The Best Board Games We Played at PAX Unplugged 2023

By Keith Law | December 6, 2023 | 12:17pm

Video Games Lists board games

The Best Board Games We Played at PAX Unplugged 2023

PAX Unplugged, one of the major annual conventions for tabletop and board games, returned to the Philadelphia Convention Center last weekend for the sixth time in seven years, just missing one year for the pandemic, and I think it was bigger than ever. It filled up the convention hall far more than in previous years and one general comment I heard from other attendees was that it seemed like there were more people there. That certainly played out in my preferred part of the show, First Look, where various recent, new, and upcoming releases are out for folks to try for free if you’re fortunate enough to come along when a chair is open. Here’s a rundown of what I played plus some notes from a few meetings with publishers.

The White Castle was the best new game I tried at PAX Unplugged, unsurprisingly so as it’s from the designers of The Red Cathedral, one of my top 25 games of all time. The game has a similar feel but not similar mechanics; it’s just very tightly designed and gives you the satisfaction of a heavier game in a shorter playing time, in this case because every player will get exactly nine turns before the game ends. That shifts the challenge a little because you have to be very efficient with your moves, rather than the challenge of long-term planning in longer and more complex games. Here players draft dice to place them on the main board or their own boards to gain resources or take actions, ultimately placing three types of their own workers on the board, which shows Himeji Castle, the largest such structure in Japan. One big catch is that you can only take the highest or lowest die of each of the three colors; taking the high one gives you more options, but taking the low one triggers an income phase for you and may give you more stuff. The play time is under 90 minutes but it hits that crunchy spot perfectly for me, like I’d played a great two-hour monster.

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Daybreak is the latest cooperative game from Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and the Forbidden series (including this year’s Forbidden Jungle), here working with a first-time co-designer in Matteo Menapace. Daybreak challenges players to fight climate change and save the planet before it gets too hot, and it’s a clear step up in difficulty from any of Leacock’s other cooperative games, not least because there’s so much more to do. (I mean, props for verisimilitude.) Up to four players play as different countries/regions of the globe, starting with different energy needs, energy production levels, and other sources of carbon, along with varying starting cards. Players get new hands of cards each round and may play them to their personal tableaux for their actions or tuck them under existing cards to make those cards’ actions more powerful. That phase of the game is simultaneous, reducing game time quite a bit since each player will play anywhere from three to five cards—occasionally more—per round. Then players count up all the carbon they’ve produced and figure out how much the global temperature has risen after various carbon sinks have done what they can, followed by a series of unfortunate events on the Crisis cards. The players win if they can reduce their carbon emissions to net zero and survive all crises for that round; they can lose many ways, but the simplest is by failing to meet that goal by the end of round six.

Emerge is a solid, medium-to-lightweight dice placement game that moves very quickly and has one of my favorite game features, one where your actions and powers start out simple and grow over the game, so it’s great for new players. Players are working to grow their islands on the main board and attract plants, birds, and three other species to those islands, doing this by rolling dice in each round and trying to collect sets of certain numbers while using those powers to manipulate them. Most of the game’s points come from scoring the islands, where your points for any one island equal the product of the number of levels and the number of meeples on the island.

Quicksand is a copycat of the great 2022 game Kites, although it’s still very enjoyable in its own right. Kites had players use cards to flip sand timers back and forth to prevent any of them from running out before the players exhausted the deck. Quicksand now has those timers on a track of tiles, and the goal is to get the timers to the end of the track while flipping them to prevent them from running out, although here you can bring a timer back to life with a wild card. It’s very much a game to get if you like Kites and want a new challenge.

Tiger & Dragon might be the biggest-box game ever from Oink Games, publisher of Scout and Deep Sea Adventure. It plays two to five players, and works great with five. The game has 38 tiles numbered 1 through 8, with the count of a tile equal to its face value, so there are five 5 tiles and two 2 tiles. The start player plays any tile to “attack,” and then it goes around the table until someone else can play a tile of the same value to “defend,” after which they attack with any other tile. There are two wild tiles that defend against even or odd attacks. The first player to get rid of all of their tiles wins the round, and gains points based on what their last played tile was—which varies every game depending on the scoring card you choose. It looked like it would be too random at first, but you have to think about your tiles when defending or attacking, as well as what tiles others have played and might still have in hand.

Dro Polter isn’t really my type of game, but I have to admit it’s kind of fun. It’s a tiny box game from Oink where each player has five tokens—a shell, a cube, a key, a ring, and a cracker—and must hold them all in one hand. On every turn, the start player flips a card that shows anywhere from one to four of those items. Players try to drop exactly those items and no others; the first to do so gets one bell, and the game ends when any player gets five bells. The catch is you have to hold all of your bells with your other objects, and if you drop a bell at any point, you lose it. It’s silly but got everyone laughing.

Pollen is a retheme of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai: The Card Game, itself a spinoff of one of my all-time favorite games, Samurai. Pollen definitely takes a less aggressive approach, as you’re still fighting for control of the areas around various scoring tokens, but those tokens don’t appear until two cards are placed next to each other, and then score when all four spaces around a token are filled. There’s some take that, where you can make a strong move to sneak in and steal control of a token, but without the more strategic tiles that make Samurai so cutthroat.

The Rats of Wistar was the dud of the convention for me, although I was looking forward to playing it because Simone Luciani is one of the better designers of heavy worker-placement Euros. The theme is cute, clearly a nod to The Secret of NIMH, but it’s an overdesigned mess, with way too many gimmicks and too many actions for players, while the rulebook is, unsurprisingly, long and plodding. Players have rat chiefs and regular rats, and move their chiefs to action spaces, which they can take as many times as they have regular rats in the same sector, but moving those rats between sectors is also an action. You can have your rats explore the house (which has four separate actions within it), gather wood, mine ore, build rooms in your nest, dig tunnels, complete missions, and I don’t even know what else. Oh, and the action spaces rotate each round, as in Tzolk’in, which is a much better game where the rotation serves a real purpose. The Rats of Wistar made me want to call the exterminator.

Mycelia is a brand-new release from Ravensburger, the rare PAXU debut (since it’s so late in the year), and one of several new mushroom-themed games this year. It’s a very light deckbuilder with a theme that sits on the border of cute and twee. The cards show woodland creatures from some sort of Miyazaki fever dream, like the happy white mushroom holding hands with a ladybug, but there’s a real game under here along with one major gimmick. Players start with dewdrops scattered across their personal boards, and will use cards to move them across the board towards the tree space, which removes them from the board, or just flat-out takes them off. Removed dewdrops go to the central tree, a two-layered contraption that players rotate when it’s full to drop all of the dewdrops into the bottom of the tree. It doesn’t have a real game function but it’s eye-catching. The first player to remove all of their dewdrops wins.

Outside of the First Look section, I met with a few publishers about their 2024 lineups. North Star will have a new version of the game Biomos, which hasn’t come out in the U.S. previously, in 2024. It’s a light but still quite challenging game with unique (and eye-catching) player boards that have curved cutout tracks into which players will drop different biome tokens to try to match various objective cards. You can try it now on Board Game Arena.

Floodgate: Skyrockets is a sequel game to Kites, the real-time cooperative hit from 2022, adding more challenges and raising the level of difficulty; it’s just out now and was on sale at the con. Floodgates also has a new expansion for Decorum in the works, and of course were selling the massive Sagrada legacy game.

Dead Alive’s Lunar Rush is an economic game with an auction component as players bid on shipping slots to send goods to the moon and bring newly discovered materials back while trying to time the market, which of course sees prices drop as more goods of a type are sold. It’s highly customizable to your desired skill level, with a solo mode, although I have to admit the boards all looked very busy to me at a glance.

Paverson Games’ first release, Distilled, was a big hit among fans of longer and heavier titles, and the liquor-manufacturing game gets its first expansion in the Africa & Middle East package, which introduces new spirits to make and new cards across the game. They were also demoing a prototype for Luthier, coming to Kickstarter next year, a sprawling—I mean, physically and figuratively, as this is a huge table hog—game about classical music and the instruments that make it possible.

There were way more games that I wanted to try than I could get to this year, but a few I saw in the First Look area of new/upcoming titles that I’ll be eager to try as as soon as I can include the sentient bee game Apiary, the deduction game Archeologic, the cats-in-space game MLEM: Space Agency, the 18XX roll-and-write game Arabella, the route-building game Moorland, and the beautiful area-control game Islet.

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.