A PAX East 2025 Tabletop Round-Up
Just because PAX East isn’t a 100% tabletop-dedicated convention doesn’t mean I’m going to stop treating it like one. Well, mostly. I did check out some “video” games while at the con, but that will be more of a CHG aperitif. Let’s get to the main course first so that I can share the games that caught my eye this past weekend with you: dead gods, burning forests, nighttime escapes and knives in the back, things upon things, and glittering glass!
This GMless roleplaying game from Jordan Palmer stars clerics of a god, right before a big celebration in their god’s honor. The only problem? The god has gone and died, and now the clerics must Weekend at Bernie’s their religion so nobody finds out they’re dealing with a dead deity. There is zero prep, and gameplay proceeds through three acts: 1) figure out who everyone is, who the deity is, and how the death is discovered, 2) come up with schemes to cover up the death, and 3) execute the schemes and likely have them go terribly awry. The only mechanic is that when the ball starts rolling each player rolls a d6, and then when they want to do something they have to beat their previous result. Getting a 1 for your first roll means you’ll probably succeed on your second, for instance, but then when you roll a 5 on that second roll your third roll is looking a lot more dangerous.
Over the course of a late-night Thursday session we established ourselves as clerics of the food truck god known as the Iron Chef, making our grim discovery on the eve of a Polytheistic PANtheon competition that would have seen our god elevated to a higher rank. We contemplated a steamed ham gambit, stole equipment from other trucks, lit everything from a nearby weed farm to most of the competition on fire, bludgeoned St. Gordon Ramsey with a frying pan, and mostly perished after trying to retrieve a jeweled ceremonial ladle from a deep fryer with a post hole digger – aside from one survivor rendered an amnesiac who proceeded to join the circus. It was an absolute blast, and a fast and easy game to play besides.
Thanks to Laurel for facilitating, John, Aaron, and Griffin for being fellow players, and to Games on Demand for providing a place for games like this to get table time at the con! The games costs $8 on itch.io, and as of this writing there are also literally hundreds of free community copies there.
Brought to us by Runaway Parade Games, Fire Tower sees 2-4 players posting up in fire lookout towers – and sure enough, a fire has started in the middle of the forest!
At the start of every player’s turn they place a new fire token in the direction of the wind, which starts off being determined by a special d8. Then players can use cards to change the direction of the wind, use water to remove fire tokens, place fire breaks to stop the fire from moving through specifics spaces, and spawn even more fire. Fire hawks can also be placed in a player’s quadrant (everyone starts with one), and if fire reaches them then the hawk can drop it anywhere on the map that’s not a tower in the corners of the map. Once the fire reaches a tower, there’s a last-ditch bucket that can be used. If the fire reaches the absolute corner of the map, though, the tower there burns down, and its player is taken down. You’re not completely out of the game yet though, becoming a shadow in the forest who gets to roll a special die every turn that will help you try and gain vengeance against the other towers.
The base game costs $35, and there’s a deluxe version as well as a number of expansions. Fire Tower had a lot of strategy some fun elements of random chance, and features my favorite design choice of knocked-out players still getting to play (and maybe even win). Plus, not for nothing, it looks really, really good.
Runaway Parade had another game at the booth that looks just as good, if not better, and sounds pretty fun as well. Punch Bowl is about picking a fruit-based faction, since giant fruits have started showing up and everyone agrees they would make an excellent punch. The forces of oranges, strawberries, lemons, and grapes will compete with one another to see who can make the best one! Punch Bowl got Best In Show at the 2024 Boston Festival of Indie Games, and if you want a taste you can set yourself up to be notified of the Kickstarter launch.
Mantis Falls is a mob-ruled mountain town in the 1940s – and a ‘sometimes cooperative’ game from Distant Rabbit Games. The player characters all witnessed something terrible that wasn’t meant to be seen, and now their only hope is to make a nighttime escape from town.
The twist is that sometimes all of the players are witnesses, each equally at risk, who will have to work together in order to survive. Other times, there will be an assassin in the mix, whose job is to tie up loose ends. This is determined in secret, so real witnesses are going to have to figure out exactly what kind of game they’re playing every time. Players will build hands with cards that will have all sorts of special abilities and actions, try to survive events as they make their way out of town, and try to convince their fellows that they can be trusted… for one reason or another.
It’s a really interesting mechanical twist on the social deduction genre of games, packed with film-noir flavor – there’s even a soundtrack. Given that a lot of other social deduction games function best when you’ve got lots of players, like Blood on the Clocktower, Mantis Falls opens up an opportunity for those duet or low player count nights. A copy of the game goes for $34.99, and if you’re in the US you can get it directly from Distant Rabbit and get a strategy guide for free.
A category card game from DVC Games, Thing Thing seeks to be both eminently easy to play in the first place and endlessly replayable in all the other places. Every player is dealt three cards, each with a single Thing (which includes people, concepts, items, pretty much anyThing). The first player will then play two of them, and state what category they belong to. Each other player then get the opportunity to play a card that they think fits that category. For every one that does so successfully, the current player has to draw another card. If a player doesn’t have anything they can fit into the category, they have to draw a card. And so the flow of turns goes from player to player! The goal of the game is to not be the last player that still has cards in their hand. An already simple ruleset is made even easier by having all of the rules right on the box where you can’t help but see them when getting the cards out to play.
What makes Thing Thing work so well is that the categories are completely made up by the players, so no game will ever be the same, and you can get some really fun results. I really thought playing Handcuffs and Cactus in the category of ‘things for the bedroom’ was a good one, but of course my opponent had Love. Then when Bank and Phone were played as things you unlock, well, I didn’t have anything for it, and I earned the Last Place star.
DVC Games had a rotating cast of games being demo’d, and Thing Thing was the one available when I swung by the booth, but the rest looked equally interesting to me – particularly Here Lies, a GM’d mystery game of the world’s greatest detectives gathering together to help each other solve their toughest cases. Thing Thing itself is on its second edition, and goes for $25.
One of the joys of a gathering like PAX East is, instead of visiting a booth or a demo or an otherwise presented event, is simply sitting down with some friends who have a game they’d like to try out. That’s how I ended up trying out River Valley Glassworks in the Freeplay area.
RVG, brought us to by Allplay, is about entrepreneurial woodland creatures collecting pretty pieces of glass from the eponymous River Valley. The river is made up of a series of tiles, each assigned a shape. Players start with a few pieces, and on their turn can place a piece on a tile with the same shape (or can place two pieces of the same shape on any tile) to claim all of the pieces on an adjacent tile. The emptied tile then is moved to the start of the river, shifting all the others downstream, and gets new pieces put on it.
Collected pieces get put on your personal board and gain you points – you gain some just for adding pieces, but you’ll get the lion’s share from building columns and rows. Scoring at the end of the game (which starts with a final turn after the first player gets 17 pieces) has a lot to do with how many complete rows you have and how high your columns got. It’s complicated more by the fact that each column can only have one color of glass, and some colors are rarer than others, making deciding which pieces to grab when to place where a big part of the game.
River Valley Glassworks is the kind of game that is fast to learn and fast to play, but can still have a lot of strategy. I got beaten, but felt like I’d learned the game, finished the game, and still played pretty well all inside of twenty or so minutes while I was waiting for my next Games on Demand shift to come up. The base version of the game goes for $39, with there also being a deluxe version, an expansion, and some fancier accessories available. Thanks Kate, Ryan, and Lance for the game!
The tariff chaos and the damage it is dealing to the industry was a thread running through more than one booth and conversation. Punch Bowl, for one example right from this article, was supposed to launch its Kickstarter very soon, but Runaway Parade has chosen to delay. Between things like that and creators already bowing out of American conventions to avoid falling afoul of the local blackshirts, there was a note of concern in my talks with some creators for what PAX Unplugged will look like come November.
Tabletop stuff seems to be increasingly encroaching into the main Expo Hall space at PAX East, which for my purposes was pretty great. Sure, you’ve got all the geek lifestyle stuff – the tea, the clothing, the dice, the candles, the tea, the art – but actual tabletop games with booths of their own were there in plenty. With the large video game publishers giving conventions in general a pass these days, is PAX East leaning more towards being PAX Unplugged 2? I’m curious if anyone has seen something similar at the PAXi that aren’t on the USA’s east coast.
If ever such a thing were to happen, though, and even if PAX East continues to just want its tabletop section to remain healthy, some things may have to change. I talked with some tabletop folks that had forgone getting a booth at East this year because of the cost, citing that they could just get more space at Unplugged for cheaper. As budgets tighten and creators have to make hard choices, being asked to pay more for less is going to make some of those choices easier than others, to the more expensive convention’s detriment.
Overall, if you were a tabletop gamer then it was another very good PAX East, and tabletop is still the long-haul option by far – the expo hall closes at 6pm most days, but the header pic from this article is not that far from midnight and still has people checking out and playing tabletop games. I was only able to cover a very small fraction of the games being played and demo’d – for one example of missed opportunities, the Unpub section was so busy every time I went by that I wasn’t able to grab a seat!
Give these ones a try and let me know what you think, and sound off with great games that I missed! In the meantime, I have a few other games to give the full review treatment to… and some Steam demos to download.
