The Best Board Games at PAX Unplugged 2024

Playpunk is a new publisher co-founded by 7 Wonders designer Antoine Bauza, and their first game, the family game Captain Flip, was a big hit this summer. Their next title, due out in 2025, is Zenith, playable by two or four players, with a tug of war element across five lines, along with some hand management aspects, as the cards you play determine which tokens you move and how much. You can also discard a card and move up one of the technology tracks to try to build up for bigger bonuses later in the game. It’s due out in Q1.

Flatout Games had demos up for their next two games heading to Kickstarter: Point Galaxy, the third game in the series that includes Point Salad and Point City; and Propolis, a small-box worker placement and engine-building game with gorgeous components, where players play as bees looking to build up their colonies. It’ll come to Kickstarter in February. Their Kickstarter for Knitting Circle, the lighter tile-laying offshoot of Calico, ends this week. They also had Nocturne, their big release from 2024 with a clever tile-selection mechanism and that is at least on the short list for my top 10 games of the year.

The best game I played at the con, easily, was Flatiron, the newest title from the designers of The Red Cathedral and The White Castle, the latter of which was my best game of 2023. This is a two-player game with a solo mode, but otherwise has a lot in common with their other games: Turns are tight, the game rewards a lot of planning, and you need to be efficient to win. The players are both architects working to construct the Flatiron Building in New York City, which, when completed, will have six floors, each supported by three pillars. The players will buy and place pillars of four colors, with no color repeated on any single floor, and place roofs, all for victory points and in-game rewards. It’s also an engine-builder, as you can buy cards to make your purchase/placement actions much more powerful, so that on one turn you might be able to take some income, buy or sell a pillar, place a roof, and even snag some extra victory points. There are six objective cards you can purchase to score at game end, and there are bonuses and penalties for your ‘reputation’ on each of the four streets around the building, which are also represented in your engine. It looks great, especially once the building is complete, and it’s one of those games where you will be dying for your opponent to take their turn so you can do the next thing you want to do—if they haven’t blocked you or done it first. Flatiron is only out in Europe right now, but it was available for purchase at PAXU, and you bet your sweet bippy I bought a copy.

GHQ is the first and only game designed by Kurt Vonnegut, who tried to sell this game in the 1950s before his literary career took off; I’m glad he stuck to writing. This is a chess-like wargame, played on an 8×8 board, with each player starting with five pieces—three basic infantry, one basic artillery, and their headquarters—and adding more pieces as the game goes along. There are pretty simple rules for when a piece is captured and how pieces move, with each player getting one paratrooper who can fly into enemy territory but can only retreat one space at a time. The goal is to capture your opponent’s HQ, which takes some time because of the back-and-forth nature. It plays out as a war of attrition, which is pretty realistic but did make the game a bit of a slog.

Quiet House

Quiet House is a cooperative game without communication where each player can only see half of the conditions necessary for victory. The game board sits in the box, with five statues placed on it and two cards slotted in between the board and the bottom box. The cards show which two statues must be the furthest left on the board from that vantage point, with no two statues allowed to be in the same row or column. Four of the statue types have unique movement powers, while the fifth, the mirror, changes its movement type each turn to match one of the other four. On your turn, you can move one statue, or hold up your paddle to indicate that you think the group has solved the puzzle. There’s a set number of turns counted via a deck of cards that shows what one statue you can’t move on your turn. It’s solid, although I don’t think it offers anything new.

I saw Tower Up at Gen Con and played it through once, but got a second playthrough here with a different player count (three). Players place tower pieces onto a shared map and place their roof tiles on them to move up their various trackers, but the pieces are designed so that you can continue to build on someone else’s roof. On your turn, you place one tower piece from your personal supply on an empty space, and then place another piece from your supply on every adjacent tower, matching each tower’s color and ensuring that no two adjacent towers are the same color. Then you place your roof on any tower you built/added to on your turn and move up your matching tracker one spot per level of that tower. You’ll also skip some turns to take a card that adds tower pieces to your supply and maybe moves up a tracker as well. Once someone has placed their 10th roof tile, players finish the round and the game ends; you score based on the positions of your four trackers, based on the number of your roofs that are visible from the sky at the end of your last turn, and from the three objective cards for that game. This is definitely one of my favorite new games of the year, as it’s so simple to learn with elegant rules but involves a good bit of take-that while requiring you to balance a number of variables in your head.

Fishing is the newest game from designer Friedeman Friese, whose games all start with the letter F (including his biggest hit, the game Funkenschlag, sadly translated as Power Grid). It’s one of the most clever trick-taking games I’ve ever seen because it keeps rebalancing itself every round. Players all start with the same hands for round one, but when you win a trick, you keep those cards, scoring one point for each, and put them into your deck for the next round. If you don’t have enough cards in your deck to fill your hand, you draw new cards that are more powerful than any cards that were previously in play, so players who fall behind get to power up for the next round. Three of us played a full game of eight rounds and the leader changed after almost every round, with a final score of 92-90-88.

Australis

Australis is a righteous game of life in the EAC, with an interesting dice-drafting mechanic where you take a dice for its action and strength, but then re-roll all of your dice at the end of each round for a ‘dice battle’ to claim one of that round’s two bonus tiles. Players will select four dice per round, using them to move their turtles along the East Australian Current, to place their coral tiles in the six different regions (for area control), to gather fish, and to claim cards that activate each time you select a die of the matching color and action. Only the turtle and coral dice factor into the dice battle, along with the one powerful red die that gives you first player for the next round, so you can’t just load up on fish or cards. It’s fast-moving and well-balanced, and I like how it sequesters most of the randomness in one aspect of the game. It’s due out early in 2025.

Ice Hike: Beware of the Bears was my “they had us in the first half, not gonna lie” experience of the convention, as halfway through the game I thought it was kind of dumb, only to see the tension turned up to 11 in the second part. Players are trying to move their hiker meeples diagonally across a blank board that they’ll fill up by taking and placing a hex tile on each turn. You place the tiles not to help yourself, but to get in the way of other hikers, like placing a lake (impassable) or mountain (only passable by going up a hill tile and then a mountain tile, and then you have to get down) in front of them. Also, you draw a cube from the bag for every mountain tile, and while some are treasures you place on the board, you may also place a polar bear, and then anyone can move the bear instead of their own hiker and send it after another player. The player who raced across the board fastest ended up in second place, because the rest of us threw up a blockade of lakes and mountains to make her go the longest way around, while the player who was in last at the midpoint ended up winning.

There’s another Around the World in 80 Days game, at least the third I know of, but this one is probably the most true to the actual book (as opposed to one that came out around 2016 and just slapped a new theme on a mediocre older game). In this title, from Spanish publisher Looping Games, players will purchase a train or boat card from the market and then use the travel line at the bottom of that card to trace a path on their personal maps and make their way from London east and around to London again, stopping in other cities along the way for more money and for victory points. Each transit card also costs you days, and you do have just 80 to complete the mission. There are four individual character cards you can gain temporarily, hot air balloon cards you can use at great expense, and three sights that change each game that are worth extra points if you go there first. My question after one play is if the bonus for finishing the trip first (12 points, where our winner scored 36 total) is too powerful and makes taking a longer route through more cities and sights less optimal.Some games I saw in the First Look area that I didn’t get to (but wish I had): 1980 Sixtina, about the restoration of the Sistine Chapel; Rebirth, a Reiner Knizia game I saw briefly at Gen Con; Monkey Palace, a Lego board game where players build towers and staircases on a shared board; and The Yellow House, a two-player game inspired by the debates on art between Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. So many games, so little time.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.