Wow, what a great time I had at PAX Australia 2023! I’m just back from a whirlwind weekend at the convention, and it’s time to sit down and write about what I saw. I took the opportunity to experience some unreleased designs that people had brought to PAX to test and spruik. Of course, PAX is huge, and there were literally hundreds of games being play-tested in the ‘Collaboratory’. I managed to enjoy 5 of these, along with a couple of already released games from smaller local publishers. Anyway, let’s get into it!
The Collaboratory
Designers can book slots to show off their designs in the PAX Collaboatory, a sea of tables you can wonder and discover new ideas. Here’s what I found when I was there:
Quintuple
Quintuple is a 2 player abstract game that would fit right at home in the Gigamic ‘Q’ series of games. The designer Adam Obren, insists the Q-naming is just a coincidence. Quintuple means ‘group of 5’ – which is the objective of the game.
Players take turns adding blocks to the board, or moving placed blocks. You are trying to form a row and column of your colour blocks simultaneously to win the game. When you move your blocks, if you land on an opponent, you kick their block off the board. Beginning to play the game, I pulled a few levers and quickly the core strategy of the game became clear – add and position your blocks so they can’t be kicked off by your opponent, whilst also being in spots your opponent cannot remove.
After a very intense and deeply strategic 15 minute battle, I managed to edge in a win over my opponent. I found the game to be really satisfying to play, and apart from a few minor rules clarifications and visual design improvements, it feels like a game that is ready to publish. Find the BGG entry for Quintuple here
Fire Noodle Eating Champs! The Dice Game
This game from designer Jason Tam is a hectic real time dice rolling fest. Players are competing to see who can smash through bowls of fiery hot noodles the fastest by franticly rolling dice and matching symbols on their dishes the quickest.
The game has no rounds or turns, play begins and everyone flips over the top card on their stack of 4 meals, and starts rolling their dice! If you match dice to the icons showing on your meal, you successfully eat it and move onto the next. Each meal will have more dice faces to match than the last. And of course Beware! If you roll a die onto its ‘spicy’ side, that die is locked and must be put aside till you either finish this meal, or decide to reset all your dice, including ones already placed onto the meal card.
This game is an awesome looking little real time party game. If you like games like ‘Escape Curse of the Temple‘ and ‘Fuse‘, this is very much in a similar vein to those. Find the game on BGG here.
Way of Thinking
Way of Thinking is a fascinating word game about connecting words via associations and seeing if your peers can come to the same conclusions as you.
In a similar way that you try to associate words in Codenames, Way of Thinking sees you connect words together in a chain. Players use the word cards to make a string of 6 words in which each pair relates to each other. (For example, Doctor – Hospital – Building: Doctor doesn’t relate to Building, but Hospital connects them well). Each player comes up with their own chain and reveals only the first and last word, shuffling the rest of the cards and giving them to the other players. They then guess which words were in the original chain (each card has 4 words that could have been used), and what order they were in.
The table scores points for how many words were correctly placed. I was very surprised with how interesting I found this game. I felt I really struggled to create a good chain of words, and was totally astounded when the other players at the table managed to replicate exactly the chain I had come up with. I can definitely see groups that like Codenames, Letter Jam and Just One enjoying this game. You can find more about it on its website.
Tavern Brawl
Tavern Brawl is a card game under development about running a Tavern (and weirdly, hopefully not having anyone brawl in it). The aim of the game is to be the wealthiest proprietor after 1 round per player has passed.
Players make money by playing patrons into their Tavern, and try to incite brawls in other player’s taverns by filling them with rowdy patrons. At the end of each round, if the sum ‘rowdiness’ of your patrons is below seven, you earn their payout, otherwise you will have a brawl in your tavern and need to pay to fix things up after.
I found the game fun to play in a thematic sense (it plays on a lot of tropes of fantasy in an entertaining way) but ultimately it wasn’t my type of game. If you like beer and pretzels sorts of games like Munchkin or Red Dragon Inn, this game fits right into that genre. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anywhere with more info on the game online.
Spellwards
Spellwards is wordgame from designer Thien Minh Tran. It’s a fast playing, real time game where players fight to come up with words that satisfy the conditions of the cards in their hands, hoping to get rid of them as fast as they can. First empty hands wins.
Players start with a hand of 7 cards. Each card has a letter, and a number on it. There will also be a starting card in the centre of the table. There are no turns, players are just racing to find a word that starts with the card in the middle of the table and ends with a card in their hand, having the same number of letters as the card to be played. For example, if the card on the table is a ‘D’, and you have a ‘W4’, in your hand , you can yell out ‘DRAW’ and place the card in your hand down on the table, on top of the ‘D’. Everyone now needs to seek a word starting with ‘W’ to match a letter in their hand.
This game, similar to games like Bananagrams and Anomia, I found very fun but also very stressful. I really enjoy the mechanic of pushing your brain to try to find words what fit what you have, the feeling when you get it is very rewarding. Despite that, it’s also something that I find super draining, after one game that went for something like 3 minutes I was satisfied! Here is the BGG entry for Spellwards, it is available as a print and play game.
Published Indie Games
These games are available now, but from smaller publishers (generally one or two person operations)
Bonza
This game is actually a physical manifestation of an App that provides the same experience. I had a quick go – you are essentially trying to arrange the provided fragments of words into a crossword that satisfies the given clue.
The designer admits this game/experience is very limited in the physical world – once completed there is not much reason to revisit it. They expressed it was akin to a puzzle, but I’m not really sure that’s a great comparison, unless you are doing 20 piece puzzles. To be totally honest, I would never buy this (and I overheard several people mention this while at the booth) but the demo was a great advertisement for the App, which has much more re-playability. You can see more about this game here at the developers website.
Saltfish & Almanacs
Saltfish & Almanacs is a cozy, DM-less RPG made by Storybrewers, a two person design team who self publishes a bunch of RPG/Narrative style games on their website. I’m not particularly interested in Tabletop RPGs themselves, but Storybrewer makes games that I found attractive, in that they are a bit more on the boardgame end of the spectrum and provide a structured narrative and storytelling experience.
In Saltfish & Almanacs you take on the role of a travelling merchant, buying and selling goods through several towns during the trading season before heading home for the winter. The game has ‘actions’ and ‘resources’ in a sense, but there is no scoring or victory conditions, the whole experience is about telling the story of your merchant as you travel the land and encounter new people and places.
I picked up a copy of this as I’m keen to give it a go, if you are interested, you can also find it and other games on the Storybrewers website.
Floating Floors
Floating Floors has been on my radar for a bit as local publisher Guf brought it to kickstarter last year, but I never took a detailed look at it till I found Tarrant from Meeple University demoing it at the Guf booth this year. He gave a great overview of the game and convinced me to pick it up.
In Floating Floors, you are a ninja looking to gather up your seals before anyone else can gather theirs. Players take turns creating platforms, moving around the board, and generally leaving things in as precarious state as possible for future players to have to deal with. The core idea in the game is you need to move across platforms without them falling over, but you want other players to fail – leading to you building wobbly platforms that only you can safely traverse, and hoping your opponents will find themselves toppling off on their turns.
The game has a light set of rules and is a fun combination of strategy and dexterity. I think it’s a great game for families and recommend it if you like balancing games. If you want to know more, here is the BGG page.
Buffet Boss
Buffet Boss is a game from Singapore, published by Origame and designed by Darryl Chow. At its core, it’s a simple balancing game (like Animal upon Animal) but with a couple of tweaks that make it a little more strategic, fun, and competitive.
Players take turns drafting food pieces from a limited set in the middle of the table and stacking them on their plates. Players are trying to satisfy secret objectives, and also build the tallest tower of food. My favourite part of this game, is that if something drops off your tower, and you can pick it up in 3 seconds and blow it (3 second rule!) you get to add it back to your plate.
Buffet Boss is a perfect games for kids and adults alike to enjoy together, I’m keen to play it with my son. Check it out on BGG for more info.
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Well, another PAX in the bag, I had a great time as usual, and I really enjoyed discovering all these new and upcoming games. I certainly look forward to following along the ones I liked to see where they go, and of course, wonder what of the many other great games there I missed out on! There’s never enough time to see everything. Thanks for reading!
The Boardgame Detective 