Wow, what a great time I had at PAX Australia 2024! 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 SO many games being play-tested in the ‘Collaboratory’. I managed to enjoy 7 of these, and had a look at some other games that are less indie that I want to talk about too. 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:
Towns Down Under
The first game I sat down to play was Towns Down Under. This game was a bit of a cheeky take on an Australian town building game from designer Daniel Marin. The game is all about building a town out of hexagons and features a very thick coating of Australiana which I loved. I also found the artwork genuinely fantastic, and great at drawing out the nostalgia for weird derro Australian stuff we share as a culture.
Towns Down Under is a drafting game that plays out pretty similarly to 7 Wonders – 3 rounds, draft one card a turn and play it to your tableau. The bit where it gets very interesting is the cards are hexagonal tiles that you will be building into a town as the game goes on. Tiles have varied scoring conditions often based on their neighbours and tiles can also be stacked. Players are competing to achieve public goals for specific tile patterns too, so there are a number of things to think about while playing.
I really enjoyed Towns Down Under. It has very simple rules, satisfying yet quick turns, fun scoring, and some good points of competition among players. I really hope that Daniel pursues publishing this because I want to play it some more! If you want to follow along too, Daniel has an Instagram account for the game.
Coffee Up
Have you ever wanted to know what it’s like to work in a coffee shop? (Or relive the horror of your past/current experience working in one?) Jason Tam’s next game to come to Kickstarter – Coffee Up might be the game for you!
Coffee Up is a co-operative memory game where players make sure to please the customers of their new coffee shop, hoping to maintain a 5 star google reviews rating across the course of their first week of business. Each day, a number of customers will rock up. Players spend some time discussing their names and orders before shuffling the cards and dealing them out to to hold facing the rest of the players with the customer’s information hidden, only their portrait visible. Now the players need to remember either a name or coffee order for each patron. A mistake means a bad review and a drop in the rating of the business!
Each day more and more customers will turn up but some of them will be ‘regulars’ from previous days – easier to remember as you’ve seen them before. If the players can survive to the end of the week (remembering tens of customer orders!) they win the game.
I found the experience of playing Coffee Up pretty fun. I don’t love games with memory elements but Coffee Up makes it exciting to come up with ways to remember each customer as a group. There is some element of playing to the strengths of each player involved that I like. The game creates great shared experiences when players make right or wrong guesses and the iterative of the game nature gives a great feeling as you work together and see the same customers coming back.
Jason is running a Kickstarter for the game next month, if you are interested be sure to follow to be notified when it launches!
Peep Spotting
Peep Spotting is a micro game also from Jason Tam. Jason ran a Kickstarter for this game earlier in the year. He describes the game as ‘competitive Where’s Wally’ – and that’s exactly what it is!
The game includes 3 crowd cards and a number of randomly allocated ‘peeps’ – with no two copies of the game being the same! To play, you simply set out the crowd cards, two face up and one face down, flip over a peep and see who can find them first! The clever twist on the game is that the peep might be on the face down card – but you need to be sure before you declare you think it’s there because if you are wrong you lose the round!
I think Peep Spotting is pretty clever and something fun to keep in a pocket and play for a few moments. It’s listed on Jason’s store but is currently out of stock – maybe it will be back soon!
Letter Spaghetti
Letter Spaghetti is an interesting twist on word games from designer Joel Kennedy. I played a quick 2 player game with Joel to get the feel of the game, and despite me being really bad at knowing words, we actually ended up with very close scores!
In Letter Spaghetti, players draft letter cards from some piles in the middle of the table. You keep the cards face up in front of you, and when it gets to your turn, you can either take another letter, or declare that you have a word in front of you and you are going to spell it out. The interesting twist happens here: when you declare, your letters don’t (and probably should not be) in the right order to make the word, and you are also allowed to add up to 3 virtual letter cards to the ones you have to make your word.
Other players are allowed to challenge your claim you can make a word. If they do challenge and you were bluffing (had no word to make), you don’t score the cards you have, and you lose points you previously had. If they challenge and you DID have a word, you score and steal a point card from them too. Finally, if no one challenges, regardless of whether you had a word or not, you score your cards.
I’m not the biggest fan of word games but I quite enjoyed Joel’s clever game here. I like the element of bluffing. I did mention to Joel – I’m not really vibing with the theme, but of course it’s a pretty themeless game anyway. I can see this game being a hit as a party game, it’s so simple to learn which lets anyone play it – convert your grandma from Scrabble to Letter Spaghetti! Joel has some details about the game on his website.
Bouquet
Bouquet drew me over to it’s table with some beautiful watercolour artwork. I sat down to play and after a short explanation of the rules from designer Martin, we dug in.
Bouquet is a deduction game which reminded me a lot of games like Letter Jam, and Paint the Roses. Interestingly the game is competitive, with players racing to complete 3 bouquets first. Similar to Hanabi, player’s cards are set in front of them and they can only see one side (which contains one type of flower). The other side is a bouquet to complete, which consists of 3 flowers.
On a turn you have a number of options for actions, you can give other players clues about their cards, ask for clues on yours, trade some of your cards for others or try to make a bouquet. Over the course of the game you will build up a stock of information about the cards you hold using tokens to enumerate what clues you have been given, e,g, this card has red and blue flowers but not yellow. When you are confident you have narrowed down the hidden side of a bouquet card you can spend flowers cards to try to make that bouquet. I found this mechanic particularly interesting because when you spend flower cards you are also sacrificing the information you have learnt about that card and you will need to start again with new cards you don’t know much about.
I thought the deduction system in Bouquet was really cool. I much prefer games that formalise the process of deduction (rather than relying on memory like Hanabi) and so I really like this. Martin has also come up with a clever card stand that helps players efficiently give clues as it numbers each card. Overall I was pretty impressed with Bouquet and hope to see it published soon! Martin has a number of other published games you can see at his website Bigger Worlds Games.
Corporate Bigwigs
When I saw Corporate Bigwigs sitting set up on the table in the Collaboratory, I looked at the multiple tables, spreadsheets and tracks and thought “This game is for me”! I was welcomed by designer Cheryl to sit down and play a few rounds of the game, which is a satirical poke at the absurdity of the corporate world. Cheryl told us that some of the ideas in the game date back to her first game designs from the 80s – so this game has had a lot of thought put into it!
Corporate Bigwigs is an economic game about buying and selling shares and companies, trading integrity for profits and executing strategically timed board meetings. Players take turns moving around the “Daily Grind” board to do things like buying and selling stocks, hiring staff, acquiring companies and using their corporate powers. Doing certain things, like acquiring companies gives you points, and after a year of wheeling and dealing the most accomplished player is crowned the Biggest Wig.
I really liked Corporate Bigwigs! The game has lots of very interesting mechanisms that mesh together to create an interesting economic simulation with a lot of fun things to do. I was impressed how simple the rules were – there’s only a few things to explain and then you can get started playing and every turn feels like you are doing something meaningful.
Deservedly, Cheryl has recently won a design competition and is about to get the chance to pitch her game to publishers. I’m very excited for her and really hope that next year at PAX I could be looking at a more polished prototype or even a published game I can take home! Cheryl has a few details about her game design adventures at her website Howzat Games.
The Twilight Zone Game
The Twilight Zone Game easily wins most outstanding table presence in the PAX Collaboratory in my book! Walking past the table I stopped and had a chat with Adam, who co-designed the game with his son Atticus. My first question was, of course ‘is this officially licensed?’. Adam was excited to report that after a hopeful email was sent off to Paramount Pictures without much expectation of any reply, it actually does have provisional licensing for playtesting, and pending approval, publication! He then asked me if I was a Twilight Zone fan, and I had to admit I have never seen an episode, but I am familiar with “The Scary Door”, a parody from TV show Futurama.
I didn’t get a chance to play the game myself but Adam explained the game centres around players being confronted by the moral decisions found in the show and progressing around the board based on the decisions they make. It looks like a lot of thought has been put into making a fun, diverse and approachable experience, and I was so impressed with the production of the prototype they had on display. I really think this game could end up as a massive success and I am keen to see where Adam and Atticus take it. You can have a look at their Instagram for some more information!
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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 