Attending PAX East and want to know who is exhibiting at what tables? We’ve been given the list of exhibitors in the tabletop hall, which currently do not show up in the Guidebook app, the only version of the program and show’s floorplan available.

The tabletop booths will be along the right (north) edge of the space, near the skybridge. From the main Queue Room entrance on up to the Lenovo Legion PC Room, the following companies will have a presence in the tabletop hall:

• Gamewright, Q-Workshop, Asmodee NA
• Compleat Strategist (local game store), Steve Jackson Games
• Battleground Games & Hobbies (local game store), Level Up Dice, Fun to 11, Tectonic Craft Studios
• CMON, Wyrmwood Gaming
• Burning Wheel, Japanime/Global Games Distribution, Greenbriar Games
• Modern Myths NY (“local” game store), Armor Class 10 Shirts
• Pandemonium Games (local game store), Crit Success, Dragoon/Lay Waste Games
• Atlas Games, United States Professional Mahjong League
• Drinking Quest, Aviary Games, SFR
• AdMagic
• Greater Than Games
• Foam Brain Games (“local” game store)

Although the PAX 2017 program book that appears in the Guidebook app doesn’t break down the tabletop hall, PAX’s Tabletop Manager has said that this year a detailed map of the tabletop area will appear in the program.

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For the past six years, Gen Con Indy has continued to grow. This year’s numbers are in, showing a 9% increase in the number of convention attendees from Gen Con Indy 2014 with 61,423 attendees (unique) and a turnstile attendance of 197,695. Leonard Hoops — the head of Visit Indy, the city of Indianapolis’ tourism board — said that the gaming convention “drives more than $67 million in annual economic activity” to the city, with past conventions bringing in “more than $50 million” in 2014 and $47 million in 2013.

Not only is Gen Con Indy the world’s largest tabletop gaming convention, the growth of Gen Con has made the 2015 convention one of the largest-attended conventions in Indianapolis. However, the Future Farmers of America‘s return to the city in 2016 may topple that: The FFA’s 2014 convention in Louisville, KY, had 64,409 attendees, a 2.2% increase over the previous year. We’ll be keeping an eye on FFA 2015 when it’s held this coming October to compare numbers. (Note: although the NRA 2014 Annual Meeting reportedly brought in 75,269 attendees, repeated inquires to that organization about if those were based on unique or turnstile attendance have gone unanswered.)

Assuming Gen Con Indy’s growth continues, it is on track to overtake the PAX (Penny-Arcade Expo) as the largest gaming convention in 2017. (PAX’s last public attendance records were in 2011 with 69,500 at PAX East.) Housing may start to be a problem for Gen Con in future years as the city only has 20,335 sleeping (hotel) rooms available.

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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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