Category: PAX

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.

PAX East – The Card Game Post

Card games? Card games! One of the great things about PAX East is that there are an incredible variety of new card games and weird TCG’s to play. In this post, I’ll be quickly going over what I saw, and what I enjoyed, and also what I didn’t.

The Good

These are all the games I recommend at least trying if you get a chance. Am I going to collect them myself? Not necessarily, but I do enjoy playing them, and would play them again.

Here Be Monsters

Here There Be Monsters is a placement and ability-driven head-to-head battler with a sort of wacky pirate theme. It was in Unpub, and unfinished, but was fun enough for me to play 3 games of it—which is rare for something in Unpub. The core mechanics felt like they were almost where they needed to be, but the cards themselves did have some balance issues.

I’m hopeful that I’ll get to see more of this game, though I’m not sure when. There’s a lot of promise here, and the core mechanics are fun.

Altered

It feels like we’re in a bit of a TCG gold rush at the moment. Altered raised over $7 million kickstarter. I didn’t back it for various reasons, but mostly a distaste of said gold rush.

That said, I will absolutely not turn down a chance to try to play new card games, so I did play it. It’s neat, and doing some fairly different stuff. There’s no direct combat; instead it’s effectively a series of cost checks, where you and your opponent try to have the most of a given value present at one of two locations. While what I played didn’t sell me on buying a case, it did convince me that it might not just be an attempt to cash in.

Star Wars: Unlimited

I actually rather like Star Wars: Unlimited. It’s just unfortunate that I’m not a Star Wars person; I actually find the Star Wars theming a bit of a turn off. But I’ve found the gameplay of all the demos I’ve played quite enjoyable. They’ve got a nice tension to them, and that’s enough to put it into the good category.

PAX is also a great opportunity to grab all the promos.

The Bad

Despite the title of this section, these aren’t necessarily bad games. They are, however, (based on what I played) games I will never demo or touch again unless I am paid cash to do so.

Flesh and Blood

I’d heard a lot of good things about Flesh and Blood over the years, and it’s one of the mid-level TCG’s that seems to have clawed itself a spot at various local game stores. So I’ve been curious about it for a while, and at one point even thought about picking up a starter set.

Holy crap, am I glad I didn’t. I hate this game. I pretty much just quit halfway through, and didn’t even grab the simple starter deck.

The short version is that I just found Flesh and Blood both boring and frustrating, and it felt more akin to playing a fighting game than a card game.

UniVersus

The best thing I can say about playing UniVersus is: UniVersus made it clear that I just don’t like the alternating turns of attack and defense pattern that both it and Flesh and Blood seem to be using.

It just never clicked, and I never had fun. I’m sure I’ll get plastered for this, but both of these demos felt random. They felt like I was missing much of the critical information I needed to make meaningful strategic choices. And the remaining choices—the tactical ones—were boring to me.

The Ugly

Welcome to the bad vibes section. It’s not even the mechanics for this one.

Gem Blenders

I wrote a bit about Gem Blenders a while back, and I was pleased to see they were still around, and had a booth. But I was somewhat dismayed to learn that with their switch to a full TCG model, they also switched their card backs. Meaning that if you purchased their earlier base set, the game is no longer compatible.

It just doesn’t feel great, y’know? Anyway, that lands them in ugly.

Final Fantasy TCG

Not good, not bad, just sorta there. Maybe this would have landed better another year, but I just didn’t get anything out of this one. Honestly, I felt a bit bad for the enforcer and 3 other folks total I saw playing the game over the con. It follows a weird version of MTG’s resource system that I found both very slow, and not too fun.

PAX Report – Path of Exile 2

So, one of the coolest things I got to do at PAX was sit down and see the media demo for Path of Exile 2. I’d like to thank the folks Grinding Gear Games and Octavian0/Chris for showing me the game, since I’m obviously a much smaller outlet than a lot of other folks. If you’re curious about why you should care about my opinion click here.

Overall Thoughts

There’s a bunch of interesting small things, but as someone who previously played a bunch of PoE, two things stood out to me from the demo:

  1. A focus on making the game much more reactive than Path of Exile is.
  2. An intention to simplify the parts of the game that can be simplified.

Let’s go through them!

Increased Reactivity, Less Spamming

There were two big sets of changes I saw in the media demo of Path of Exile 2, and the demo I played. The first was that bosses felt and played differently than in the first game. I watched one boss fight thathad a sort of bullet hell sub-mechanic, and I fought against two bosses in the demo.

Of those bosses, the demo’s version of “Hillock” is a good example here. Hillock is the very first sort of mini-boss in the game, and he’s just a big chonky dude. In PoE, he just runs at the player, so you kite him back, and whack him down.

In Path of Exile 2, the boss has a much larger variety of attacks, including summoning packs of zombies, and a ground targeted panel that crosses a large portion of the screen and has to be dodged with the game’s new roll/dash. Plus, Hillock was just generally much more aggressive with its gap closers.

On the player’s side of the media demo, Octavian0 showed off a much larger level of interactivity between skills than I’ve seen previously in PoE. This included things like: throwing down clouds of poisonous gas and igniting them with fire; and setting up plants to grow over time, but that can be detonated early by casting another skill onto them. Instead of just having PoE’s synergy between skills, there was real interactivity between them.

Simplification

This might sound bad, but it really isn’t. In this case, I’m mostly talking about simplifying some of PoE’s internal systems, specifically mechanics around getting early game items.

I saw two big examples of this. The first was skill gems. Instead of single gems, gems now come as uncut gems that when dropped, and you use them to choose what skill you need.

The second was around…. GOLD. Yes, PoE has gold now, but it seems like it’s mostly to buy campaign items from vendors. And honestly, it feels like a really good change for onboarding. I’m someone who loves PoE’s economy, but asking a new player to understand the idea of alterations and chromas and vendor recipes, as well as the skill tree has always felt like a bit much when I try to get new friends into the game.

So yeah. Simplification of systems that can be simplified.

Some Other Notes, and Neat Stuff

I’m just gonna be rambling now, but there was a bunch of other cool stuff I saw. For example, there are gonna be mounts! And Rhoas have been been redesigned look more like Chocobos, and less like head-crabs with legs.

The WASD movement feels great, as does the dodge roll. It honestly feels better than right clicking. There are skills on weapons, so that seems neat. Also, many bosses seem to build up stun, giving them a much nicer sense of pacing than “dodge dodge dodge dodge pray flask dodge”.

Overall, after what I’ve seen, I’m really excited for Path of Exile 2. It’s gonna be a different game, and potentially a much harder one, but it looks incredibly fun. It’s trying to address a lot of the problems Path of Exile has, just as a result of 10 years of incremental updates.

My Background

I like Path of Exile. How much do I like Path of Exile? Well, here’s my Steam playtime.

And this before I switched over to the single player client, where a majority of my play time is.

For fellow PoE players, who are going “Yeah, but for all we know, that was spent farming tab cards in Blood Aqueducts,” I offer the following notes.

  • I killed Uber Elder when it was peak end game boss.
  • I almost exclusively play necro/summoners, but I’ve also played trappers/miners in a few leagues.
  • Most of my playtime was between Delve League, and Echos of the Atlas, with a smattering afterwards, so I am a bit out of date. That said, I tried to chat with some folks who have played more recently, and did a quick act 1 run for comparison with the demo I played at PAX East.

PAX Unplugged 2023 – The Trading Card Games

Ah, Trading Card Games, or if you’re me, “The Money Hole.” PAX Unplugged is almost always awash in TCG’s of some sort or another, and this year was no exception.

Alpha Clash

Alpha Clash was the indie TCG of the show for me. Were there other small TCG’s at the show? Yes, but if you can afford a Disney license for your product, you’re not small enough.

It’s also the one I’m probably going to write the least about here. It’s actually interesting, so I’m going to play a bunch more and do a full writeup later. But as a teaser, here are some of the game’s mechanics:

  • Every creature effectively has haste. (Okay.)
  • All cards are lands. (We’ve seen this before, but still neat.)
  • The entire system for resolving combat has been blown up. There’s a secondary system to prevent the game from stalling out in a game of chicken with combat tricks. (Actually very new and interesting.)

As with almost all games, I do have problems with it. I dislike the the rarity system, and I don’t love the American comic book aesthetic. But the game’s actual mechanics are far more solid than pretty much every other indie TCG I’ve run into over the last few years. So this could be one to watch.

If this sounds interesting, here’s a link to the game’s webpage, and the game has a fully functional TTS implementation as well.

Star Wars: Unlimited

I’ve done some thinking about other Disney properties in Lorcana, but I never put my thoughts into writing in my “Future of Lorcana” writeup a while back. I was curious if Lorcana could potentially see Marvel or Star Wars cards, and the answer right now appears to be “No.” Otherwise I suspect Fantasy Flight wouldn’t have shelled out for a license for Star Wars: Unlimited.

I never actually asked anyone what the Unlimited in the name meant. Presumably the amount of money Fantasy Flight hopes to make with the game? Regardless, I did play a demo of Star Wars: Unlimited.

I don’t have much to say on the game itself. It’s not uninteresting, but the starter decks and demos often don’t translate into thrilling gameplay. Meanwhile, Star Wars: Unlimited doesn’t have any incredibly unique inherent systems if you’ve already played a ton of games.

The most interesting part of the game for me is how it handles the ever present “actions on opponent’s turn” problem. Star Wars: Unlimited makes it so that players don’t really have turns, they just have actions. Doing anything: attacking, playing a unit card, using a commander ability, or playing an action card all use up your action, resolve the effect, and then pass priority to your opponent. In addition, one of the actions that can be taken is to pass all futures for the round, and in exchange, get to act first next round, called seizing the initiative.

If I remember correctly, I think this sort of mechanic might have been in Star Wars: Destiny, another collectible game by Fantasy Flight.

My overall thoughts on Unlimited are kind of just “Okay.” Star Wars has negative brand loyalty from me, mostly because I just don’t care about the franchise. Also because I’m petty and billion years ago dated someone who cared too much. There were some elements in Star Wars: Unlimited that felt like fun flavor touches with how certain mechanics functioned, or characters worked together. But while I’d play more of the game, I’m not in any rush to acquire a copy. It launches March 8th, and I suppose I’ll see what state it’s in at PAX East.

Lorcana

The most notable thing about Lorcana for me at PAX Unplugged was that the prices were “within expectations” as opposed to an “arm and leg.” Usually things are not notably cheaper at Conventions. Usually it’s the other way around. But booster boxes and decks were at MSRP. For comparison, single booster boxes are currently $207 dollars.

Not cheap, but yknow. Normal prices. Also 8% sales tax. The hell is that Pennsylvania?

I was going to say that I didn’t actually play any Lorcana at the show, but that’s not true! While I didn’t play any during the show, I did run into a very friendly group of folks in the hotel lobby Wednesday night, and spent a few hours chatting with them. And also beating them with their own starter decks that they’d just picked up. Because y’know, I’ve played the game before. A lot.

There wasn’t anything in the new set that immediately stood out to me. Looking back at it now, it does have at least one new keyword, and some new typal references. It also had a fair amount of space on the show floor.

Magic: The Gathering

Magic earns a slot on this just barely above Pokémon by virtue of the fact that I actually did play some Magic at Unplugged. It was a grand total of 3 games, they were all two-headed giant Ixalan drafts. Me and the friend I was playing with won every single one, admittedly some by the skin of our teeth. But win we did, and I was able to get a copy of one of the Dr. Who commander decks with our prize tickets.

There’s not too much to say on Magic, really. Ixalan is a fun set. Pasttimes is still running events in a way that makes no sense. You still have to use the terrible MTG Companion app whose one saving grace is that I can log in with my MTG Arena Account.

Pokémon

I didn’t play much Pokémon this year outside of looping by the Pokémon booth to get some pins. At this point, I’ve played those demos enough that I could probably run them. They did add a small raid battle mode which was almost cool, but unfortunately, doesn’t actually have any meaningful strategy.

As such, it’s hard to tell if Pokémon was mostly at Unplugged as a collector’s game, as opposed to a TCG.

Everyone else.

It was an interesting year for PAX TCG’s. There was a lot more support for mid-level entries than I was expecting. The show had at least semi-dedicated areas for Flesh & Blood, and One Piece. I think I saw SolForge fusion over somewhere as well. That said, I didn’t play any of these, and didn’t feel very compelled to.

Unlike last year, with Gem Blenders & Genesis, and last year’s PAX East with Nostalgix, it felt like a very light year for the true indies, with Alpha Clash really being the only one.

Still though. Lotta card games.

PAX Unplugged 2023 – The Full Demos

There’s not enough time to play a full demo of everything at PAX. I think if the show was set up to let you do that, it would probably be one or two months long. I’m not sure I could take that long off work.

That said, I did play a bunch of full demos! So, in no particular order, here are a bunch of things I played that you might not have heard of.

(Okay, in no particular order except Pack The Essentials, which is first because it’s pretty great.)

Pack The Essentials

There’s a lot to unpack about Pack The Essentials. The short version is that I really liked playing this, and I’m excited to see a full release. And while I did play it in the Unpub hall, it already has a publisher: Whacky Wizard games, a new spin off of Wise Wizard games.

Pack the Essentials is a tile drafting and placement game. Players take turns drafting tetromino-like tiles, and placing them onto a personal board. It’s a bit point salad, and your goal is to get the most victory points. You get points for a variety of things, from building chains of certain colored tiles, to surrounding other types of tiles, to using a secondary resource to flip the tiles into cats. Yes, your stuff turns into cats.

Prototype art!

Pack The Essentials was one of my favorite things at the show, and I’m excited to see the full version.

Author Note: If you’re wondering why the board looks completely different from the splash image, that’s because I was playing a prototype version which doesn’t have finalized art. The gameplay was still great.

Crystallo

I am putting Crystallo on this list mostly out of a combined sense of spite, and grudging respect. I did in fact play an entire game of Crystallo, and I actually won, admittedly on easy mode. But let’s back up for a moment.

Crystallo is a single player set placement game. In fact, you could call it a Set-like game, in that it takes the primary mechanic from Set. I don’t think that’s an unfair observation, since the person demoing it to me referenced Set when explaining Crystallo.

It’s a bit easier to see than to explain, so here’s a quick image of my finished Crystallo board.

Did this image help? I hope it did, because it’s eating a non-zero portion of the 10 gigs I have to host this site. A picture might be worth a 1,000 words, but it takes up the memory of like 400,000 words.

Crystallo effectively has two rounds. In the first round you build out a map of cards, one card at a time. You’re trying to surround specific colored emblems. Each time you do so, you complete a set, and you’re trying to complete enough sets to win. In the second part of the game, you try to get one more match of kind each, using all your remaining cards, plus an additional 9.

The thing about Crystallo is that it was not particularly “fun” for me. In fact, the main emotion I remember feeling was immense stress, and mild frustration. There was a palpable sense of relief after I finished, because apparently when a game frustrates me to no end, my response is to sit down and finish the entire thing instead of going and doing something else.

I should work on expanding that skill set to the rest of my life.

Anyway, I do respect Crystallo, but it’s absolutely not a game for me.

Canosa

One of my personal “classic” board games, which is to say a game that I remember from my childhood is Quoridor. Fairly simple rules, but what felt like a complex game to play.

Canosa gave me a very similar vibe. It’s probably easiest to describe it in terms of something like Chess, but that’s still inaccurate. There are two types of pieces: Sailors and Sirens. Each player has one Siren, and your goal is to move four sailors to your own island. The catch is that you don’t own Sailors. Instead, their ownership changes. Sailors and Sirens have colored rings on them corresponding to the player, and there’s a set of mechanics for moving those rings on and off. Which ring is the highest on the sailor determines which player controls it.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure the retail edition has the beautiful wooden pieces, but I can still dream.

Playing it feels very similar to playing something like Quoridor, Connect Four, or Chess to me. The main skill you need to succeed is the ability to look ahead and figure out what your opponent is going to do. But that’s hard enough that it’s fairly easy to missing an option or fail to spot a solution.

I don’t think it’s fair to evaluate a game like Canosa after one play. But I would play more of it! Just preferably not against the game’s creator again, because getting butchered isn’t exactly the best experience. But I would play more.

Skyrockets

Skyrockets is thematically a game about fireworks. Mechanically, it’s a real time sand timer management game. Players have hands of cards with two colors on them, take turns playing cards. Whenever anyone plays a card, you flip the two sand timers that match the card’s colors.

You win by flipping the largest sand timer several times, but you can only flip it after it runs out. Meanwhile, you have to keep all the other sand timers from ever running out. It’s a fairly simple concept, but worked pretty well.

On the whole, Sky Rockets felt like a lightweight game I’d bring to a family gathering, or maybe play as a quick thing at a larger event. It’s not uninteresting, but it also didn’t sell me on itself quite enough for me to grab a copy on the spot.

Shape Invaders

Shape Invaders is a tabletop game, in that it takes up an entire friggin tabletop. It’s a physical dexterity game for two players. Each player has a set of slim plastic pieces that they set up on their side of the table. Then they take turns flicking pieces and trying to knock the other player’s mothership off the board.

It’s actually quite fun, and I really liked it. It also has a sort of comeback mechanic that works really well. Each player has a set of pieces that can’t be flicked, called shields. Whenever your mothership would be knocked off the board, you remove a shield and place the mothership where the shield was. It’s much better than a flat life system, since it’s possible to go after shields early.

Dungeon Drop

Dungeon Drop is another “most of a table” game that has some physical dexterity elements. I’ll be honest, I did not enjoy Dungeon Drop at all. Here’s how the game works.

You start by dropping a large number of small plastic cubes into an enclosed area. On your turn, you drop more cubes in, then select a set of cubes encapsulated by other specific cubes to pick up. There’s more to it than that, and there are some special powers that involve flicking cubes, or different cubes being worth different amounts, but it just wasn’t very interesting.

Most of the game is just spent looking for good patterns on your turn, and hoping no one else spots them. There just wasn’t very much I found interesting about it.