“Daddy, I want to go to one of your board game conventions. Is there one that has board games AND video games?”
This conversation, a chat with my eight-year-old son that took place near the end of 2024, kicked my convention planning into high gear. I love board games, I love video games, and I love my kids. Using the powers of the content creation space, I combined these passions into my first trip to PAX East, which takes place in Boston every year.
I left my wife and older child behind to make PAX East a bit of a boys trip. Once my son received his attendee badge by mail, our plan was simple: hit the convention, play dozens of games, eat doughnuts, watch NBA playoff games at our hotel, and generally do the things that people do when they are armed with a convention badge and too much time to stroll the halls.
As a tabletop media event, PAX East was a strange bird. As a video game media event, PAX East was a blast. And as a chance to spend 48 hours with my son doing…well, just about anything, PAX East was out of this world.
PAX East: Tabletop
I couldn’t have my son miss any school, and my newfound enemies at JetBlue really hosed our flight schedules, so PAX East ended up being only a single, full day at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center (BCEC). Despite a late arrival on the Friday evening of the show weekend, we were up and at ‘em early Saturday, getting to the BCEC just before 10 AM to pick up my media badge then hit the expo hall in full attack mode.
The tabletop portion of the expo hall was tucked away along a couple longer aisles near the back of the floor. Also, tabletop gaming is a tricky beast when it comes to classification. “Tabletop” in the eyes of the organizers included not just board games, but lots of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG), straight-up RPGs, accessories retailers, and at least one large area run by a Boston game store that set up a sales area in the middle of the tabletop region of the expo hall.
When factoring in high-end game table manufacturers such as Wyrmwood, tabletop apparel booths, tabletop booksellers, and a miniatures painting area, PAX East can definitely say that it caters to board game players of many shades. However, the lack of focus meant that my time at the show became a tricky catch-all for anyone looking to focus on a particular area.
For example, if you were hunting booths to buy card games, there were a couple booths that had card games. But that was it. Trading card games? You had Star Wars: Unlimited, and Flesh and Blood in the building. But, TCG action was light. A couple booths had party games. Medium-weight strategy games were not really available. Gamewright and a couple other smaller publishers were in attendance to hawk family-weight games, but that was another niche play featuring just a booth or two.
There were almost no titles I had not seen at any of the recent tabletop shows I attended, including PAX’s own Unplugged event last December. No one of note had anything new, and no new games from publishers I track debuted at the show. Some booths had demo tables of 2024 releases going (games such as Hachette/Scorpion Masque’s Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game), and Happy Camper had Combo and Trio available. Bezier Games was doing tables with Xylotar and Rebel Princess Deluxe Edition.
Tabletop media members looking for a scoop struggled to find one at PAX East, which is why I wouldn’t necessarily attend it again if I was only going to focus on tabletop. Luckily for me, my son was in tow, and all he really cared about were…
The Video Games
PAX East’s website says it is a show that celebrates gaming culture, and in that vein, I would agree. While the tabletop area was pretty light, PAX East made up for that with action in almost every other area of the video game sphere. If you are a video game junkie who lives in the Boston area, PAX East is a no-brainer.
At the show, we started with a heavy dose of demos on the main show floor, with new action from the likes of Bandai Namco, Atari, Devolver Digital, and Retroware. (Bandai Namco featured the new Elden Ring standalone co-op adventure Nightreign). No matter where you looked, there was a demo station calling the name of either me or my son every few minutes. Puzzle games, adventure games, fantasy spectacles, twin-stick action games. Lots of new console games. More high-end PC games. Miniature arcade cabinet games. Games that were appropriate for kids…and games that definitely were not.
The expo hall floor was not very crowded on my Saturday visit. Certainly, people were there, but I’m used to navigating 100,000-person mobs in Essen, Germany a couple days each year. At PAX East, I had the space to stop and stare without getting run over by an overzealous tabletop junkie who hadn’t caught a shower in days while hauling two 30-pound backpacks of games from point to point.
In other words: it was lovely.
Food trucks on the expo hall floor, in the form of booths situated at the far end of the expo hall? Check. An e-sports arena where players and fans could cheer on complete strangers playing old classics like Power Stone 2? Check. A dedicated PC area for fans to set up their own rigs? You bet. Booths that had lines that actually didn’t get in the way of other booths trying to attract business at the show? Absolutely.
The expo hall space was great, but for my son and I, that was only about half of the action. There were video games tucked into convention center ballrooms everywhere. There was an old school arcade, with “bullet hell” shooters, Dance Dance Revolution, light gun games like Virtua Cop 2, and your friend and mine, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (Four players or bust, baby!)
The library for older games was great, so we took advantage in the Classic Console area, including games on Sega Dreamcast, Sega Genesis, and the original Playstation. (The PAX East organizers were smart to also have some of the new-yet-old-school “mini” consoles, so that people could break out the Neo Geo Mini, Classic NES, and Sega Genesis Mini to their heart’s delight.)
Even though it was a room I skipped, my favorite room might have been the “Steel Battalion” room. There, players were using large joysticks and dual monitors to play tank video games. From afar, it looked awesome. My boy had no interest in playing hypercompetitive tank games, but if I’m back at PAX East in the future, I can’t wait to spend a few hours lobbing shells at strangers.
These specialty areas were open all day, as well as that time period after the main expo hall closed up. So, I got in a few more rounds of Dolphin Blue, Mortal Kombat, and other arcade games between 6 and 8 PM, well past the time I should have kept playing. By 8:30 PM—maybe ten hours after the day began—my body was subtly reminding me that I had not eaten yet.
The Look in His Eyes
Over a box full of Domino’s Pizza around 9:30 PM—getting back to our airport hotel turned out to be an adventure—my son reflected on the day.
“I loved PAX East…this trip was a nine out of ten!” he said. “If we didn’t have to fly back home tomorrow, maybe we should go back and play more games tonight?”
I shot it down; we had a mid-afternoon flight on Sunday, so our final few hours were spent eating doughnuts before watching the latest Marvel flick, Thunderbolts*. But while I was laying in bed Saturday evening, I sat there thinking about the day and about the look my son had in his eyes as he tackled game after game after game for hours.
Because we came in so late the night before, I thought he would hit the wall halfway through our day at PAX East. But that moment never came. He played every game he could. He howled with delight during a play of an arena-style combat game featuring ninjas, paint, and a king of the hill mechanic. In other cases, we played some games where we couch co-op’ed our way through upcoming releases. The last game we tried in the expo hall, In Full Bloom (Swissgames), featured a large mouth fixed in the middle of a table, where players had to maneuver food over the mouth to drop it inside. He played it for 20 minutes and was only ripped away because the PAX enforcer team came by to sweep bodies towards the exit funnel when the expo hall hours ended.
For a video game junkie, PAX East is great, and like other PAX shows, the show was well managed and had lots of friendly people working on site. While it was light on opportunities to engage with the tabletop space, I will probably come back as a fan of the video game experiences…and the lack of crowds was very attractive as someone typically overwhelmed at other tabletop shows.
If you love video games and live in the Boston/New York/Philly corridor, you owe it to yourself to make the trip!
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