Some tiles have a secondary effect when you move off of them, such as additional ways to score at the end of the game, or the ability to adjust the ranking of the animal types on the scoreboard. During setup, the animal tiles are ranked on a scoreboard, with some animals scoring for each of that type collected and others awarding points to whomever collect the most and second most. I played a few games in the dealer area, starting with Bumuntu, an upcoming abstract game from Wizkids.īumuntu features a grid of bakelite-type animal tiles, and during the game you move off of your current tile, collecting it and moving in a manner prescribed by the animal depicted. Here, that’s the purple tableclothes in the foreground: First Look. There is a library of titles which can be checked out, and as with something like BGGCON, the ‘hot’ titles are collected in a special section. In the foreground is the industrial scale open gaming. If you squint, in the distance there is a dealer hall with booths from the various publishers and accessory makers you’d expect. The central feature of the con is this large hall. In general though, the rooms for various sub-genres of tabletop are near each other, so for my boardgame centric interests, I generally wasn’t going far. This first floor of the convention center is non-contiguous, and I find the PAX maps and programs to be unintuitive, so finding my way around was at times frustrating. It sprawls - with one large main hall and several smaller halls, rooms, and “theaters” in different wings and floors of the con. PAX Unplugged is in Philadelphia, and is the tabletop focused PAX event.

I’ll talk about the show itself, a few things I played, and, of course, a few pictures of what I ate. We haven’t covered this convention before, and it’s only in its second year. A last minute addition to my schedule this year, I went to PAX Unplugged to help my friends Andy and Rand demo games in the “First Look” area.

Pax unplugged 2018 dates