The Best Board Games at PAX Unplugged 2019
Main image: Azul Summer Pavilion. All photos courtesy of the game's publisher.
PAX Unplugged was bigger than ever in its third year of existence, still at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia but taking up even more floor space than in previous years. I attended for the first two days before various microbes sent us to the injured list for Sunday, but here’s a look at the best of what I did see while at the con.
Azul Summer Pavilion was a big hit in the First Look section, which was larger than ever. This is Michael Kiesling’s third game in the Azul line, after the Spiel des Jahres winner Azul and last year’s Azul Stained Glass of Sintra, and shares the same basic selection mechanic as the preceding two games, where tiles are spread out, four to a ‘factory,’ and you take all tiles of one color from a factory before pushing leftovers into the middle of the table. Azul Summer Pavilion has wild colors, though, one per round, and you can save up to four tiles from one round to the next—there are six, so each color becomes wild once—and thus might grab a tile now because it’s wild in the subsequent round. Players then try to fill out the seven six-pointed stars on their boards, but all spaces are numbered 1 to 6 in each star. To place a tile, you must have that number of tiles in the matching color. You place one and discard the rest. My daughter absolutely waxed me at this game.
North Star had copies of The Taverns of Tiefenthal, the much-anticipated sequel to last year’s Kennerspiel winner The Quacks of Quedlinburg, both from prolific designer Wolfgang Warsch, who also designed The Mind, That’s So Clever, Twice as Clever and Fuji—all released in the last three years. The Taverns is his crunchiest game yet but still promises to play in under an hour. Players operate taverns in a small medieval town—I couldn’t help but think of the Friendly Arms Inn, and if you don’t get that reference, that’s probably good—and try to place dice to gather gold and brew beer, then trading those in on the same turn for upgrades to their bars to attract customers and nobles. It looks like a lot, in part because the art is ornate and fun if a little goofy, but also because there are a lot of components to your bar that you can flip over to upgrade. North Star also is preparing for the spring release of Oceans, a new, standalone game in the Evolution series, which they’ve streamlined to play with just two to four players.
Ecosystem was a sort of quiet new release from Genius Games, as they acquired its rights after Gen Con and were already selling it here at PAX. Genius’ games all have strong STEM elements to their themes and game play, but Ecosystem is probably the lightest of any Genius or Artana (acquired by Genius this year) title I’ve played. Players will build their own 4×5 tableaux of animal cards from a shared deck of animal, meadow, and river cards, each of which scores in its own way, some of which score based on what’s adjacent—including cards that can’t be adjacent to each other because one species would eat the other one. Artana will also publish a U.S. edition of the Spanish game On the Origin of Species, an economic game with a theme based around Charles Darwin’s voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, which led to his writing of the book of that name. The game should be available in Q2 and can be pre-ordered now. Evolution is real, folks.
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