Category: PAX

PAX East 2025 – Day Three Quick Thoughts

It’s day three, and I’ve somehow managed to make it to the finals of the Omegathon. That fact is starting to become mildly overwhelming, but for now I’m gonna focus on other things before it becomes all consuming.

Anyway, day three.

I took today pretty slow. After showing up and looking around for a bit, I met up with another friend. I spent some time showing him around the show, and a bunch of the stuff I already liked, meaning I spent less time looking at new things today than I would have otherwise.

Still, before it was time for the Omegathon round of the day, I did get a chance to try out Don’t Wake The Beast and play a bit more Cappy and Tappy. I also played some Dining Deck, a two player co-op prototype deck builder. Dining Deck was interesting, but frankly pretty unpolished. I also played a bit more Re:Match!

And then it was time for the Omegathon. I’ll recount the events in greater detail later, but suffice to say, I’m now in the finals! So in less than 24 hours I’ll either be a champion, or swearing revenge for next year. Either way, it’s been an incredible PAX East, and I’ve had so much fun (and also stress) competing.

After that I got some food, and then finally got a chance to play some two-headed giant with a friend. We did reasonably well, finishing 2-1 overall.

More tomorrow, and Cryptid Commandos for the win!

PAX East 2025 – Day One and Two Quick Thoughts

Long time readers will know that I do daily writeups and wrapups of what I saw, and what I played during conventions. Unfortunately, I’m a bit busier this year than I normally am. So allow me to offer a brief and undetailed account, written in a mild fugue state, just around midnight of day 2.

First up, I’d like to explain the business: I’m competing in this year’s PAX East Omegathon.

Sorry, let me say that again.

I’M IN THE FUCKING OMEGATHON! AND I’VE MADE IT SEMIFINALS (after being carried in F-Zero by my awesome teammate)!

Anyway. More on that post show. But suffice to say: any extra energy has been redirected from writing to the Omegathon for the moment. I still want to document my thoughts, so let’s get started.

Day 1

Day 1 started off with the first round of the Omegathon. More on the full experience post show, but the game was F-Zero X. I practiced a little once I got the game list, but I was still quite bad. Fortunately, my partner practiced a ton. Between my mediocrity, and her excellence, we won our round and advanced.

This was followed by hitting the show floor, and just generally browsing. I’ll be honest, it feels a bit weaker this year. There are a lot of repeats, and also a lot of gaming-adjacent stuff. Chairs, dice (god, so many dice), and not as many games.

I want to make a special callout to Elden Ring Nightreign having this cool-ass inflatable geodesic dome thing that you can go inside and… not the play the game? It wins first prize for “Wow, I wish this was more interesting!” I don’t know why I would want to watch an hour of streamers playing a game that I can’t play, but whatever.

I did get a chance to finally learn and play Crokinole, so that was fun. I don’t know that I can squeeze and entire post out of Crokinole, but I might try since I’ve been playing a lot at the show.

Crokinole was followed by something I’ve been looking forward to for years at this point: A chance to play Re:Match, the new name for Brother Ming’s Sento Fighter. I’m hoping to do a larger writeup on the game post PAX, but for now all I’ll say is that I’m excited.

Finally, there was an opportunity to play in a Starter Deck Gem Blenders tournament. I’ve always had a hard time refining my thoughts on Gem Blenders, and playing a competitive event seemed like good way to grind some more matches. So I did that, got to finals, and split the pool.

Then I played out finals for fun and lost, but it’s okay since I already got half a booster box.

Finally, I went up to the Jonathan Coulton concert. I stayed for the opening set from Paul and Storm, but then decided to go back down the show floor and just relax.

Day 2

I spent most of the morning practicing Push Me Pull You, a game that truly has some of the sound design of all time. After that, and some intense rounds in the Omegathon, my team came out triumphant, leaving me with the rest of the day spend futzing about.

I started my futzing with Crokinole, before moving over to UnPub.

UnPub has been interesting this year. I played a bunch of stuff, but none of it so far was super memorable—except for one thing that was memorable for… less than great reasons. That said, it’s a work in progress. I have nothing to say about an unfinished game anymore then I’d comment publicly on an unfinished painting.

On the flip side, though, I got to play Tournament Arc again! I wrote a bit about this in one of my PAX Unplugged writeups last year. It’s still just as funny and enjoyable as it was then, except now it’s launching a Kickstarter shortly! So more on this one later, but for now just know that it’s good. If you’re at PAX East, you should check it out.

After that enjoyable experience, I tried to sign up for some 2-Headed Giant MTG. That… did not work out. It was an incredibly frustrating and frankly, incredibly stupid experience. I’ll get into this post-PAX most likely in a full rant post. It was that bad.

For now, I just want to note that it’s not the fault of individual staff of supervisors at the Pastimes booth as PAX East, but it was still incredibly dumb.

So instead, I just went and played in another Gem Blenders tourny, won another half of a box, played some Wavelength, before finally heading out.

Tomorrow is another day of Omegathon, so wish me luck and I’ll edit this post into something more coherent after the show. But for now, I just need to sleep.

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.