MERCS Miniatures has been around for a while now, but got a major popularity boost from their successful Kickstarter for cooperative fantasy miniatures game MYTH. I didn’t see them showing off even a prototype of their recently-funded expansion Frigost, though. The game, based on popular French MMOs and Anime Dofus and Wakfu, is a super-light arena skirmish game that’s been receiving lots of positive reviews. Speaking of Chibi art, the folks from Japanime Games were showing off their game Krosmaster Arena in giant-size form. This company grossed a million dollars on a kickstarter, and it’s obvious by the amount of demos running and people passing through their booth, that the chibi art style and dungeon theme of the games are a not-so-secret sauce for success. Soda Pop Miniatures was out in force, showing off its new companion expansion for Super Dungeon Explore. There was also had a fully painted version of Greenbrier’s Jim Sterling model for its Zpocalypse game on display. I was able to preview their new game Heavy Steam in-depth, and can say that it’s one of the most unique resource management games I’ve ever played. Zpocalypse publisher Greenbrier Games had a great booth where elevated tables provided access to quick, easy demos of their games. Jokes aside, some of these companies may fade away within the decade, but it’s almost for sure that one or more of them will parlay Kickstarter success into huge, ongoing business. Out in force on both the main show floor and the secondary tabletop area were Kickstarter funded miniatures games, from “humble” $300,000 dollar grossing companies to folks with multiple $1 million or higher efforts to their name. The booth staff even had a bit of a knowing nod to the proliferation of the Catan franchise, with each wearing a different Catan-spinoff shirt every day. There were certainly more varieties of Catan than you could shake a stick at on display at the Mayfair booth, with near-constant games going on rotation for all three days of the convention. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof was an easy standout, a game where you’re a cat trying to collect as much delicious fish as you can by building paths between neighborhood rooftops – it looks like a surprisingly tactical game for such a light theme! Also on display was Villainy!, which, while I didn’t get to play it, was described to me as Doctor Horrible meets Mayfair Games. Mayfair Games had a strong showing at PAX too, delivering the widest variety of new games from their lineup for the coming year. While I couldn’t get the entire sense of how the game played from a short demo, the mechanics seemed like they had enough bounce to carry fun player interaction and the dark, carivalesque art was quite nice. La Nuit, due for English translation and publication this year, is a bluffing game with light mechanics that looks quite fun. The most notable thing going on for iello was a copy of La Nuit Du Grand Poulpe on display at its booth. It also brought a giant copy of King of Tokyo, including characters the size of a person and dice so large you could barely hold all of them at once. Popular publisher iello made its first appearance at a PAX East this year, laying out a healthy size booth filled with copies of King of Tokyo and Tokaido. While things like this are definitely still the purview of wealthy specialists, there was definitely a certain magic to the glow of the touch display and the speed with which it reacted – is it the future of complex, mathematical tabletop roleplaying games? No way to forecast the future, but what I can tell you is that it’s a really fun toy to play with. A quick demo that the guys at the booth ran showed how rapidly the touch software allows players to take an action, attack an enemy, or use a spell, and how the GM can reactively reveal portions of a map, and tweak game statistics behind the scenes. The huge, multitouch table combined with the GM’s side of the software on a nearby laptop delivered the kind of experience promised by old Microsoft surface demos from years back. The second and decidedly more drool-inducing was a multitouch digital gaming surface from Mesa Mundi combined with the software in development at D20 Pro for playing games like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder online. The first were the omnipresent Geek Chic gaming tables with a large amount of 3D terrain, including custom sculpted Dwarven Forge stuff from its last kickstarter. As always at these kinds of events, there was a fantastic array of very expensive game toys on display, but two stood out.
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