PAX Unplugged (PAXU) has become a yearly pilgrimage for me and thousands of other board game fans from around the world. Each year, we gather at the Philadelphia Convention Center to spend three days exploring the new games in the expo hall, attending informational and entertaining panels, and demoing all sorts of analog games: board games, card collecting games, and tabletop role-playing games being the most prominent.

The Expo Hall

As usual, most of my time was spent walking up and down the many rows of games, accessories, and geek-forward lifestyle products. I saw more puzzle-centric games than usual, the majority of which were in the murder mystery genre. Many, many other games caught my eye as well. Here is a rundown of some of the many things from the expo hall.

Puzzle-y Games

PostCurious (reviews) is always a must-visit booth, even if I’ve played everything they have for sale. The booth is always impeccably decorated with the beautiful art that we have come to know and expect from PostCurious, and it’s always nice to see some familiar and friendly faces. New to the booth this year was the recently Kickstart-ed Ministry of Lost Things.

Kosmos (reviews) displayed their Exit: The Game series and debuted the Masters of Crime series. Masters of Crime was a game series with four titles currently published: Vendetta, Rapture, Incognito, and Shadows. Each entry in this series put the players in the role of criminals performing some nefarious deed.

The Mystery Agency was on hand, showing off three of their games: The Balthazar Stone, The Ghost in the Attic (review), and their newest game The Man From Sector Six. The Man From Sector Six came in an attractive and intriguing locked zipper folder, and the materials created for it looked and felt like good quality items.

One of the most anticipated companies at PAX – at least if you asked the REA Patron discord – was KMS Games. KMS Games is a Singapore-based company that makes English-language jubensha, a scripted murder mystery game that is very popular in China and the rest of East Asia. They were running their PAX exclusive title Game Over as well as selling their newest title Secret Tribe. I had a great time playing Game Over and look forward to playing my copy of Secret Tribe.

Misfit Mixers was showing off their future Kickstarter project Murder on the Rocks. This game will come in a large cocktail shaker and come with vials you fill with “poison” that the killer uses to secretly murder a player. Murder on the Rocks is still in development, and I’ll be keeping tabs on its progress.

Rounding out the murder mystery games, I thought Deception: Murder in Hong Kong was a cool, undiscovered gem of a game. Turns out, it’s a cool, discovered game! REA’s own Peih-Gee Law recommended it in our 2022 Holiday Gift Guide.

Notable Games

Stifling Dark from Sophisticated Cerberus was an asymmetric hidden movement game. One player secretly controls a monster who stalks the other players who are trying to either escape or defeat the monster. It reminded me strongly of the video game Dead By Daylight, but for tabletop and with an interesting flashlight mechanic for the non-monster players.

Czech Games Edition’s new sprawling board game this year was SETI, a beautiful game about searching the cosmos for signs of life. This was the kind of table-covering crunchy game that tested not only a player’s ability to strategize, but also their endurance to sit through a three-to-four hour game. I bought a copy and look forward to testing my stamina.

Collectionomics was a soon to be coming to Kickstarter game that played to the inner magpie in everyone. It will come with minimal components as I understood it, and players will use their own objects as tokens. The game was described as “show and tell, gamified.” In the style of Apples to Apples, players match objects to cards and then argue about it to determine whose object best matches the card.

Lairs was a game that mixed the mechanics of Battleship with a dungeon crawling theme. In this short, two-player game, each player took on the role of an Adventurer’s Guild candidate and the final exam was to create a dungeon to trap your rival in while attempting to escape their dungeon. Lairs had a successful Kickstarter campaign and is expected in 2025.

There is significant overlap between escape room fans and haunted house fans, so Scream Park caught my eye. This game from DVC Games tasked players with building a cohesive and properly themed haunted attraction. What really sold me on Scream Park was the inclusion of challenge cards like fire marshals, which showed me that the team at DVC understands what true horror is.

Panels

PAX events are not just about the expo hall. There are a constant stream of events, tournaments, and panels going on throughout the long weekend. The panels I attended were entertaining, informative, and insightful.

Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game

This panel was led by Geoff Engelstein, a board game designer from New York. He told the story of reading a throwaway line in multiple books and articles about famed American author Kurt Vonnegut (one of my favorite authors) designing a board game in the 1950s that was never published. Engelstein did his research and found a trove of papers at Indiana University in their Vonnegut collection. After getting the proper permissions from the Vonnegut estate, Engelstein was able to use Vonnegut’s notes to produce and sell copies of GHQ through Barnes and Noble and the Vonnegut Museum in Indianapolis.

Engagement! The Secret to Teaching with Board Games

Every PAXU seems to have at least one panel about using games for educational and therapeutic purposes, and as a teacher I try to attend them. This particular panel trended towards the topic of how to teach board games to people with a variety of experience levels rather than how to teach with board games. The panelists discussed the importance of knowing how to tap into someone’s prior knowledge and experiences in order to deliver new knowledge more efficiently. Perhaps the biggest takeaway was the existence of Board Game Academics, a nascent peer-reviewed journal about games in higher education. Issue one even includes an article about a particular use case of escape rooms.

Jubensha: Murder Mystery East meets West

I ended my PAX Unplugged the same way it began – discussing jubensha. The team from KMS games discussed the history of jubensha and how they are bringing the game style to American audiences. They reviewed the basics of jubensha as well: they are murder mystery games that typically last 3 hours and have 5-6 playable characters. There are two phases, usually separated by a plot twist or other big reveal. The panelists emphasized their role as a “third place” that participants use as a social outlet. There was a good amount of hype in the room for their newest game, Secret Tribe, which was released at PAXU.

…and more!

The expo hall and panels weren’t the only things to do at PAX Unplugged 2024. Stay tuned for a look into the other games and puzzle hunts available to play at the convention!

Disclosure: PAX Unplugged provided a media pass.