Two Worlds Collide
PAX West is a bit of a deviation from the traditional board game conventions we typically cover here at Meeple Mountain. Nestled in the tree-rich city of Seattle, PAX West offers a convergence of both the video game and tabletop hemispheres.
I had the wonderful opportunity to experience the show as an exhibitor, showcasing For All Mankind from Bad Cat Media. Though I’m fairly well traveled, I had never visited Seattle or attended PAX West, so the promise of new surroundings was absolutely tantalizing.
I’ve been a video gamer all my life, from my very first console, a red Game Boy Pocket, to now, where I recently beat Capcom’s Pragmata (fantastic) and Bethesda’s Ghostwire: Tokyo (very good). Tabletop gaming, on the other hand, is something I stumbled into only within the last six years. Given that I now write almost exclusively about board games, it’s actually a little puzzling considering I’ve had another gaming love for far longer.
So my coverage of PAX West was always going to focus on both worlds. Both have an equal place in my heart, and to say I was ecstatic to see them come together under one convention umbrella finally would be a massive understatement.
Where Did Everybody Go?
I read in the PAX Discord that PAX West veterans almost envy newcomers because we don’t know what we missed. According to longtime attendees, the show is a shell of its former glory, back when big names like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, and others were expected to show up with massive booths and theatrical displays.
None of those names were here this year, and many haven’t been for the past few years. My extremely scientific five-minute research and analysis came up with a multitude of potential reasons.
The biggest, of course, is the state of the economy. The market has been a free-for-all whirlwind of trade wars, tariffs, and skyrocketing costs of, well, everything. Both the video game and tabletop industries have experienced significant layoffs, and cost-cutting remains a theme for many companies. Big studios have to be more selective about where they establish a marketing presence, and PAX West simply isn’t the massive industry showcase it once was.
Which leads into another reason: the explosion of video games themselves.
I remember playing World of Warcraft with my friends in high school in the mid-2000s, and people would call us nerds before moving along with their lives. Which, for the record, was fine by me. Nowadays, video games are so mainstream that you can’t spend five minutes online without seeing some form of gaming coverage, whether it’s livestreaming, memes, esports, or your kids asking for money to buy something in Roblox or Fortnite.
With that rise in popularity has also come a rise in competing showcases. Between publisher Directs, The Game Awards, Summer Game Fest, TwitchCon, and countless other highly publicized events, there’s an oversaturation of places for companies to spend their marketing dollars. The biggest names can simply choose to dump their money elsewhere.
But their absence creates something else: space for smaller publishers to shine.
Bandai Namco and Konami were among the biggest names present, complete with full demos of the highly anticipated Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse and a massive interactive setup for Silent Hill F. There was also a playable Elden Ring challenge with swag prizes and an Ace Combat 8 showcase.
Beyond those giants, much of the hall belonged to rising publishers and developers showcasing indie games, and people were showing up to play them.
Indie Games Get Their Moment
The beauty of an indie showcase is discovering video games you may have never heard of. Much like the tabletop world, money talks, and smaller studios simply don’t have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets to throw around.
What makes these publishers so enjoyably unique is that almost everyone is approachable. While waiting for my turn to play the 1–4 player cooperative survival horror game Voidwood from Santa Barbara Games, I casually struck up a conversation with someone working the booth who turned out to be the head of design.
This was their first time publicly debuting the game, and they were understandably proud of what they had accomplished over the weekend, with tons of playtest sign-ups and Steam wishlists. If you’re unfamiliar, Steam is probably the largest game launcher and storefront on PC, and wishlisting a game can help increase its visibility within Steam’s ecosystem.
Another benefit of a show like this is trying genres I normally wouldn’t touch.
I had a chance to play the upcoming Rain98 from C#4R4CT3R, an anime-style sci-fi time-travel visual novel complete with original lo-fi music. I was surprised to find that the demo offered around 30 minutes of gameplay, and even more surprised that I really enjoyed the narrative. Maybe I’ve been overlooking an entire genre of video games this whole time.
Of course, I can also be bribed into trying demos with swag.
PAX West is big on free stuff, and show veterans told me that years ago you’d leave with so many shirts, pins, bags, and assorted goodies that eventually you had to start declining things because you simply couldn’t carry it all home.
Most of this year’s swag fell into familiar territory, but Voidwood easily took the prize with its giveaway: a hard plastic axe. I left mine behind out of fear that TSA would have some questions.
Often, completing a demo and wishlisting the game on Steam earned you a pin, which attendees traded among themselves like tiny convention currency. The Among Us booth even had a “take a pin, leave a pin” board, where I was ecstatic to find one for Bandai Namco’s The Blood of Dawnwalker. I hadn’t managed to grab one earlier because the queue to get it was ridiculously long.
At first, I wondered why anyone would wait hours to play a video game demo when so many games release demos online before launch. Then I realized a lot of these games simply didn’t have public demos. PAX West was your chance.
That was the case for titles like Persona 4 Revival and Stranger Than Heaven from SEGA, where people waited upwards of three hours just to get some hands-on time.
The hype behind Stranger Than Heaven in particular was real. I’ve played a bunch of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon titles from RGG Studio, and the draw here is a historical setting in 1920s Shanghai and, somehow, a Snoop Dogg cameo. I kid you not.
Everyone received about 20 minutes with the demo and could choose easy, medium, or hard. I’m not a hardcore gamer in the sense that I need to play everything on the greatest difficulty, so I comfortably selected medium.
Boy, was I humbled.
The combat is much slower than the traditional Yakuza/Like a Dragon titles, leaning closer to the “Soulslike” combat of Dark Souls or Elden Ring. After 20 minutes, I simply could not beat the boss. I handled the regular mobs without much trouble, but I could never get the strange parry timing down.
Oh well. I’ll give it another go when it releases next year.
Meanwhile, on the Tabletop Side…
The tabletop portion of the convention was housed in a separate hall about a two-block walk from the main video game area. Honestly, this wasn’t a bad thing. It gave everything a little more breathing room.
Bad Cat Media and I had a great time demoing board games to attendees. (“It’s like Catan, in space, with nukes!”) But compared to the video game side, there wasn’t a massive tabletop industry presence.
Like the video game hall, though, the space gave indie publishers plenty of room to showcase smaller titles. There were tons of small-box games, including one rock-stacking game featuring extremely expensive but very handsome hand-cut rocks.
Outside of that, many booths catered to the trading card crowd, with custom sleeves, Pokémon cards being traded, and demos of Riftbound, the League of Legends trading card game. A massive queue formed outside the hall every morning for people hoping to buy product early, which felt very reminiscent of those infamous Gen Con lines for whatever the hot-ticket item happens to be that year.
There was, of course, a “Hot Games” section alongside an open gaming library, with helpful Enforcers available to teach games. I was working for most of the convention, but I did manage to squeeze in some time with Drillers and The Lord of the Rings: Trick-Taking Game – The Two Towers, though the latter was technically played on my hotel room floor.
There were also plenty of tables dedicated to the Pacific Northwest Playtesting group, where designers eagerly gathered feedback on games still in development. I was happy to see such a strong turnout because player feedback and playtesting are incredibly important parts of a game’s life.
Fast-forward to Saturday night, when I visited the PNW Indie Game Market, which featured small-batch and often handmade games from local designers. There was a surprisingly long queue to get inside, and by the time I made it through, several titles had already sold out.
Which, honestly, is a great problem for an indie designer to have.
I still managed to take home a few fun titles, including Noodle Battle and Coupon Clippers, a game where you literally clip coupons to score points.
It was heartwarming to see how much passion went into these games and, more importantly, to see the positive reception from players eagerly taking home something that may or may not ever reach the larger gaming population.
More Than Booths and Demos
One thing I absolutely loved about PAX West was how much free stuff there was to do outside of the traditional expo hall experience.
You could stumble across a Metal Gear Solid 3 speedrun where someone beat the game in under 90 minutes, jump onto an open-use Rock Band stage, or wander into a free arcade complete with Dance Dance Revolution. The convention center always seemed to have something happening somewhere.
That’s a noticeable difference from other conventions where additional experiences can be locked behind a paywall or severely limited in availability. Sure, PAX West is a smaller show, but one thing PAX does exceptionally well is create experiences that you can accidentally stumble into and walk away from with a completely unexpected memory.
One of those experiences for me was the Red Bull Tavern.
This was a free, fully immersive live-action roleplaying experience where attendees embarked on a fantasy quest. Set inside a local theater, actors brought players into an elaborate Red Bull fantasy world complete with a tavern and a questline that involved interacting with different characters throughout the space.
It was unlike anything I’d experienced at a convention before and an absolute blast. Hats off to Red Bull and its consistently eccentric, avant-garde marketing tactics.
Another observation was the crowd management. Maybe because the show was less focused on buying things and more focused on experiencing games, there were rarely massive queues blocking walkways or crowds grinding aisles to a halt. PAX also had signs everywhere reminding attendees to move to the side when taking photos and keep walkways clear.
Compared to Gen Con, which admittedly may not be an apples-to-apples comparison, it was a breath of fresh air not constantly fighting through cramped aisles.
Maybe it’s a behavioral difference between different convention demographics. Maybe the excellent signage simply taught people how to con better.
I’m sure there’s a sociological study buried in there somewhere.
A Convention for the Hybrid Gamer
I could go on and on about my first PAX West experience, from the amazing local food to the always-impressive cosplay roaming the halls, but there’s only so much one article can contain.
As someone who lives somewhere between video games and tabletop games, PAX West felt uniquely suited to me. I could spend one hour getting destroyed by a boss in an unreleased video game, the next talking to an indie board game designer about their handmade creation, and then somehow end the night wandering through a fantasy tavern sponsored by Red Bull. There aren’t many conventions where those experiences comfortably exist side by side.
Is PAX West the massive spectacle longtime attendees remember? Based on everything I heard, probably not. The tabletop presence could certainly be stronger, and I’d love to see more publishers take a chance on the show in future years. The appetite is clearly there.
But I also don’t think PAX West needs to recreate its past to justify its existence. What impressed me most was what had grown into the spaces left behind: indie developers, small publishers, playtesters, strange experiences, and people genuinely excited to show you something you might otherwise never discover.
For a hybrid gamer like me, that sense of discovery was the best part of the entire weekend. I flew to Seattle expecting to cover two different hobbies sharing the same convention. I left realizing that, at their best, they really aren’t all that different. Both are built around sitting down, picking up a controller, cards, dice, or whatever else is in front of you, and finding something new to nerd out about.
