Board games are always on the table at PAX Unplugged

Keith Law recaps every board game he played at this year's PAX Unplugged event.

By Keith Law  |  November 26, 2025 | 3:00pm
Images, clockwise from top left: Night Soil (Grail Games); I Made You a Mixtape (Massive Asterisk); Bohemians (Portal Games); Baghdad: The City of Peace (Alley Cat Games)
Games Features board games
Board games are always on the table at PAX Unplugged

The tabletop gaming convention PAX Unplugged was earlier than usual this year, with the 8th edition taking place at the Philadelphia Convention Center this past weekend. Rumors that the show would be smaller due to the date change appear to be have been unfounded, as the show took up the entire main expo hall as usual, with publisher booths, tournaments, free play, and the lending library, as well as the large First Look and Unpub sections on the center’s fourth floor. 

Unlike most previous years, I focused on playing games in full and only did a couple of publisher meetings, for two reasons: I didn’t see as many new game announcements for the show as I had in past years, and playing games in full is more fun. So with that in mind, here’s the rundown of my time at PAXU 2025. 

The best game I played was Baghdad: The City of Peace, and it wasn’t particularly close. This upcoming release from Alley Cat Games, which will be fulfilling Kickstarter pledges in December, is the latest game from designers Fabio Lopiano and Nestor Mangone, who worked together on last year’s Shackleton Base. Baghdad is most similar to Lopiano’s game Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road in look, feel, and playing style; both are tight economic games at heart, with gorgeous, brightly-colored boards that make the game easier to play and see. In Baghdad, players compete to build the “Golden Palace” (which I assume means the Palace of the Golden Gate) while also constructing buildings, collecting artifacts, and trading and selling goods along the Tigris. The game has several mechanics that were either new to me or deployed in new ways, and despite its complexity and two hour-plus playing time, turns were really quick and it was easy to spend the interim between them thinking through all my options so I was ready to rock. I wanted to try another beautiful, complex game from Alley Cat called Ada’s Dream, but couldn’t get to those tables; U.S. backers are receiving their copies as we speak, and the publisher says it’ll be available via their website soon. 

I was slightly disappointed that Baghdad passed my second-favorite game of the convention, Night Soil, which is literally a game about shit—“night soil” is a euphemism for human feces, and in the game, you’re competing to make the most money from shoveling poop into the Thames. It’s actually a highly competitive area control game with some take-that aspects and a devious worker-placement system where you have to claim areas to gain workers for the next round, with a chance you’ll end up with zero if you’re not careful.

I Made You a Mixtape has an “I split/you choose” mechanic, but that ends up a pretty minor part of the game. The game has 90 song cards—real song titles, but no artist names, so nobody’s getting sued here—each of which has a number from one to three on the left or right side, indicating the song’s length and whether it has to go on side A or side B of your cassette. There are six music genres, and each card has a ribbon flowing from the top of the card to the bottom. You’ll score points for how close you came to getting the two sides of your tape balanced in total song length, for how well your songs “flowed” into each other based on whether the ribbons lined up, and for how many songs you got in each genre, where more songs in fewer genres is better. You draw three cards on each turn, split them into two piles, and offer them to your neighbor to the left, so you’re trying to see what other players need and maybe going for different genres yourself. Also, there is huge value here in someone breaking into song with every draw.

Papyria is the latest game from Bernd Eisenstein, the designer of Discordia, who specializes in games that are long but aren’t that heavy or complex. That’s true of Papyria, which has a two-track mechanic where the amount of victory points you can score on any single turn can not exceed your place on the knowledge track, so early in the game you’re trying to gain knowledge so that later you can rack up bigger bonuses. You lay tiles to create your landscape with various features on it that you can upgrade as the game progresses, although you can score points for the upgraded or non-upgraded versions. The best part of the game is that you can score points on most of your turns—there are scoring tiles everywhere and when you pick one up you gain some multiple based on the matching feature or tile type. The worst part is the utterly inscrutable rulebook; we played it for about a half an hour before I realized we’d done something completely wrong (the knowledge track) and joked that I was going to flip the table over (okay, maybe not entirely joking).

1975 White Christmas is the tenth title in Looping Games’ 19xx series, which is highlighted by 1985 Channel Tunnel, from the designers of The Red Cathedral and The White Castle. 1975 White Christmas asks players to help in Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of Saigon ahead of the city’s takeover by the North Vietnamese army, with each player using two helicopters to visit the rooftops and collect meeples to return to their aircraft carriers. You can get points based on the specific meeple types, and for matching sets on the special mission cards, while you can also upgrade your helicopters and aircraft carrier to make future missions a little easier. It’s a solid play, but I don’t think the game really serves the theme here; this is a tragic moment in world history, and the evacuation effort left many people behind, while the need to evacuate and the cost involved was a symbol of the giant failure that was the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. The game’s mechanics don’t acknowledge that in any way; if any turn ends with more meeples on a rooftop than there are spaces, you simply return those to the box. No one loses points or anything else for doing so.

Cereal Killer is a two-player deduction game where one player is the titular killer, placing little Froot Loop-like tokens on the map to show where they’ve killed someone, and the other is the detective, chasing the killer by asking any one of six fixed questions on each turn. The killer’s location is always secret, but they must move exactly three spaces per turn, and can’t pass through the detective’s space, so there’s a fair bit of deduction required—and possible—for the detective player. There’s a three-player mode that introduces a dog, Lola, who is also trying to catch the killer but who can’t speak to the detective. I think it’s better with two players but respect the effort to try to expand it for three.

Fossilium is a medium-heavy game where players place workers to build out their museums with fossils of land and sea animals as well as plants, where the biggest challenge is trying to collect all of the matching tiles for the largest (six-tile) specimens. There’s some randomness involved here in the tile pulls from the three separate bags, each of which has its own unique fossils, while the worker-placement aspect puts a tight constraint on players because there aren’t many spaces available. I thought it was well-designed but the play was kind of dry.

Kilauea is a tight game with simple rules and some area-control aspects, but keeping an eye on the scores as you go was a lot of mental math. On each turn, you move a tiki piece from the forest to your canoe, from your canoe to the volcano in exchange for coins, or from your canoe to your island while paying coins. You score based on what tikis are on each sector of your island, with a multiplier based on the height of the matching colored tiki tower on the volcano—but the highest one scores the fewest points. The cultural appropriation here is way over the line for me; two white designers from Spain should not be making a game out of native Hawaiians’ religion.

Bohemians is a deckbuilding game with some incredible art on its cards, where you play as louche artists in Paris at the end of the 19th century. On each turn, you play four cards to your board, trying to line up the symbols on the left and right edges of the cards to gain points you can spend to upgrade your deck, but on any turn where you choose not to play your job title card (which has no symbols), you get a hardship card that makes future turns less powerful. Those hardship cards can really limit you, and working around them is the game’s real challenge, for better and for worse.

Khlor is a simple tile-laying game played on a 7×7 board covered with stacks of two demon tiles on each space except the center. You’ll play a polyomino tile covering four or five squares on the board, then take the demon tiles under the three demon symbols on the tile you place. You then get to place dragon eggs of a single color on all empty spaces you covered (including those you just emptied). At game-end, the number of eggs in a color determines the value of each captured demon of that color. There’s a bit more to the mechanics, creating a push-pull system where you can mess with someone else’s scoring. It’s a sleeper.

Ink was available at the convention and in First Look; I reviewed the game here earlier this month.

Oink Games, publishers of Scout and Deep Sea Adventure, had demos out for Pick ‘n Packers, a dexterity game ideally for two or three teams of two players each; players will try to stack various small objects on the flat ‘drone’ piece and carry the drone to the next stop by using just one finger apiece to hold it from the edges. And their Petiquette is a pattern-recognition game of a sort I just don’t particularly like—there’s no right answer, but as long as the card you pick to fill out the pattern is the majority choice, you score. I like clarity in my puzzles.

I did chat with two publishers while at the convention. Hachette had the second game in their Kronologic deduction/mystery games, Cuzco 1450, with a bigger and more difficult board to navigate. It has 15 cases, just like the first one, Paris 1920, but is supposed to be a little tougher to solve. They also had two expansions for the Paris game, each with five new cases. Micro Hero: Hercules is a tiny-box, solitaire deckbuilder where you try to complete all of the twelve labors of Hercules without dying from the damage the monsters inflict on you. Snake Charmers is a family-weight deduction game designed by the Brand family—Inka and Marcus, who designed the Exit: the Game series and Rajas of the Ganges, plus their kids Emely and Lukas. It’s a bluffing game as well, where the players with the snake charmer cards are on one team and the remaining players on the other team, but a player can end up switching sides if someone hands them a snake charmer.

25th Century had several new games, with the biggest buzz around Ra and Write, a flip-and-write game based on Reiner Knizia’s classic auction game Ra, which 25th Century reprinted with new art last year. They also had a new expansion for Ra called Ra: Traders that adds a new type of tile to the game. They’ve also picked up the rights to the two-player game The Yellow House, originally published by the Korean company Mandoo last year (and in First Look at PAX Unplugged 2024), where players play as Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh (no mailing of ears, alas); and Neko Syndicate, a 2024 title from Spain where players play as cat smugglers moving sushi contraband around their tableaux. And they’ve brought back 2009’s La Habana (formerly Havana), a set collection and action-selection game where players compete to build up the Cuban capital.

 
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