Room Escape Artist

For a few years now, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to travel down to Philadelphia each year for PAX Unplugged. For the uninitiated, PAX Unplugged (PAXU) is an annual convention celebrating board games and all other forms of analog gaming. There are hundreds of exciting board games, tabletop roleplaying games, accessories, and other merchandise on display to be demoed and purchased. Over the last few years, there has been a concerted effort to gamify this gaming convention. The attempt has been successful, and between the Expo Hall and all the other spaces throughout the convention center, PAXU is now almost too full of things to see, do, purchase, and play to be contained in just three days.

The Expo Hall

The centerpiece of PAX Unplugged is the Expo Hall. It would be easy to spend all three days just wandering the aisles, stopping at every interesting booth for a demo or a conversation with a designer. This is usually my PAXU plan, but my intent this year was to spend more time exploring the things that happen in the many other rooms throughout the convention center. Even so, I found more than a few booths and games worth highlighting while investigating the Expo Hall.

Two booths I consider puzzly stalwarts of the convention are PostCurious (reviews) and Thames & Kosmos (reviews). If you’ve been reading REA for any length of time, you’re likely already familiar with these two companies and why you should stop by their booths. PostCurious has been making beautiful tabletop puzzle tales for years and is an industry leader in combining engaging gameplay with captivating art. They were showing off their new and upcoming titles Emerald Echoes, Ministry of Lost Things: Finders Keypers, and Pandora’s Legacy.

The folks over at the Thames & Kosmos booth had their usual slew of games, both puzzle and not. Thames & Kosmos is known for their Exit: The Game series of tabletop escape games. The Exit line includes a yearly advent calendar. This year’s calendar theme was The Intergalactic Race.

A throughline I kept noticing this year was games with low player counts, specifically games designed for just two people. And while I love a huge game that can take hours to churn through, it’s very helpful to have a selection of games that work best for just two people. To that end, the banner for Logic & Lore caught my eye. Logic & Lore was a competitive deduction game designed for exactly two people. Each player had to put their constellations (represented by cards numbered 1-9) back in order by asking their opponent a series of yes or no questions. The catch was that only their opponent saw the cards they were asking about. It was a great, quick game based on logic and deduction, and I happily added it to my PAX haul.

Distant Rabbit’s Mantis Falls was a noir-inspired hidden role game made for 2-3 people, but seemingly designed with two players in mind. The two players were witnesses to a crime in a mob-run town and needed to work together to escape – but one of the witnesses might actually be an assassin sent to dispatch the actual witness. It was a tense game of suspicion that made for some interesting gameplay.

While the expo hall was definitely still the centerpiece of the convention, I tried to explore the other rooms around the convention center as much as possible. Between the panels, the playable games, and the dozens of other rooms to visit, there was more to do than I could fit into just three days.

Panels

Panels and workshops at PAXU run the gamut from entertainment to education and everything in between. Whether you’re looking to get inside information about the industry or just there to watch funny people do silly things, there were panels for everyone.

To kick off my PAX weekend, I spent my Friday morning at the “Super Sleuthing: Successful Solving of Puzzle Hunts” panel. Not only was this a must-attend based on the content, it was also led by known and trustworthy people in the puzzle hunt world: Sara Winters, Jacqui Fashimpaur, and Michael Anderson. They all spoke of their MIT Mystery Hunt experience and so much more. Any attendee of the panel left with a history lesson as well as valuable tips on how to find puzzle hunts and start solving them.

PAX events attract celebrities with well-established nerd credentials. Dropout regular and host of Um, Actually Ify Nwadiwe has hosted a few panels at PAXU and PAX East, and I was finally able to get a seat at one. His panel was called “Ify Play Tests A Panel Show” and it was a game show featuring three teams of two notable nerds each playtesting a panel game that was reminiscent of famed British panel show Would I Lie to You? The teams had been given topics to present a real or fake fact about, and points were awarded for spotting the fake statements. This was a lesson in the importance of playtesting everything, as I’m reasonably certain that half the participants didn’t fully understand the scoring system (to a very entertaining outcome).

Convention Games

For the past few years, PAX Unplugged has been curating a selection of convention games and has now settled into what feels like a standard format. They had the same number of convention games available as last year, all updated for 2025.

Lockwood Immersive returned with another puzzle hunt, this time called “Oddities Inc.” This paper-based puzzle hunt took the form of a competence assessment for new hires at Oddities Inc. Once we solved all ten puzzles, which were varied in both puzzle format and difficulty, we were presented with a final meta mission – sneaking into Oddities Inc. HR and stealing our employment contract. It was a fun and innovative way to finish up the puzzle and narrative aspects of the hunt.

Back again with their small footprint games was Co-Operatives. Based permanently in Boston, they travel to PAXU each year with a selection of short, portable communication-heavy escape games. I had the chance to play the new game for this year, Gnome Sweet Gnome. We had to help a bunch of tiny gnomes get ready for their upcoming celebration. Like their other games, teams were evenly divided on two sides of a wall that contained all the locks and puzzle information. Gnome Sweet Gnome was 20 minutes of compact fun. It’s usually difficult to get a booking at Co-Operatives once the ticketing opens up, and that’s a good problem to have.

Board game publisher Czech Games Edition has had a yearly puzzle hunt celebrating their latest major release, and this year’s was Wispwood. Wispwood caught my eye immediately because not only was it themed around cats, it was also black light sensitive! The free puzzle hunt followed CGE’s normal loop of having players explore the convention hall for posters, scanning QR codes on them, and solving a puzzle on their phone, which gave the location of the next poster. CGE managed to pack a variety of puzzle types and challenge levels into this year’s hunt, and a lucky winner each day went home with a copy of Wispwood.

So Much More To See

There were many, many options to book social games. KMS Games returned and ran two of their games: Game Over (which they ran last year) and a new game for the convention, The Sandcastle. I wasn’t able to get a booking for The Sandcastle, which was sad for me but a good sign for the popularity of what KMS Games is making. And there were multiple time slots for two different Blood on the Clocktower scenarios, one for beginners and one for more advanced players. These were also full as soon as preregistration opened, and had a long waitlist.

Hidden on the upper level of the convention center was the First Look room. The First Look room is where PAXU displays the “hot” games that you might only have seen at other large shows like SPIEL Essen because they likely do not have US distribution yet. This room was table after table of games all available for play.

The highlight of the First Look room was Digit Code, a two-player logic game using player created codes written on a seven segment display. Players competed to guess each other’s codes using questions about how many segments were filled in a row or column. It made for an interesting and quick guessing game, and the rulebook provided my favorite justification of the weekend: “for some unknown reason…we must quickly interpret a six-digit digital code.”

If you plan on traveling to PAX Unplugged in 2026, be sure to check out all of the things that are happening beyond the expo hall. There were rooms full of hidden treasures all throughout the convention center, and more games and events than I could play in a full weekend. PAXU returns to Philadelphia December 4-6, 2026. See you there!

Disclosure: PAX Unplugged provided a media pass.

For more about some of the games and events mentioned this this piece, check out these podcast interviews:

REPOD S10E8: The PuzzleTales of PostCurious with Rita Orlov & Lauren Bello

REPOD S9E1: MIT Mystery Hunt: James Douberley, Benevolent Dictator of Death & Mayhem

REPOD S9E6: Steven Medway, Creator of Blood on the Clocktower