The Best Board Games at PAX Unplugged 2024
PAX Unplugged 2024 was the biggest edition of the tabletop gaming convention yet, as the show expanded to take up the entire main floor at the Philadelphia Convention Center and expanded to take over another ballroom on the fourth floor, with more free play tables, a new Unpub area for designers to test and showcase unpublished games, and the First Look area of games that were just released, are about to be released, or are looking for U.S. distribution. The consensus of everyone I talked to was that this setup was a huge improvement over last year, which felt like the busiest PAXU to date and made it harder to get around or find places to play games because of the ratio of people to seating. The new setup also meant that there was more space between publisher and merchant booths in the expo area, and a little more space in the aisles among the tables, all of which I appreciated quite a bit. I love a good board game convention, but last year was a little peopley, so the more space the better.
I spend most of my time at PAX Unplugged every year in First Look, a section devoted to buzzed-about games that haven’t hit the US yet. It was bigger than ever in 2024, but I did notice a trend towards very quick, light games and very long, heavy games, with some of the latter running two to three hours in boxes the size of one of those tiny houses people pretend they enjoy living in. I was fascinated when I saw the board and box for İnkılâp, as it’s the first game I’ve ever seen by a Turkish designer (Tunca Zeki Berkkurt) and publisher, but the box says it takes 90-240 minutes. I love board games of almost all stripes, but I am not sitting down to play any one game for four hours, let alone do it twice because you know the first time you’re going to screw a bunch of things up.
As usual, here are my notes from meetings with publishers, followed by a rundown of everything I played at the convention.
Red Raven had one of the most popular new releases of the convention in Creature Caravan, a quick-teaching game set in the Above & Below universe (like all RR games). Players will play cards to gain resources and build a tableau that helps them move their caravans across the board, trading goods and coins, searching for treasure, and fighting zombies. It features simultaneous play, so it’s somewhat shorter than a lot of designer Ryan Laukat’s games. Red Raven also had a new printing of Roam, a game I particularly love for its elegant approach to area control, as players place tokens on cards matching the patterns on cards they haven’t yet used from their hands; and a new small-box set collection game called Isle of Night from first-time designer Dustin Dowdle.
Allplay had a press demo of Twinkle Twinkle, a quick tile-laying game from the designer of Gnome Hollow. It’s very simple to learn or teach, as you take a tile on each turn and place it on your 4×5 board, trying to create a star chart with constellations and other patterns for more points. It plays in 20 minutes and offers lots of different scoring tiles so each game can be a little different. It’s heading to Kickstarter in January. Their reprint of Through the Desert sold out its first print run, but more copies should be coming just after the holidays. It’s a classic Reiner Knizia game of area control and I would never part with my copy, which is one of the earliest editions. Allplay is still churning out its games in tiny square boxes, adding Switchbacks, the first English version of a Japanese game called Connect 37, where players place tiles on to the board and try to create runs of consecutive numbers with their own hikers on them; hikers who aren’t in such a line are removed and don’t score any points. They also have a party game coming called Alibis, which has a cooperative Codenames vibe, but that’s not my cup of tea.
Dire Wolf had demos out for their digital adaptations of Cascadia, which is now in beta on Steam and which I can confirm is pretty great, and the upcoming Ark Nova, along with places to try out their existing titles, including this year’s Clank! and last year’s Dune Imperium. They’re also bringing out a second season of the physical game Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated, building on the first box, which brought some new game mechanics they kept and brought into Clank! Catacombs.
25th Century had Diatoms, an absolutely stunning new game from a new designer, Sabrina Culya, where players place tiles of diatoms (microscopic life forms) in mosaic patterns to try to maximize their scoring for different colors, different shapes, and symmetry, plus that game’s unique scoring criteria. They were selling it at the booth but the retail release won’t come until March or so.
Restoration Games is bringing back the 1990s miniatures game Battle Masters, this time as Battle Monsters, using their license for content and characters from the Monsterverse like Godzilla and King Kong. It’s coming to Kickstarter this year.
Kosmos had their big hit from 2024, The Gang, a cooperative game based on Texas Hold ‘Em, which I can confirm is pretty great and works well with kids as young as 8. They also had Australis, which I describe below among games I played in full, and their new Masters of Crime series of narrative games that look like they fall somewhere between the Exit series (which I loved) and the Adventure Inc. series (which I thought was way too text-heavy). There’s a new family version of their cooperative trick-taking game The Crew coming out in 2025.
Capstone is bringing back a 2012 Reiner Knizia game, Indigo, with a new title and theme as Butterfly Garden, which has a very Metro/Tsuro feel in the way you place tiles with paths on them to connect different parts of the board. Here you’re trying to direct butterflies from the middle to your specific points on the outer edge, or from elsewhere on the outer edge to your points, with different colors worth different point levels. I actually lost badly because I confused the values of two colors, but this is a great family-level game for play with kids ages 8 and up, with just a little bit of take-that to it in the way that you can drop a tile to mess with someone else’s well-laid plans. I also got my first look at their edition of Pagan: Fate of Roanoke, which came out in Europe in 2022 but didn’t get a proper U.S. release until now; it’s an asymmetric two-player deckbuilder with some area control elements, where one player is the witch and the other the hunter (I would have gone with Witchfinder General, but, hey, it’s a free country) trying to figure out which character on the board is the witch before time runs out. Atlantis Exodus is a medium-heavy game where players are kings trying to evacuate as many of their subjects as possible before the island sinks, with a board that rotates so that the variables each player faces change over the course of the game. Capstone also had some very heavy games out in First Look, including Black Forest (part redesign of Glass Road and part sequel), Beyond the Horizon, Galileo Galilei (I love the theme, but it might be longer than I can take), and what might have been the least appealingly-named game of the convention, Stephens.
Playpunk is a new publisher co-founded by 7 Wonders designer Antoine Bauza, and their first game, the family game Captain Flip, was a big hit this summer. Their next title, due out in 2025, is Zenith, playable by two or four players, with a tug of war element across five lines, along with some hand management aspects, as the cards you play determine which tokens you move and how much. You can also discard a card and move up one of the technology tracks to try to build up for bigger bonuses later in the game. It’s due out in Q1.
Flatout Games had demos up for their next two games heading to Kickstarter: Point Galaxy, the third game in the series that includes Point Salad and Point City; and Propolis, a small-box worker placement and engine-building game with gorgeous components, where players play as bees looking to build up their colonies. It’ll come to Kickstarter in February. Their Kickstarter for Knitting Circle, the lighter tile-laying offshoot of Calico, ends this week. They also had Nocturne, their big release from 2024 with a clever tile-selection mechanism and that is at least on the short list for my top 10 games of the year.
The best game I played at the con, easily, was Flatiron, the newest title from the designers of The Red Cathedral and The White Castle, the latter of which was my best game of 2023. This is a two-player game with a solo mode, but otherwise has a lot in common with their other games: Turns are tight, the game rewards a lot of planning, and you need to be efficient to win. The players are both architects working to construct the Flatiron Building in New York City, which, when completed, will have six floors, each supported by three pillars. The players will buy and place pillars of four colors, with no color repeated on any single floor, and place roofs, all for victory points and in-game rewards. It’s also an engine-builder, as you can buy cards to make your purchase/placement actions much more powerful, so that on one turn you might be able to take some income, buy or sell a pillar, place a roof, and even snag some extra victory points. There are six objective cards you can purchase to score at game end, and there are bonuses and penalties for your ‘reputation’ on each of the four streets around the building, which are also represented in your engine. It looks great, especially once the building is complete, and it’s one of those games where you will be dying for your opponent to take their turn so you can do the next thing you want to do—if they haven’t blocked you or done it first. Flatiron is only out in Europe right now, but it was available for purchase at PAXU, and you bet your sweet bippy I bought a copy.
GHQ is the first and only game designed by Kurt Vonnegut, who tried to sell this game in the 1950s before his literary career took off; I’m glad he stuck to writing. This is a chess-like wargame, played on an 8×8 board, with each player starting with five pieces—three basic infantry, one basic artillery, and their headquarters—and adding more pieces as the game goes along. There are pretty simple rules for when a piece is captured and how pieces move, with each player getting one paratrooper who can fly into enemy territory but can only retreat one space at a time. The goal is to capture your opponent’s HQ, which takes some time because of the back-and-forth nature. It plays out as a war of attrition, which is pretty realistic but did make the game a bit of a slog.
Quiet House
Quiet House is a cooperative game without communication where each player can only see half of the conditions necessary for victory. The game board sits in the box, with five statues placed on it and two cards slotted in between the board and the bottom box. The cards show which two statues must be the furthest left on the board from that vantage point, with no two statues allowed to be in the same row or column. Four of the statue types have unique movement powers, while the fifth, the mirror, changes its movement type each turn to match one of the other four. On your turn, you can move one statue, or hold up your paddle to indicate that you think the group has solved the puzzle. There’s a set number of turns counted via a deck of cards that shows what one statue you can’t move on your turn. It’s solid, although I don’t think it offers anything new.
I saw Tower Up at Gen Con and played it through once, but got a second playthrough here with a different player count (three). Players place tower pieces onto a shared map and place their roof tiles on them to move up their various trackers, but the pieces are designed so that you can continue to build on someone else’s roof. On your turn, you place one tower piece from your personal supply on an empty space, and then place another piece from your supply on every adjacent tower, matching each tower’s color and ensuring that no two adjacent towers are the same color. Then you place your roof on any tower you built/added to on your turn and move up your matching tracker one spot per level of that tower. You’ll also skip some turns to take a card that adds tower pieces to your supply and maybe moves up a tracker as well. Once someone has placed their 10th roof tile, players finish the round and the game ends; you score based on the positions of your four trackers, based on the number of your roofs that are visible from the sky at the end of your last turn, and from the three objective cards for that game. This is definitely one of my favorite new games of the year, as it’s so simple to learn with elegant rules but involves a good bit of take-that while requiring you to balance a number of variables in your head.
Fishing is the newest game from designer Friedeman Friese, whose games all start with the letter F (including his biggest hit, the game Funkenschlag, sadly translated as Power Grid). It’s one of the most clever trick-taking games I’ve ever seen because it keeps rebalancing itself every round. Players all start with the same hands for round one, but when you win a trick, you keep those cards, scoring one point for each, and put them into your deck for the next round. If you don’t have enough cards in your deck to fill your hand, you draw new cards that are more powerful than any cards that were previously in play, so players who fall behind get to power up for the next round. Three of us played a full game of eight rounds and the leader changed after almost every round, with a final score of 92-90-88.
Australis
Australis is a righteous game of life in the EAC, with an interesting dice-drafting mechanic where you take a dice for its action and strength, but then re-roll all of your dice at the end of each round for a ‘dice battle’ to claim one of that round’s two bonus tiles. Players will select four dice per round, using them to move their turtles along the East Australian Current, to place their coral tiles in the six different regions (for area control), to gather fish, and to claim cards that activate each time you select a die of the matching color and action. Only the turtle and coral dice factor into the dice battle, along with the one powerful red die that gives you first player for the next round, so you can’t just load up on fish or cards. It’s fast-moving and well-balanced, and I like how it sequesters most of the randomness in one aspect of the game. It’s due out early in 2025.
Ice Hike: Beware of the Bears was my “they had us in the first half, not gonna lie” experience of the convention, as halfway through the game I thought it was kind of dumb, only to see the tension turned up to 11 in the second part. Players are trying to move their hiker meeples diagonally across a blank board that they’ll fill up by taking and placing a hex tile on each turn. You place the tiles not to help yourself, but to get in the way of other hikers, like placing a lake (impassable) or mountain (only passable by going up a hill tile and then a mountain tile, and then you have to get down) in front of them. Also, you draw a cube from the bag for every mountain tile, and while some are treasures you place on the board, you may also place a polar bear, and then anyone can move the bear instead of their own hiker and send it after another player. The player who raced across the board fastest ended up in second place, because the rest of us threw up a blockade of lakes and mountains to make her go the longest way around, while the player who was in last at the midpoint ended up winning.
There’s another Around the World in 80 Days game, at least the third I know of, but this one is probably the most true to the actual book (as opposed to one that came out around 2016 and just slapped a new theme on a mediocre older game). In this title, from Spanish publisher Looping Games, players will purchase a train or boat card from the market and then use the travel line at the bottom of that card to trace a path on their personal maps and make their way from London east and around to London again, stopping in other cities along the way for more money and for victory points. Each transit card also costs you days, and you do have just 80 to complete the mission. There are four individual character cards you can gain temporarily, hot air balloon cards you can use at great expense, and three sights that change each game that are worth extra points if you go there first. My question after one play is if the bonus for finishing the trip first (12 points, where our winner scored 36 total) is too powerful and makes taking a longer route through more cities and sights less optimal.Some games I saw in the First Look area that I didn’t get to (but wish I had): 1980 Sixtina, about the restoration of the Sistine Chapel; Rebirth, a Reiner Knizia game I saw briefly at Gen Con; Monkey Palace, a Lego board game where players build towers and staircases on a shared board; and The Yellow House, a two-player game inspired by the debates on art between Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. So many games, so little time.
Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.