Category: PAX Unplugged 2023

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.