines filled. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the setup:

Diagram of table layout and flow. There are 20 tables, and lines going from left to right to enter the area where the tables are.

Games sold quickly. Different designers brought different numbers of games, so some games vanished in an instant, while other games held onto their demo copy to sell closer to the end of the night. While the event was planned to run until 10:00, things had mostly quieted down by about 9:30 or so.

Pain Points

No first draft is perfect, and the same can be said for events. While things went fairly smoothly for the designers, many attendees who waited in line found that all the games they were looking for had sold out by the time they got in.

Image of crowd of people gathered around tables with board games on them. The image was taken at PAX Unplugged.
I probably should have taken more photos, but that would have required me to actually look up from the event itself.

In addition, the looping structure of the layout and the small corridors for each table meant that there was some bunching up near the front. This resolved itself eventually, but was definitely a bit of a problem at the start.

Overall

IGNM was a pretty incredible event. While I didn’t get a chance to talk to everyone, it seemed like at least half the tables completely sold out. I’m super excited to see what the future holds for this sort of event.

That said I do feel quite bad for folks on the tail end of the line to get in. Some of these attendees waited 45 minutes to walk into a mostly empty salesfloor.

The designers I was able to talk to were thrilled with the response to their games. Even the folks who had expected to sell all their copies didn’t expect this level of turnout.

While I obviously wasn’t able to look at everything, the full list of games and designers can be found here.

Post-Scripts

  1. There’s a lot that could be said about Japanese indie culture as it relates to fan work, small batch board games, and other differences between Japan and the US. And it should be said by someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone like James Nathan, whose has a bunch of great posts about attending the Tokyo Game Market on Opinionated Gamers. (The one above is a really fascinating read about catalogs, and cultural expectations.)
  2. I had originally planned to play as many of the games at the event as I could, and buy a lot more. Since I managed to get into the event early to help folks set up, and to interview a few people, I scrapped that plan out of respect to attendees who had waited in line. I did manage to get copies of Propaganda, Mutation, and In Memory Of, which I’ll cover at some point in the future.

Thanks

I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who took time to chat with me about their games, and their thoughts on the night market, including, but not limited to:

  • Daniel Newman of New Mill Games, for hosting the event, and chatting with me about his inspiration for it.
  • Chris Lawrence, the designer of Propaganda
  • Max Seidman, one of the designers of Skyline
  • Tony Tran, the designer of In Memory Of
  • The many, many, attendees who took the time to chat with me briefly about their feelings on the event.

PAX Unplugged 2024 – Day 2

It’s the second day of PAX Unplugged! This meant that I actually had time to attend some of the meetings that I’d set up yesterday, starting with a demo of Obscurids!

Obscurids

As a game, Obscruids can be described as an attempt to fix all of the problems with Magic: The Gathering’s commander format. Mana screw has been removed, there’s no summoning sickness, and the game is based around victory points instead of life totals. That last one is important, because it heavily rewards aggression over purely defensive play.

If those words didn’t mean anything to you, it’s probably best to describe Obscurids as a big monster brawl, and a fun one that at. If you want to learn more about the game, it has a Tabletop Simulator Mod here.

(And for folks who might be a bit worried by that “collectible card game” under the tagline, the devs have told me that there will also just be a 5 deck box set for all the people who don’t like cracking boosters.)

After that I just tooled around the show floor a bit, helped some folks find the upstairs freeplay area, and finally headed over to UnPub. I played a few things that didn’t quite stick, before finding Tournament Arc, a sports anime themed game by Little Creature.

Tournament Arc

Tournament Arc is pretty straightforward. Players draft athletes, and then take turns playing episode cards to buff and debuff their own and other players’ athletes. All of this is in service of creating the best team for the sport that’s been randomly chosen.

While it’s a simple game and some ways reminded me a bit of Fluxx or Muchkin, its strongest point is just how funny and accurate it feels to following sports anime. Someone got isekaied! Someone has a tragic backstory! There’s a love triangle.

I also just found the art to be incredibly wonderful. It feels incredibly evocative but without engaging in a lot of the crappier anime tropes.

It’ll be Kickstarting at some point in the future, and I’ll likely back it.

Leaving UnPub, I went back to browsing the expo hall. I did a little shopping, and picked up a copy of Clank Legacy 2. I said in my Clank Legacy writeup that I wouldn’t play a fresh game, but the $115 I just spent says otherwise.

Was that my entire day? Well, no. The Indie Games Night Market tonight is probably the thing I’m most excited to see at PAX, followed by the Jonathan Coulton concert. So of course they’re at the same time. I also have a few meetings to demo stuff before the night market, so I’ll have to see how that pans out.

That said, the Night Market will be receiving its own writeup, so I’m going to take this hour to chug pedialyte and consume a waffle refresh and relax, before rushing back to the show floor.

If you’re curious about my experiences on day 1, you can read them here. And if you’d like semi-random photos and live blogs of the show, you can follow me on Bluesky here.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a waffle to eat.

PAX Unplugged 2024 – Day 1

Woof. It’s just around 4:00 PM, and everything is in a bit of haze. Maybe it’s the hours on the con floor, or maybe it’s the 5 hours of sleep. It’s been a good event so far, if busy. PAX Unplugged actually sold out for the first time this year, but it hasn’t felt too bad.

Side Note: I’m on Bluesky now. If you want tweets and updates from the show, follow me there. Shilling over, back to blogging.

Morning

I spent most of the morning getting ahold of few things that seemed like they would be pretty tricky to get otherwise. Notably the new Lord of the Rings trick taking game. I don’t have any special fondness for either rings or tricks, but I have friends who do, and Dan Thurot has given it positive review, so I grabbed a copy.

Buying games based on other peoples’ enthusiasm is not something I usually do. Usually, I just make questionable purchases based off box art. Given that the game sold its daily allotment by about 1:00, I think I may have made the right call here.

I followed this up by demoing and purchasing a copy of Happy Camper’s Combo, a retheme of Surfosaurus Max. It’s a co-operative set building game where you try to have your own personal cards be the best value in the set.

Last purchase of the morning was Undergrove, again, going in somewhat blind. But Elizabeth Hargrave is an incredible designer, so I’m willing to take a chance.

Afternoon

The afternoon was a bit more chaotic. I taught some folks dressed up as the Grinch’s dog Max how to play Lorcana. I did a little bit of networking and chatting for a future investigative piece I’m doing (mostly just looked for contacts and grabbed business cards) and just wandered the floor.

I can’t talk about those conversations too much yet, but they felt like a productive start to a bigger piece.

I didn’t play as many games as I had expected to play in UnPub. But fortunately, the two games I did play were both great.

First up was Matthew Everhart’s Dance Shuffle, a very clever dance themed deckbuilder for 2-6 players. I’ll likely revisit it in a full UnPub rundown post-show. But in summary: it’s worth playing even as it currently stands. It has some very satisfying movement, chaining and typal triggers, and also has a very clever scoring system. None of which I quite have the energy to currently describe in detail.

It’s not finished yet, but if you like deckbuilders, and get a chance to play this, you should.

The second game was Brightcast. Brightcast describes itself on the back of the box as a 1v1 card battler, which is really underselling it. I think it’s like two MTG controls decks into each other. It’s a very tense of game of reading your opponent’s options, and trying to figure out how to they interact with your own.

It’s a very fun experience, and the dev team was actually giving out free copies of the game up in UnPub.

It also has some incredible art. Again, cannot stress the whole “Get a free copy of this” thing enough.

Oh! This doesn’t fit in anywhere else, but I chatted with a few folks who had been competing in Speed Puzzling! It’s basically doing jigsaw puzzles as fast as you can. It was really cool to see part of the event, and learn about something I’d never heard of before. So that was really neat.

Of course, the show isn’t over yet. I’m planning to do some two headed giant Magic in about an hour and 30 minutes, but that’ll probably be my final event of the night. I’m a little wiped from the drive down, and not getting enough sleep. I really want to conserve my energy for the Indie Game Night Market tomorrow, and the Jonathan Coulton concert.

Corrections 12/9: In an earlier version of this article, I incorrectly called Dance Shuffle’s creator Matthew Everhart by the name Matt Ever. This has been fixed.