This post will be short and to the point because I’m late on writing it again and I again don’t have anything particular to write about. So I’m going to talk a little bit about PAX and how it’s basically morphed into a board game convention for me.
As I mentioned in my last post, PAX East was last weekend, and it was a fantastic four days in Boston, one of the better PAXes in recent memory for me. While it was my first time going to PAX East, in total it was my 17th PAX (this seems pretty impressive but it’s about par for the friend group we usually go with these days). And things have changed a lot in the time since I started going.
For example, when I first started going to PAX in 2007, there was only one show. Now there are five shows every year. The first couple PAXes in Seattle were small enough to be entirely contained in the convention center. Now it is spread out among the convention center, the Paramount, Benaroya, and four hotels. It used to be easy to get passes up to the day of the convention, now passes sell out in less than an hour (though the trend is starting to turn the other way as more people lose interest in going). And on personal level, how I interact with the show has changed a lot too.
For the first few years, when the original PAX was still pretty small, I would go with my local friends and we would basically do whatever we felt like at the time. Back then, that would usually mean going to the expo hall and checking out random games, jumping into PC freeplay to get in a few rounds of Counter-Strike, signing up for console tournaments (getting to the finals of the Guitar Hero 2 co-op tournament is still one of my best memories), rocking out at the concerts, and getting into giant games of Werewolf. I would also branch off from my friends to do panels, mostly to see live recordings of podcasts I liked.
After a few years, around 2012/2013 when getting badges to go started to get difficult, the local friend group started losing interest and we would split our time between going to the actual convention and just playing games at a friend’s house. It was also around this time that we started shifting from video games to more board games and party games as the group got bigger. While the times we had were still fun, it started to become more of a hassle trying to keep everyone together between multiple locations.
Knowing that the local friend group was slowly drifting away from the convention, I started to put more time into hanging out with another group of friends who I met through an online forum via a podcast I found back in college. It honestly felt weird at first because it seemed like I was kind of forcing my presence into their group, but they were cool with it and it became normal after a while. And now, several years later, we are good friends, and several of them live near us in NYC so we see each other even more often than before.
There were two big changes to how I do PAX because of this switch in friend groups. One, the new group goes to PAX because they want to go to PAX, so I was glad to be in the convention for the whole time again. Two, they are serious board game players, so I have gotten much more into playing board games as well. I like this change because the board gaming at PAX is generally more laid back than doing the video game content that is a lot more popular. I also know that when I go to PAX now, I’m going to get to play a bunch of new games, which helps me decide which ones are good to purchase for myself. I used to do that with video games as well, but it’s just too difficult these days to make that worthwhile.
Once we got more established with this new group, and I started making more money, we also started going to more PAXes than just the Seattle one. At this point we’ve been to all of them aside from PAX Australia at least once. And now that we live on the east coast, it’ll be easier to go to all four of the US ones each year. On top of that, in the last couple years my wife and I have both started enforcing (which is just a fancy way of saying we help run the convention as temp workers), which has been a lot more fun and rewarding than I thought it would be. Even when the job itself isn’t that fun, helping other attendees maximize their fun feels great. Enforcing also makes attending the more popular shows a lot easier since we don’t have to buy badges and we get first dibs on hotels.
The full arc, essentially, has been going from playing random video games with my local friends to a full blown board game convention, multiple times a year, with friends from around the country, and I give back to the convention by volunteering my time to make it more enjoyable for others.
I’ve also learned a lot about what kinds of board games I like thanks to playing them so much. While I like a bunch of different kinds, my favorites tend to fall into two broad categories. The first is card games where you’re building up some kind of engine that accelerates as you go. Deck-builders like Dominion definitely fall into this, but I feel like other card games like 7 Wonders, Splendor, and, most recently, Everdell also fit here, since you are still gaining cards in order to make it easier to get more cards. The second category is games where you have multiple options for getting victory points, to the point where figuring out the optimal play is difficult. That’s really just another way of saying: games where there are no obvious directional heuristics. These tend to be the big, meaty games with lots of bits and it takes up a bunch of table space. The best ones are the ones where your actual turn is pretty simple, you just need to figure out how to best use it. The two games at PAX East that best fit this category were Crown of Emara and Forum Trajanum.
I don’t have a lot more to say about this, so I’ll cut it off there. Maybe at some point I’ll do more of a deep dive review on a board game I really like (I have one in mind but I need to play it more to give a real opinion).