Tabletop Gaming at PAX Prime 2012

Although PAX is primarily a videogame expo and the bulk of the exhibit hall is taken up by huge, noisy booths for the latest shooters, there’s a pretty big tabletop component as well, and that’s the part I love. This year’s tabletop gaming felt a little scattered: there wasn’t any central location where you could find all of the board game publishers and vendors, even within a particular exhibit hall. Some of the bigger names were on the big exhibit hall on the fourth floor, some were tucked away in the 6th floor exhibit hall, and several were tucked into the side rooms on the second and third floors. Still others were off-site at the Red Lion, where one enormous room was opened up for tournaments and free play.

Here’s my round-up of the tabletop gaming I experienced at PAX Prime this year. I didn’t make it to everything, but I tried my best to see as much as possible.

I knew from last year’s experience that the Sheraton (near the convention center) was where a lot of gamers went on Thursday night before PAX to hang out and play games, and I wasn’t disappointed. While there were a few folks in suits, there for some other event, much of the space in the lobby and bar areas were taken up with people playing games.

This year, however, the Sheraton also opened up a few of their meeting rooms for gamers. (Apparently last year they had some trouble with the fire marshal.) It wasn’t a huge amount of space, but it added about ten large tables for open gaming, and it definitely freed up space in the lobby areas. I sat down and played a few rounds of Metagame, an Apples to Apples clone introduced at the 2010 Game Developer’s Conference. It includes questions like “Which is more tragic?” or “Which tells a better story?” and then provides a huge deck of cards of various videogames, from Pong to Assassin’s Creed to John Madden Football. Players are encouraged to argue and debate over the answers, and it can lead to some interesting discussions about games. As somebody who isn’t familiar with a lot of the more recent videogames, some of it was lost on me, but I still managed to win once.

After dinner I found a group sitting down to play Red Dragon Inn, which I’d heard of but hadn’t ever played, and had a blast. Here’s the premise: you’re a group of adventurers just back from a successful quest, pockets full of your hard-earned loot. Now you’re at the tavern, hoping that your other party members get drunk and pass out so you can steal their gold, or else win their gold through gambling (and cheating). Each player gets a deck of cards representing their own character, and you go around the table brawling with each other, forcing others to spend their gold, and generally wreaking havoc until only one player is left standing. It’s a lot of fun (even without real drinks) though the premise and some innuendo make this a teens-and-up game.

If you’re looking for a fun, lightweight party game, Red Dragon Inn is worth checking out. Expansions allow you to play up to twelve people at a time, or introduce more of a real gambling element. And for those who are already familiar with the game and like RPGs, SlugFest Games is running a Kickstarter campaign for a Red Dragon Inn Pathfinder Sourcebook.

The next morning (thankfully, simulated drinking games don’t give you hangovers) my first stop was to see Ray Wehrs of Calliope Games. He showed me a finished copy of Tsuro of the Seas along with the Kickstarter rewards (you can see those in my PAX Kickstarter Round-Up), and then showed me his upcoming game, Roll for It. Each player gets three dice, and there are three goal cards set out at a time. Like Yahtzee, you get three rolls with the dice, setting aside the dice you want to keep. At the end, you get to commit matching dice to the goal cards — if you complete a goal card, you take it and reveal another one. If you have dice committed to incomplete cards, though, you get fewer dice to roll, so you’re forced to make some tricky decisions about how many cards to go for at a time. The game reminds me a little of Take It or Leave It, but with each player in control of their own dice rather than a central pool, and it’ll be a portable game that you can easily grab for on-the-go gaming. I’ll be looking forward to this one.

Although I didn’t stop to play Leviathans — I was eager to check out games I hadn’t seen yet — I did take a moment to admire this setup. The Geek Chic table was a perfect way to show off the game (though I’m wondering if you’d be able to put the leaves in, since the airships are so tall).

I went to the Game Salute booth, which was running demos of cool games all weekend. I got to meet CEO Dan Yarrington and had some great conversations about the state of the board game industry, Kickstarter, game stores, and the Star Trek Catan–Target deal. I believe Erik Wecks will be speaking with Yarrington further, so watch for that in the coming weeks. We also picked up a few board games to try out, which we’ll tell you more about as we review them.

Meanwhile, I also met Levi Mote and Sarah Sharp, creators of Ruse, a not-yet-released murder mystery game. I saw folks playing an earlier prototype at GameStorm but didn’t get a chance to try it. Basically you’re trying to pin a murder on one of the other players while maintaining your own innocence. Play a motive, method, and opportunity of the same color on an opponent to win — and in the meantime, match up alibis to the accusations other people play on you before they find you out. The gameplay is fairly simple but it allows for Gloom-style storytelling, and the artwork really accentuates the theme. Watch for this on Kickstarter soon.

Dave Banks, Erik and I went over to the Red Lion tabletop area for a couple of games. First we played Kingdom Builder, this year’s winner of the Spiel des Jahres. It’s an interesting territory-control game, designed by Donald X. Vaccarino, best known for Dominion. While the mechanics of the game are the same each time — draw a card, build three houses on that type of terrain (with some restrictions) — the replay factor comes in the fact that scoring may be different each round. Points are determined by three randomly selected cards: you might want as many separate settlements as possible, or settlements that connect cities to other locations, and so on. The differences in scoring will determine your building strategy. Overall I thought Kingdom Builder didn’t feel very exciting, but it was interesting enough that I’d consider playing it again to see how the different board layouts and scoring mechanics work.

After that we played Pandemic, the extremely difficult cooperative game of preventing a global pandemic. Despite the Wired cover story this month, we found that the world did in fact succumb to too many outbreaks and everyone perished.

I met Patrick Connor of Mage Wars but didn’t have time for more than a quick overview. Mage Wars is played on a huge board, and combines elements of trading card games and miniatures wargaming. You do build a deck of spells, but rather than shuffling and drawing them randomly, you can choose which cards to play when. Also, the game comes with all the same cards, so players have access to the same pool of spells, setting it apart from traditional collectible games. It might be a little more involved than what I’m used to, but I’m intrigued. We’ll keep you posted if GeekDad does a Mage Wars review, but in the meantime you can find out more at the website.

In the main exhibit hall, I stopped by to say hello to brothers Scott and Jason Hill of Flying Frog Productions, home of one of my favorite zombie games: Last Night on Earth. Even though I woefully neglected to write up Fortune & Glory from last year (still on my lengthy to-do list!), they were still happy to see me. There’s a new stand-alone expansion for LNoE called Timber Peak, which continues the story. A few survivors made it out of Woodinvale, hoping to escape the zombie hordes … but of course they found more zombies waiting for them. With a few new recruits (including Alice the diner waitress pictured above), they’re back to fighting off the undead. I’ve got a copy of Timber Peak and am excited to break it out. You can pre-order it here. (They were also showing off The Coast, an expansion for A Touch of Evil, but the theme of AToE never grabbed me as much so I haven’t tried that one yet.)

Flying Frog also has an expansion coming out later this year for Conquest of Planet Earth, the game where you’re all aliens competing to take over Earth. Apocalypse comes with four new alien races, some stronger coastal defenses for those puny humans, and four new allies (including the Apocalypse Cube, featured on the box cover). I hope to have more about this one down the road.

Speaking of games with cool miniatures, I stopped by Cool Mini or Not’s booth and saw Caverns of Roxor, the first expansion to Super Dungeon Explore. Of course, if I got a copy it wouldn’t look like this, because I’m still a miniatures n00b. Caverns of Roxor adds three new heroes (Starguild Sapper, Princess Ruby and the Deeproot Scout), and big Fire Elemental and some smaller baddies.

I also got this shot of a bunch of minis for another upcoming expansion for Super Dungeon Explore, Von Drakk Manor. Looks like another set of heroes and several more big bad guys with minions. I don’t have an anticipated release date on this one yet, but if you’re a SDE fan then keep an eye out for these. As a bonus: the minis for the expansions come pre-assembled!

I stopped by to visit David Weinstock, creator of Zoxso, which won our (ahem) very prestigious Golden Bots Award in 2011 for Best 2-Player-Only Game. Well, after GeekDad Nathan Barry created our lovely Golden Bots image and we sent it out to winners, I hadn’t actually seen one out in the wild. For the recent Zoxso World Championships, Weinstock took some of the chips used for Zoxso pieces and made tokens to hand out — including some with the GeekDad Golden Bots Award. Pretty cool. And if you still haven’t tried Zoxso, check out my review and then go order yourself a copy — it’s great.

Smash Up made a big splash at Gen Con this year, and you can expect a review soon (after I get caught up with PAX and my trip to Taiwan). It’s a “shuffle-building” game: you pick two factions and shuffle them all together — that’s all the deck-building that’s required. With combinations like dinosaurs and ninjas or robots and wizards, you score points by attacking bases with your minions, and wreak havoc with action cards. It’s an easy-to-learn, fast-playing game.

Erik Wecks and I have been developing a board game based on Watership Down for several years (with a long break when I moved to Kansas), and we made a lot of good changes after playtesting it at GameStorm in March. We decided we’re ready to start showing it to publishers, so Erik made up a couple of playtest sets (with a printed board to save on setup time) and we broke it out a couple times during the convention. It still needs a little tweaking, but we made a few contacts and are hopeful that we’ll be able to finalize the rules and send it out to some folks soon. Of course, one big looming question is whether we’d actually be able to get the Watership Down license or if it’ll be some more generic title, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it (or perhaps float down the river on a raft). In the meantime, it’s still way early for a Kickstarter campaign but you’ll definitely be the first to know if/when it happens.

Eric Reasoner, pictured above trying out our game, is Sales Director for Coffee Haus Games, which distributes a lot of games that don’t have US publishers. A few that I spotted that looked interesting were Drako, a two-player game about three dwarves vs. a huge dragon in a tight space; Vanuatu, a game with “programmable actions” and some auction mechanics; and Sheepland, in which you and your opponents are shepherds moving your sheep around in the same field.

At the Looney Labs booth, I got to meet Andy Looney himself, and got a signed Fluxx card that lets me brag about the time I met him. He showed me an upcoming Looney Pyramids (formerly Icehouse) game called Pink Hijinks. It’s a two-player game on a 3×3 grid using three of each size pyramids and a die. Your goal is to get three pyramids of a single size into your home row, one in each square, with nothing else there — or, get all of the pyramids into your opponent’s home row. You roll the die to see what piece you can move, and anything stacked on top moves with it. Also, anyone can move things into someone’s home row, but only you can move things out of your home row. It’s a simple idea but lends itself to some really fun gameplay.

One of the fun things about any gaming convention is getting to try out things that are still in development — you get to give input on the gameplay and make suggestions, and also see a bit of the game design process in action. I met Rick Collins at GameStorm earlier this year; he does Studio Support and Game Development for Game Salute. But he’s also a game designer, and showed us Scrapbots, a mashup of Mechwarrior, Battlebots, and Junkyard Wars. The idea is that you build your bots from the scrap heap and then send them into the arena, where you earn points for smashing each other and knocking parts off the other robots. If you die, you just grab some more parts and send in another bot — it’s all about pleasing the crowds. Collins hopes to finish tweaking the game for a 2013 release from Clever Mojo Games, so I’ll be watching for this one.

Fun fact: in the photo above, Randy Newnham and Julian Leiberan-Titus of the Story Realms team are also learning the game. (Angie Hickman Newnham is to my right.) Also, in the left background, I think that’s Chris Cieslik of Asmadi Games.

Hey, check it out: Steve Jackson Games has a new game coming out, and it doesn’t start with M and rhyme with “punchkin.” Castellan lets you build little tiny castles with walls and towers; you get points for completing a courtyard based on how many towers it has (regardless of size or shape). The cards in your hand indicate which pieces you’ll get to build with each turn. It’s not terribly deep, but is kind of fun, and I think may make a fun light game for casual gamers and in-between heftier fare (like, for instance, Ogre). Castellan isn’t out yet, but should be soon.

I checked in with Bill Witt of Pajaggle to see what was new, and he showed me Pajaggle Rings, which were just released. The rings consist of foam hexes with the shape cut-outs, so that you can join up a bunch of hexes to make a puzzle, and then use the various-colored pieces to fill them in. Pajaggle Rings come with a bunch of cards for different types of play. Some require you to build the exact picture indicated on the card, another challenges you to build something based on a text description before revealing the image to see how well you did. The large foam pieces are easier to use for folks with impaired vision, and Witt has found that because Pajaggle‘s audience includes seniors, the Rings are a great fit for senior centers and assisted living homes which have incorporated the puzzle game into their activities. You can get more info or purchase Rings on the Pajaggle website.

Cryptozoic had a couple of new things to show off. One of the most popular at the show (understandably so) was their upcoming DC Comics Deck-Building Game. I don’t know if that’s the final title — that’s how it’s listed on the website — but what it lacks in charm it makes up for in sheer licensing power. Yep, it’s an officially licensed deck-building game where you get to play as your favorite DC Comics superhero (as long as your favorite is Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Flash, Green Lantern, or Cyborg). As with Ascension, the rest of the cards are all shuffled together to make one stack, with a few available cards each turn. However, there is only one currency — Power — which you use to purchase new cards and to defeat villains. Meanwhile, villains can add Weakness or Vulnerability cards to your deck, diluting it and reducing your score. Watch for more about this one soon.

Another deck-building game from Cryptozoic was 3012, set a thousand years after the Mayan apocalypse. In 3012, you pick a hero, gather weapons and allies, and face encounters to level up. However, at each encounter the other players have the opportunity to aid you or hinder you. Will it turn out to be something like Thunderstone Munchkin? (And is that a good thing or a bad thing?) I’ll find out and let you know!

Aside from those, Cryptozoic is also developing the world of Lookouts, created by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade. There is a game coming, but first they’re fleshing out the world itself through a comic book series. They had the first issue available at PAX, and it looks like a great start. Also new this year was Hot Rod Creeps, a customizable racing board game which even includes a jump through a ring of (cardboard) fire. Dave Banks is planning to get a closer look at both Lookouts and Hot Rod Creeps.

And one last game before I had to hit the road and head back home: FlowerFall from Asmadi Games. Dave Banks will provide a full review later, but basically it involves dropping cards onto the table and trying to create garden paths that you control. Rael mentioned it during the panel as a game that starts off with “flowers falling from the sky” and then quickly becomes something intense like Risk. We played a couple of games of FlowerFall (it’s a fairly quick game), and met Chris Cieslik from Asmadi Games who happened to be in the same tabletop room at the time.

Overall, this year’s PAX tabletop gaming felt more far-flung than last year’s, and I spent a lot of time walking between various locations (which meant less time actually sitting down and playing). But it was still a lot of fun and I’ve got a long list of games to check out. If you haven’t already, be sure to take a look at my PAX Kickstarter Round-Up as well, because there are some great tabletop games mentioned there as well!