Category: Board Games

PAX Unplugged 2023 – The Unpublished

Everyone has their convention rituals. Some people go to panels, get autographs, or eat food at a specific place. I always try to spend at least some time down in the Unpub room and play prototypes.

This year, I played two games in Unpub that really stood out to me.

Abracabattle

Image Taken from the Abracabattle Pitch Kit.

First, there was Abracabattle. Abracabattle is a tableau building battle game. Players are battling wizards, adding cards from a central buy row to their attacking spellbook, and then casting those spells based on the outcome of dice rolls. At the same time, casting spells generates wisdom to spend on even better spells.

Abracabattle is probably the perfect example of the sort of thing I go to Unpub to see. It’s a fairly fun, if currently a little unpolished, with a simple premise and enjoyable gameplay. It’s also very much a work in progress, with a limited number of cards and synergies, and a bunch of placeholder art.

But Abracabattle is fun, and it feels like it just needs a bit more time to cook to become something really interesting. For one, there’s a lot of open design space in its design. In addition, at least one of the game’s elements—snakes—really works. In fact, let’s talk about snakes for a moment.

Some spells in Abracabattle are Snake Spells. Snakes spells want to be next to other snake spells. Some of them get stronger when next to other snake spells. Others reward you when you cast nearby snake spells. The snake mechanic is a really cool design, and it also means that some of the “trigger when nearby stuff triggers” effects also synergize well with the rest of the pool.

I’m excited to see what Abracabattle becomes, and I’m hopeful I’ll get to see it as a full game at some point in the future. Oh, and if you want to see what it looks like right now, you can play it on Tabletop Simulator.

Blackberries

On the other end of the spectrum, there was Blackberries, a physical dexterity game about picking blackberries. Cards are stacked into a huge heap, and each turn players use a single finger to nudge and move them about. It’s not very complex, but it’s quite fun, and I can see it working very well as simple one deck sort of game.

If you want to see progress on the game, the creator can be found over at jestinbrooks.bsky.social. I’d make that a link, except I’m not on Blue Sky. So I can’t actually seem to find their page. It is what it is.

Still though, Blackberries was quite fun, and I’m curious if the game will still work when it’s not printed on sleeved cards. It could be great! Or it could completely fall apart. But it was still a clever game in that moment, and I hope I see more of it.

Wrap-up

There was one other game in Unpub that I want to talk about, but it wasn’t actually unpublished, so I’ll be saving that one for another post. There were also a few other games I looked at, or played but didn’t feel strongly enough about to want to talk about them.

Still though, it was a lot of fun, even though I spent less time this year in Unpub than I usually do.

And hey! If playing unfinished games sounds interesting to you, or you’re looking to have people play your game prototype, maybe check out the Unpub website. You’ll be able to find info on Unpub’s other events. PAX isn’t the only con they attend, and there are a lot of other opportunities to try unfinished prototypes.

PAX Unplugged 2023 – Pre & Post

Welcome to part one of my PAXU 2023 writeup! If you’re mostly here for game coverage, you can skip this one. If you’re willing to indulge me in a bit of rambling on air travel, Philly, and the new OLED Steam Deck, feel free to stick around. Unlike most of the other posts in this series, this is just going to be some thoughts about everything that didn’t fit anywhere else.

First off, air travel! I actually don’t mind flying, and I used to do a fair amount of it for work. But I haven’t flown for work in years, so every time I think about it, I feel like the guy who talks about how he was great at high school football. But anyway, point is, I’m pretty familiar with airports, flying, and the whole thing.

Except this time I flew Cape Air, a smaller airline that services the New England area, and it was a bit of a doozy. First off, all the planes are Cessnas (I think—plane people don’t kill me please), which are very small. My flight back had 3 people on it, and one of them was the pilot.

It was an incredibly different experience than I was used to, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a weird way. The plane was much louder than I expected even with earplugs, and I could see out every inch of the plane. Honestly, it was pretty staggering. I’m fairly jaded on flying at this point. Doing it bi-weekly for 3 years will do that. But coming up through the fog and into the massive sprawling plain of clouds was just incredible. I have some photos, but they really don’t do it justice.

Also spent some time in a fancy airport lounge, and felt more upper middle class than I ever have before.

Some of this airplane and airplane adjacent time was spent testing out my new Steam Deck. I’ll probably do a full writeup once I play through a few more games on it, but in brief: good battery life, good screen, don’t love the controls, currently still mixed on it as a system. It’s also a bit bulky, but I wasn’t going to get a better chance to try it out than this weekend. I played a bunch of Shadows Over Loathing, which I’ve found to be quite good!

However, the Steam Deck didn’t get much time to shine because I spent very little time waiting in lines this week. That’s not say there weren’t lines, but they were mostly for food rather than games or demos. As always, I’m obligated to shout out Reading Terminal Market, and I’d like to specifically call out Sweet Nina’s, which makes killer banana pudding. Is Reading Terminal Market reasonably priced? Not quite, but the quality of the food is so much better than anything you’d get in any convention hall, I don’t know why you’d ever buy anything from the convention.

Seriously though. If you’re at PAX Unplugged, you should either be 1. Bringing your own food in, or 2. Going out and getting food. If you get convention hall food you’re being gouged for terrible food, at terrible prices, in terrible lines.

Speaking of terrible lines, here’s a riddle: what do you get when you try to have 10,000 people use a single escalator to enter a convention hall? Answer: a mess! There was a line stretching around Reading Terminal just to get into the line to get into security to get into the queue hall line. No, I didn’t mistype that last sentence, and you’re not having a stroke, it was that bad. Whoever thought having a single entrance with one staircase and one escalator to actually get in was an idiot.

Outside of that though, I was able to avoid most of the awful lines this week, and I’d consider it to be a pretty good show. My notes are a bit more chaotic, and I feel like I spent less time just grinding things out than I normally would.

Anyway, now that I’ve covered everything else, it’s time for board game posts! Which will be going up slowly over the rest of this week.

Quickity Pickity

I spent some time dragging Dragonwood over the coals recently. As such, it seems fair to spend an equal amount of time talking about another very simple game that I actually really enjoyed. That game is Quickity Pickity.

Quickity Pickity is a manual dexterity, real time set collection game. The goal is to be the first player to win 3 rounds. Here’s how rounds work.

Each round, the goal is to build sets of fruit. Fruits have 3 characteristics: they can be smiling or frowning, they have a shape, and they have a color/pattern. A set of fruit is multiple fruit tiles that all have the same expression and either the same color or shape.

All the fruit tiles start face down. Once the round starts, players flip up fruit tokens in real time, and take them to place into their own sets. The catch here is two-fold. First off, once you place a fruit in one of your sets, it can’t be moved or removed. Secondly, if you take a fruit, you must place it in a set.

But while the general gameplay is the same each round, the scoring changes.

At the start of each round, the players flip up a score card. These determine how points are awarded for the round, and are fairly variable. They might payout aggressively for large sets, or instead just reward a large number of points for medium sets. They might even punish for sets that are too large, or only payout for sets with an even number of fruits.

In addition to this, each round has a special fruit: a specific color and shape that rewards bonus points. Bonus fruits give yet another thing to keep track of and switch up.

The round ends when all three of a set of monkey tokens have been flipped up, at which point players stop and score points. Now remember when I mentioned that fruits can’t be moved? Well, if you accidentally placed a mismatched fruit into a set (for example, put a frowny face fruit in a set of smileys), there’s a massive penalty of minus 10 points per bad set. This almost always enough to lose the round.

While I liked Quickity Pickity, I do have one big gripe and it’s with the round ending monkey tokens. It’s very easy to flip one over, and not notice, and there isn’t really a penalty or reward for spotting that fact. Twice in the 9 or so rounds I played, we flipped all the monkey tokens up without realizing it. We only noticed later that the game was supposed to be over.

Monkeys also have an interesting effect of being an acceleration mechanic. If a player thinks they have a big enough lead, they can quickly try to close out the game by quickly flipping up tokens with no interest in collecting sets.

But these are minor complaints. The score cards do a really good job of actually making each round feel different. I had to actively change up my strategy each round based on what the payouts were. And this is while there’s room to improve the actual set building. Bonus fruits also did a good job of contributing to this, keeping the game from feeling stale.

I really liked Quickity Pickity. It’s simple, fun, and offers decisions that aren’t inherently complex, but are compressed into such a tight time frame that they’re still fun to try to solve.

If you’re looking for an interesting small game, it’s $23 on Oink’s website. As always, that not a sponsored link or anything. I just think think Quickity Pickity is good.

Tiger and Dragon

Tiger and Dragon my favorite game Oink Games has published. It’s also my favorite game with Dragon in the title that I’ve played recently. (The other two in that category are Dragonwood, and Dragon Castle.) It’s stayed entertaining even after playing 8 or so times, and is relatively simple.

Tiger and Dragon is sort of a trick taking game played with a set of numbered domino-like tiles, for 2-5 players. The group I’ve played with likes it best at four players, but I personally also really enjoy it with three players.

Here’s how a round works. Each player takes number of tiles based on the number of players, with the starting player taking an extra tile. Then the starting player places one of the tiles from their hand, as an “attack.” Going clockwise, any player can play a tile that matches that number to block. If they do, they then become the attacker, and choose a domino to play, and the process repeats.

But if none of the other players choose to block, and it cycles back around, the original attacker gets to place a single tile from their hand face down, and then attacks again.

The goal of the round is to be the first player to empty your hand. Whoever does so scores points based on the battlefield in use. Battlefields modify the games scoring rules, and the first player to get 10 points wins.

The strategy and fun of Tiger and Dragon comes from how the tiles are numbered. Each tile has the same number of copies as its value. There’s a single 1-tile, two 2-tiles, three 3s, and so on all the way up to eight. There are also two special tiles, the Tiger and Dragon, which we’ll talk about in a moment.

But let’s say another player attacks with a three, and you have a three in hand. You can block with that three, or you can decide to try to hold the three, and force another player to block. If another player blocks with a three, you now have the only three. This means that when you attack with the three, it will likely cycle the entire table, letting you play an extra tile for free.

Unless of course someone plays the Dragon.

The Tiger and Dragon are spoiler tiles. The Tiger can block any even tile, but be blocked by any even tile. The Dragon does the same thing, but for odd tiles. This makes them the strongest defenders, and the weakest attackers.

The end result is a very fun game of bluffing and hand management, that I highly recommend, and hope gets restocked at some point in the future. (I guess you could buy it off Amazon.)

I heavily recommend Tiger and Dragon. It’s incredibly repayable, has a fantastic level of planning and bluffing, and is just generally a very fun game.

Author’s Note: Apparently Tiger and Dragon is based off an old Japanese game called Goita from 1860. The amusing part of this for me is that the apocryphal designer of Goita has a Board Game Geek page, which for some reason I find very amusing.

Dragonwood

I’m supremely “Meh” on Dragonwood. The shrink wrap on my copy of the game had a sticker informing me that it won the Mensa Select award. This award is shared by Dominion and Set. I’m not sure why Dragonwood, of all games, was added to that lofty grouping.

Maybe there’s a high level of strategy present in Dragonwood and I’m not smart enough to understand it. Maybe the people giving out this award only play 5 games a year. If I had to guess, I would guess the second one.

Dragonwood is incredibly simple. On a player’s turn, they either draw a card from a central adventurer deck to their hand, or play adventurer cards from their hand to try to capture monsters or obtain equipment from a central row. The adventurer cards have five colors, and are numbered 1-12, with a set of each.

Capturing a monster requires you to play a set of cards as a strike (a straight: 1,2,3), a stomp (same number: 8,8,8), or a scream (a flush: blue, blue, blue). Then you roll dice equal to the number of cards you played. If the sum of your roll value is higher than or equal to the value of the card you are trying to capture, you take the card. If not, you return your played set of adventure cards to your hand, and then have to discard a card as the cost of failure.

Monsters are worth victory points. Equipment gives bonuses to future roles.

This is pretty much the entire game. It’s also worth noting that game’s six sided dice have faces: 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4. The end result is a fairly narrow range of expected outcomes.

The game ends when the adventurer deck has cycled twice, or both of the dragon monsters have been defeated.

Frankly, the end result is rather boring. There are virtually no interesting decisions to be made. Instead, you just do a quick analysis of if the expected outcome is worth the victory points. The equipment is almost all beneficial stat sticks, or one time buffs.

The nicest thing I can say about Dragonwood is that if I was trying to teach someone that board games aren’t difficult to learn, Dragonwood would be a great example an easy-to-learn game. Not “easy to learn, hard to master.” Not particularly fun. But a simple enough game to learn to play from the rulebook.

I believe this is called damning with faint praise, but it’s all the praise I can muster for Dragonwood.