I missed the first PAX Unplugged due to its date conflict with BGG.CON 2017 and I’d never attended one of the video-game based PAXes (I love me some video games, but never felt an urge to spend money to get an early peek at them), so really I wasn’t sure what to expect.

I went online to see if they had a schedule of events, and they did. Bonus points for having some filtering functionality, though I don’t think they went far enough. In some cases the filtering they had was kind of useless. Why am I able to filter by room (“Mothman Theatre”) but not by content (“Game design” or “Industry talk” or some such thing). Also, they had icons that didn’t seem to mean anything. What’s does this stage icon mean?

“The Workshop” was a filter option and mostly seemed to be about how to do things with miniatures or painting, but it also included a couple of sessions about running better games as a game master. But other panels about how to make your games more inclusive, or avoid stereotyping were not included in this list. I’d love to see them do a little more work to organize this more clearly.

One very nice feature was you could plan out a schedule, selecting sessions to attend, and the system would tell you what overlapped with that session, warning you when you had a conflict.

In the end, I made my own list, a very packed plan to get to almost 20 scheduled sessions.

The Sessions

The first session I had planned, Storytime with Jeremy Crawford, was a very good, and often touching, session. My gaming group has been happily enjoying playing using the FATE Core system, but Jeremy had me wanting to try 5th edition D&D.

I then hustled my way to my next planned session, only to be turned away at the doors because the session was full! I realized then that I wasn’t going to make it to all my planned sessions. Fortunately, I had backup plans and hustled to another theatre which was when I learned about how PAX handles queueing scheduling.

You just queue up and wait.

This was a surprise to me, as I was used to Gencon’s ticketing system. So, if I wanted to guarantee a session, I’d have to wait in line for it. I’d already had to plan my schedule based on session overlap, but realized this meant I’d have to decide between waiting in line for a session or view another session.

At first, this frustrated me – I’d planned to see some 20 sessions – but in truth I’d over planned and ended up being too tired to attend everything I wanted to attend.

Every session I attended was interesting. I particularly enjoyed the back and forth between CEOs Scott Gaeta of Renegade Games and Tim Fowers of Fowers Games during the CEO Panel Discusses Publishing, Trends, & Avoiding Mistakes session. They discussed whether you should or should not find a publisher, run your own company, kickstart your game, etc. In the end, both conceded that the answer was largely, “it depends.”

Other good sessions were State of the Game Industry 2018, Rise of the Co-Op Game, and Feedback Loops and You (which may get another post later).

Open Gaming Area

There was a nice large gaming area in the exhibition hall, adjacent to the dealer area, which seemed larger than needed on Friday, but was completely full on Saturday and Sunday. There were some tables put aside in this area where demos of newer games were being run, and I caught a few games there.

Dealer Area

It’s been a few years since I went to GenCon, but PAX Unplugged’s exhibit area seemed to be about half the size of the last GenCon I went too (I did not check this for accuracy — it was just the feeling I had). This is still quite large and significantly bigger than BGG.CON’s dealer area(s). Most of the booths offered demos of their games and I saw (and tried) quite a few while wandering around.

One booth I found interesting was run by local independent game makers, the appropriately named Philadelphia Game Makers Guild. I may reach out to these folks for advice on starting something in my area (central Jersey — yes, it does exist).

Observations

Like most hobbies, board gaming can be expensive. Games can easily cost $60+ and those with expansions or a lot of miniatures can end up costing more than $100 each. I was used to this and, especially in this new Kickstarter era, expected this to continue.

High-End Gaming Accessories

I was surprised by was how much the market has matured over the last few years. It seemed like there were at least eight different companies selling very high-end gaming supplies, from fancy dice, to dice-trays, modular dice-towers, magnetic dice cases, board game organizers that cost as much as the original game, to Tungsten Steel D&D dice sets at $600+, and $15,000 gaming tables that came equipped with lights and bluetooth-based sound.

Gaming, and gamers, have come of age, and clearly have disposable income to spend! Most of the companies selling gaming tables seem to have at least a year’s worth of orders already on hand, and were only taking deposits at these conventions.

Loot boxes

Another example of disposable income was the blind-box selling of board games at $50 a box. You could purchase a large white box that had some random games in it. I asked a few people if they were happy with their purchases and the best I heard was “Well, they’re definitely worth more than $50.” But every time I walked past the booth selling them, it had a line in front of it. Clearly the video game world is not the only one with a loot-box problem.

Final Thoughts

It almost seemed to me that PAX Unplugged doesn’t quite know what it wants to be — yet. I’m also not sure what I want from it.

It has game design sessions which I always find interesting, but with no way to sign up and ensure I can actually see them, I’m not sure they’re enough of a draw for me to attend the show.

It also has its own play-testing area, run by Unpub. I certainly have enough games in various states of completion to test there, but this seemed to be a small room set off to the side, and it didn’t look very busy, which may mean not everyone’s game got play tested — I’m curious to see how it compares to Metatopia which was just a month earlier, or Unpub which happens in a few months.

It is also scheduled just after the chaos that is Black Friday and all the online sales on board games that happen — I wondered if it would be a good show for dealers. Based on what I saw, it didn’t seem to have slowed down buying very much if at all. I like to support publishers (especially smaller ones) and purchase from them at these shows, but I am not going to go to shows just for this.

It doesn’t feel as laid-back and relaxed as BGG.CON, especially with the gaming area being directly next to the exhibit/dealer hall and it doesn’t seem to offer the same opportunity to play as many games since the open play area closes at 6pm.

It is also an extra opportunity to network a bit, and catch up with friends in the industry, though as the third I attended in November, it’s less useful than spreading out these contacts a little.

It seems to lack a focus, but, perhaps, that’s just a reflection of my own thoughts and feelings about why I attend these conferences.

What is it I want out of these conferences? Am I attending these as a consumer? As a game designer? As an opportunity to network? As a teacher? A little bit of everything?