Lay Waste Games was showing off Dragoon, a game that’s currently in the Kickstarter process. The game is already funded, but there’s still stretch goals to unlock.

The game is beautifully minimalistic, and it’s an art direction that the team originally wasn’t going to go with. It’s a good thing they did, because it really is something to see. The pieces are pretty amazing, too. While the dragons look to be wooden or resin, they’re actually pewter. Solid, heavy, and totally amazing feeling.

The goal of Dragoon is to amass 50 gold in your cave before the other dragons do. You get gold by destroying villages, forcing villagers to pay tribute, or by stealing it from other dragons. The whole game is supposed to last 30-60 minutes, and should be easy to learn. I was really impressed with what I saw, and am eager to try my hand at the game.

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I always love it when I stumble across a booth when just walked randomly around a convention. Tucked away along one of the walls at PAX East was the Momentum Volsk booth. Here I got a change to see and play Castle Assault, a game that’s currently up on Kickstarter. The game plays very similar to a MOBA, with 3 lanes that players fight through to attack the other player’s castle. Chip the castle’s health down to zero to win. It’s not as simple as it sounds. You’re constantly playing a game of tug of war in each lane, trying to get the upper hand to make it across the board.

Castle Assault has several different factions that all play differently. There’s also hero cards that let you, the player, act as a character in the game. The cool part about heroes is that they can be permanently upgraded between games. Another cool thing about them is that if you summon them in game and they die, you instantly lose. There’s also a Momentum meter on the board that bounces back and forth at the start of each player’s turn. When it’s in the upper ranges for a player it provides certain bonuses, and certain cards are more powerful if your momentum is maxed out.

I played Castle Assault with TJ, the designer of the game, and lost horribly. That’s OK though, because I had a great time. TJ sent me home with a few factions decks, a hero, and a board so I could play the game a bit more with my kids. My 9-year-old son is a big fan, with a healthy love of the Orcs.

The game is definitely worth a look, and if you’re into fantasy games, tactical games, etc… then I’d pledge to see it get out there.

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I made sure to see what SFR was up to this year, as I was excited to find out last year that Dragon Dice was still in production. This year they had 2 new products to show. The first was a new Daemon type for Daemon Dice, Fester. The dice are yellow with red ink, and allow you to mix things up a bit more in the game. I actually have some bagged, early-release Fester dice from last year, but now they’re boxed and ready to hit shelves. There’s 13 dice per Fester Booster, and they retail for $12.95.

On the Dragon Dice side, there’s now a new Amazons Kicker pack. This set contains the never-before-see Nightmare die, and each Kicker pack contains: 7 6-sided dice: 4 16mm commons, 2 18mm uncommons, and 1 20mm rare. They also include 1 random 22mm 10-sided monster die and a rules sheet. Retails is $9.95.

While I was at the booth I was also able to snag a Firewalker/Treefolk starter to get back into the game and start posting some reviews.

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Everywhere I went in the tabletop floor booths had beautiful, wooden accessories to accent the games being shown. Everyone said the same thing, “Wyrmwood Gaming provided these excellent products.” Be it dice trays, towers, or wooden dice. Wyrmwood had the right idea by making sure at least one of their products were in as many tabletop booths as possible. I was blown away by the quality of what I saw, but it was nothing compared to what I saw at their own booth.

The first thing that hit me was this awesome Crokinole board. Not a normal product they sell, but a custom piece. If you’ve got something in mind you want, you can always email Wyrmwood to get a quote for them to make it for you. Their actual product line consists of dice trays, vaults, towers, and deck holders. They even have some non-wooden materials like card sleeves and polyhedral dice.

Their products are bit pricey, but are built to last. There’s no denying the quality of the workmanship, the beauty of the products, and the absolute wow factor each pieces possess.

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Magic the Gathering has some really exciting upcoming releases. During PAX I got a chance to see stuff from the upcoming Dragons of Tarkir and Origins sets, as well as get a hands on look at Magic Duels: Origins. Let’s start with the latter, shall we?

Magis Duels: Origins – July 2015

Magic Duels is replacing Duels of the Planeswalkers as the digital format for Magic play. The game will be free to play with additional sets, challenges, etc… unlockable via in-game coins. Coins can be purchased, or can be earned through play. I was assured that all in-game content can be unlocked without spending a single real-world dollar. Magic Duels is also moving away from the yearly release schedule that Duels of the Planeswalkers used. It will be a game client that is constantly updated with sets available for purchase. This will eliminate the issue of buying expansions for a previous version of the game that don’t carry over to the next year’s version.

The first set that will come with Duels will be the Origins set, with Blood, a Tarkir-themed set, being released shortly after. This is why we haven’t seen any Tarkir cards in Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015. The Origins set will have campaigns for each of the five main Planeswalkers, chronicles their journeys from a mage into the Planeswalkers we know and love today. I got a chance to play a bit of the first campaign, and the gameplay is smooth as expected. Also a welcome addition, the timer has been sped up a bit keeping the game moving at a much faster pace than before.

Did I mention they’re bringing Two Headed Giant mode back? Oh yeah, they are.

Dragons of Tarkir – March 2015

I’m more excited about Dragons of Tarkir than I’ve been about a Magic set in a long time. The set, as expected, is chock full of dragons. The story has Sarkhan ressurecting dragons in past, changing the history of Tarkir. The Khans never rose to power, and instead the clans are now led by might dragons. The legendary dragons are amazing, each sharing the characteristics of the clans we’re familiar with from the previous sets. Sarkhan has also become much more awesome.

I’m sorry for the blurry pic, but I wasn’t that close to the screen here. The biggest thing here is his -8 power, which is blocked by the lovely people’s heads here. It allows you to take any number of dragons from your deck and place them directly on the battlefield. For free. Take a second to digest that. I need this card.

Origins – July 2015

Up until now we’ve had sets that frame out a world and the events that take place in that world. Origins changes that a bit, focusing on the more personal lives of the Planeswalkers. To do this, we’re going to see some new dual-sided cards in the game. The interesting part about these is that the first side is a normal character that you would summon into the battlefield. Once certain conditions are met, the card flips to reveal a Planeswalker. For example: Liliana Vess was a healer before her spark. You can summon her, and she has the ability to bring back a dead creature as a zombie. When you do this she’s exiled from play. You can bring her back as Liliana Vess as we know her, a Planeswalker Necromancer. It’s really cool how it works.

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I apologize for getting this last installment of my PAX East coverage up a bit late. Anyway, here it is.

Greenbriar Games

Greenbriar was showing off some new Zpocalypse items, but their new unveiling was for Heavy Steam. The game takes place in an alternate, steampunk Victorian era and has you piloting giant steam titans. During the game you’ll have to decided were best to utilize your power to maneuver, attack, or use other systems. It’s a resource management game mixed in with a miniatures war game. The setup they had was using 3D printed pieces, and it’s really shaping up nicely. The Kickstarter project for the game has 12 days to go, and needs a little under $20k more to get funded.

Megacon Games

Megacon was showing both their MERCS line of miniatures, and Myth, a giant, miniatures-heavy fantasy game.

MERCS Recon is a standalone board game in the MERCS universe. The miniatures are fully compatible with MERCS, but you get an entire game in the box. The game is cooperative, and the board modular. The game uses very simple, yet aggressive, logic for the enemy forces to move. This forces the players to fight as a tight-knit unit to survive. The space for your characters to move it tight, and danger lies around every corner.

Myth is an amazing beautiful, cooperative game. Once again the players are playing against the AI of the game that uses a Boss Deck. Each hero deck is unique, and plays differently than the rest. Players use their decks to advance the story, control their avatars, and conquer The Darkness.

Tectonic Craft Studios

This booth grabbed by attention from some distance away. Dan from Tectonic studios produces amazing looking wooden miniatures terrain and game accessories that are all flat-packed and easy to assemble and paint. The best part? The price. With a minimal investment you can have some of the most amazing looking miniatures terrain around. He also makes transportation trays for moving your miniatures around, bases to glue your miniatures to, and objective markers.

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Game Salute

Game Salute is always a great place to visit at a convention. The wide variety of games they publish/manage means there’s something for everyone. Their latest game is Ruse, a murder mystery game set in a steampunk Victorian era. The cool part is that you actually get a standalone card game, standalone dice game, and a 100 page novella in the box. I didn’t get a chance to see it in action, but I hope to very soon.

CritSuccess

Dice Rings. Lots of Dice Rings. CritSuccess had a booth with Dice Rings in all sorts of varieties, from classic polyhedral dice counterparts to life counters and rings with multiple die faces. They spin super smoothly, and just look way damn cool. I got sized for a ring at the show, and am eagerly awaiting its arrival at my doorstep.

Drinking Quest

Touted as the original drinking RPG, Drinking Quest is supposed to play like a stripped down version of D&D, but with lots of real-life drinking. There’s currently 3 different version of Drinking Quest: Drinking Quest 1, Drinking Quest 2, and Drinking Quest 3. Each is stand-alone, and contains 4 quests. There were beers at the booth, but I don’t think they were handing any out! This one’s on the way to me, also, so look for a review in the near future.

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High Heavens

Ryan Lesser, known in the video-game world for Guitar Hero, Rock Band. Beatles:Rock Band, and Dance Central, was demoing High Heavens at a small booth tucked away in the corner of the tabletop space. His wife, and game’s artist, Jennifer, started the game’s demo with me until Ryan was able to run the rest of it to completion. The game is a tactical one where you take control of a set of mythological gods and battle it out, trying to destroy the other gods’ home base. In this demo I played the Norse gods, while Ryan played the Greek Gods. Each turn players take 3 actions. This can be summoning a god, moving a god, attacking another god/base, or playing cards that effect the board of miniatures on the board. The coolest mechanic of this game are the stackable rings that each god sits upon. These rings signify health, armor, extra attack power, poison, stun, etc… The more health an armor you have, the higher your character sits on the board. Rings like armor can be dropped when a god is downed, and then picked up by another god who passes next to them.

High Heavens is super simple to learn, and offers a great bit of strategy when it comes to managing your gods, powers, and protecting your base. I’m hoping to get a more in-depth review of this one once it’s out. While I saw a bit of this game at Connecticon, PAX East is where it was officially previewed.

SFR, Inc

SFR surprised me a bit, because they’ve been putting out a product I thought was long-since dead. Dragon Dice. I haven’t played Dragon Dice since I was in middle school, and just looking at all the stuff that’s come out since then got me drooling a bit. So many cool dice! TSR originally had published the game 1995, only to be bought out by Wizards of the Coast. Wizards put the game on the back burner after a while, and SFR bought the rights in 2000 and has continued to keep the game alive ever since. Several new army packs were available to check out at the show, as well as an entire new dice game. Demon Dice.

While each die represents units in Dragon Dice, each set of dice in Demon Dice represents one demon. Each die is a part of the body. Players take turns rolling against their opponent’s previous roll to try and damage the other player, and eventually knock out all their dice from play. It seemed a little complicated at first, but once you get the hang of it you realize it’s really not. I’ve got a starter set on hand, along with an extra set of dice, to review and report back here in a bit.

Attack the Darkness

The name of the game brings back memories of the Dead Alewives “Dungeons and Dragons” bit from a long time ago. An impressively large and hefty box filled to the brim with cards and tokens is what initially caught my eye. Attack the Darkness is a dungeon crawl game with RPG elements and deck building/drafting mechanics. The cards make up the random dungeons, characters, and pretty much everything in between. It plays up to 1-8 players, and can be played with or without a game master. While I didn’t get a chance to play it, it should be on the way to my doorstep very soon. I really liked what I saw, and can’t wait to dig in.

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StoneBlade Entertainment

The creators of Ascension Chronicle Of The Godslayer have just put a new electronic CCG for the PC and iOS devices called SolForge. The game is a line-based battle CCG with Richard Garfield on the design team. It’s free-to-play, but you can purchase more cards and tournament vouchers as in-app purchases. I was able to fool around with it for a bit, and even try a draft tournament out. It’s very solid, with great art and gameplay. As you use cards they’re discarded, leveled up, and eventually brought back into your hand later. Combining this deck-building mechanic with traditional CCG play is a great combination.

Mantic Games

One of my favorite games at the show that I saw was DreadBall from Mantic Games. DreadBall is a sci-fi sports games where players are trying to get a 200mph, weapons-grade ball into one of three goals. There’s a bunch of teams available to purchase and play, and an in-depth set of rules that can scale up or down depending on how complex you want the game to be.

There’s a couple ways to get into the game. There’s the base set, or you can buy one of the rulebooks and a few teams to get started.

I’m by no means a sports fan, but I can’t deny how much fun I had demoing this one.

Mayfair Games

Mayfair had a few things to show, but most has been seen before. What new game I did get to see and demo was Mad City. It’s a light game where you’re drawing 9 random tiles from a bag and trying to group the colors of the city pieces together to score the largest chains before the minute sand-timer runs out. There’s also bonuses for large parks and the longest road. It almost feels like speed Carcassonne where you’re only scoring the farmers. A single round plays and scores in 2-3 minutes, which makes this a great filler game.

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This year is the first year I’ve had the opportunity to attend PAX East in Boston, MA. Mostly known as a convention for video gamers, there’s a large, and growing, tabletop  component to the show. Though I only attended the show on Friday, I was able to see a LOT of great stuff for the tabletop, and even demo a few new games. Since there was a lot to see, I’ll be breaking this up in to several posts over the next few days so as not to overload everyone.

Wizards of the Coast

My first stop was the Wizards of the Coast booth were they were showcasing the 2015 version of Duels of the Planeswalkers. While none of the new cards have been added to the alpha build yet, I was able to check out the new UI and tweaks to the game overall. While 2014 was a vast improvement over 2013, 2015 is just a more polished, smooth update to 2014. The new deck builder is supposedly more robust, but wasn’t available yet. Overall I was impressed with what I saw, and can’t wait to get my hands on a finished version with all the new features and cards.

Wizards also had a demo station set up on the tabletop floor for Kaijudo, where they were explaining the new draft format, and had samples of their new competitive decks. These decks are constructed to be a bit more competitive than current pre-constructed decks, and make for much more exciting play. I was able to get one to bring home, and will soon be testing it out with the kids. One of the most exciting aspects of the draft format, coming out this May, is that the number of cards in booster packs is going up from 9 to 14. The price will stay the same. Now you’ll be able to buy 3 boosters per person to host a draft game.

Privateer Press

Privateer Press’s booth had several things going on, but the main two attractions were Zombies Keep Out and Warmachine Tactics.

Zombies Keep Out is a cooperative board game for 1-6 players where everyone is trying to keep zombies from breaking down the barricades to a goblins’ workshop. Players work together to try and build crazy contraptions to stop the zombie horde before they break down the barricades and invade the workshop. One of the cooler mechanics of the game is that players who suffer zombie bites have to slowly start acting like zombies. 1 bite means a player has to start slurring their speech while playing. They also can’t trade cards. More bites start making the player have to moan and point, instead of speaking.

Privateer was also showing off Warmachine Tactics, a PC game of the popular miniatures franchise. The game looks pretty amazing, and feels solid. The really cool part of the game will come to a future update of the build. Players will actually be able to paint their units. Not just color them, but paint them. Since the data will be stored procedurally, it takes very little power to send your unit customizations to another player over the internet, so any player you play against will see your custom units on the field. The game is currently still in development, but will see a release around the end of the summer.

Geek Chic

One of the most amazing things I saw at PAX was the Geek Chic book. We’ve covered their tables in the past, but I’ve never gotten a chance to see one in person. Flat out, these are some of the most amazing, beautiful pieces of furniture I’ve ever seen. They’ve got tables in every size and shape to meet the needs of gamers in all stages of life. From coffee tables and GM desks to kitchen tables and the famous Sultan, these tables just ooze class.

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