Playing through PAX East

The tidbits of chocolate and caramel have some magical power I can’t describe. They also stop me from getting hangry, which is really the most significant benefit to that shiny gold bag.

On the subject of food, the convention center does have food hubs and carts set up all over the space. Fried dough, coffee, patties, chicken fingers, and many more options are available for purchase. In a break from the crowd, we opted to freeze our butts off and walk outside to the courtyard of food trucks. Our destination was The Chubby Chickpea for some of their delightful Chickpea fries. (Don’t listen to Google, they are not permanently closed.)

Now, back to what I actually spent my time on, board and card games. This probably isn’t much of a shock given my previous Wednesday material. In years past, Adam and I have been mostly board game voyeurs as opposed to active demo participants. Here and there, we would be pulled into a table. One in particular I remember was the second game in the Evolution series. Beautiful artwork and game pieces lured us in. And it is now in our game repertoire, although that game is not a quick play.

This year, we took a different tack. We hopped from demo to demo. Occasionally sliding back into voyeur mode to make sure we saw everything on display and giving our brains a break from learning. This lead to quite a few purchases. As if our stack of games from Christmas wasn’t large enough. Now, we are almost out of game storage space once again. We perhaps should bring a chaperone or something to these things. Or remember that we have birthday and Christmas lists to fill up. A downside to having an adult paycheck with teenage tendencies.

I don’t think I need to say this, but for clarity, the demos we attended were a lot of fun. For me, on top of new gameplay, I also got away from the crush of people. For Adam, he got to experience gameplay where he wasn’t the rule guru.

Adam had one checkpoint on our list that day, to demo a game called Root. He had seen several articles naming Root as the best new game on the market. We stopped by Leder Games booth in the afternoon. The two Root tables were already in progress. Still, one of their other game tables, Vast: The Mysterious Manor, was open.

We sat down and waited a few minutes for the demonstrator to come back to the table. He sat down and eagerly began talking about the game. After about five minutes of talking with the demonstrator, it became clear he wasn’t just an employee of Leder Games or someone hired to assist with the demonstrations. Sitting across from us at the table was Patrick Leder, the designer of the game in front of us.

Very, very cool. Beats out last year’s “Woah” moment where the designers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Cowboy Beebop signed our copies of the cames.

A massive shout out to Patrick Leder for being able to bring that kind of excitement to demonstrating the game when he was under the weather. A great time.

Leader games are asymmetrical gameplay, which is where each player have their own objective to win instead of a singular way to win.

Their Vast series has a medieval bent to the characters. Options include paladins/knights, dragons, spiders, goblins, and most interestingly play as the building or structure the game happens in. And everyone is out to do their own thing.