What’s that board game in the P section… —
Boots on the ground, mask on the face: We report on the weirdest PAX in years.
Sam Machkovech
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The opening queue for PAX West 2021, angle one.
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The opening queue for PAX West 2021, angle two.
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Seattle’s Pink Gorilla Games, setting up before the public enters.
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Seattle’s Pink Gorilla Games, which proceeded to be swarmed for its selection of toys and classic game cartridges and discs.
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The board-games-and-dice pavilion, before the expo opened.
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The board-games-and-dice pavilion, shortly after the expo opened to the public.
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Fangamer’s usual selection of quality shirts, toys, and plushies.
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We’ve only seen Dial-Up Games at conventions, since it mostly operates as an eBay-only shop, so this proved to be a nice collection to sift through.
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Highlights behind glass. All three Dragon Warriors from the NES!
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PAX Arena, a stage dedicated to both public and competitive play.
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The public computer lab, before it was swarmed by folks eager to play in a massive LAN party.
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Check out classic game cartridges here.
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Not enough CRTs in the classic console freeplay zone, but hey, freeplay is freeplay.
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In good news, PAX’s tradition of hosting massive Steel Battalion sessions on the original Xbox remains intact.
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Full squad gets the tutorial.
SEATTLE—From the ongoing wreckage of a variant-riddled pandemic comes… a modest, regional, and relatively fun nerd convention.
My perspective on PAX West, arguably the largest Northwest expo dedicated to gaming culture, is biased by the lines, crowds, and hype I’ve seen at every incarnation since its first downtown Seattle sellout in 2007. Back then, the show was firmly attached to the webcomic Penny Arcade, which is also a Seattle creation. But the expo’s reputation grew quickly, and it become a multiday, multibuilding extravaganza. Ever since, the fest has been increasingly divorced from its comic origins, and the PAX model has been officially duplicated and been liberally borrowed in other regions.
Recently, of course, a little worldwide dilemma got in the way.
This year, PAX has beaten most other wildly visible American nerd expos at putting the “public” back into “public expo.” 2021’s PAX was set into motion back when vaccination rates and optimism made an expo on Labor Day weekend seem like a good idea. But, uh, yeah—about that.
An anecdotal crowd estimate on day one
In the past month, I have survived three direct delta exposures (leading me to a weekly nose-swab testing regimen, all negative, all good). I also do not have regular contact with vulnerable populations like kids. So when PAX began yesterday, I decided to mask up and dive in. The result was weird. I felt uneasy, but somehow, the expo was also cozy, relatively comfortable, and fun.
This PAX, like most PAXes, is split clearly between two parts. First, there’s the vendor-filled expo hall full of brand-new games, hands-on demos, and mountains of merch. Elsewhere, you can find the DIY play spaces buttressed by TVs, consoles, large tables, and massive lending libraries of board and tabletop games. Both are a lot less crowded this time around.
How much less crowded? It’s hard to say. PAX’s showrunners made clear that they were reducing maximum attendance for this year’s show, so the smaller crowds are, to some extent, intentional. Up until the show’s opening hour, however, single-day and full-weekend (September 3 thru September 6) passes were still on sale. My eyeball estimate of the main expo hall’s queue, ahead of the show’s start at 10 am Friday, was approximately 3,000 showgoers. That’s a decent crowd, sure, but not the 10,000-plus I regularly saw in line on an average PAX West morning.
100% mask compliance, thank goodness
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Board game loans courtesy of PAX itself.
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Tabletop loans courtesy of the Alexandria RPG Library, a local nonprofit.
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Both tabletop and board game loans can be enjoyed on this smattering of tables, which are much more spaced out than this angle may make you think.
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A future-retro platformer took over prime floor real estate normally meant for major console publishers like Sony and Microsoft.
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No line to sample games made by students from local private game university DigiPen.
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Midday on PAX West 2021’s first day. Sizable crowd in the middle of the exhibition hall, and thankfully, every single person is masked and has shown proof of vaccination or a clear COVID testing.
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Lots of open space depending on what angle you peer from. No need for this queue line.
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The procedurally generated Cursed to Golf is a side-scrolling golfing adventure that lands somewhere between Golf Story and Spelunky. Fun stuff from Chuhai Labs.
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Residual is a PAX West 2021 highlight, as it combines randomly generated worlds, Terraria-like controls, and complex survival systems.
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Proceeds from any play of the smartphone game Rescue Pets go towards animal shelters. Nice.
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Rivals of Aether, a popular platform-fighting game that compares favorably to Super Smash Bros. Melee, had a consistent crowd angling to play using old-school GameCube controllers.
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I Expect You To Die 2 is a clever VR puzzle game, even if its name isn’t quite welcome in a public expo full of delta fears.
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Console freeplay from one angle.
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Console freeplay from another angle.
Sadly, PAX’s organizers at ReedPop elected to block off some large spaces in the convention center’s main exhibitor hall instead of using them to spread booths out and better guarantee six feet of social distancing. A few marked queues inside the hall suggest staying six feet away from others, but the occasional mass of bodies near, say, a game demo makes me hope the show’s 100 percent mask compliance and proof of vaccination or recent COVID tests are doing the trick.
It’s at least refreshing to know complete mask compliance can happen in America. Every nose I saw during the first morning and afternoon was even properly tucked in, and I should know—I spent hours hunting for violations. Bless PAX’s gamers for getting this right.
Lower attendance means the space between booths is also far less crowded than in PAXes past. A decent buffer separates the two maskless food courts from the hall’s mask-mandated paths, so no one is spitting particles less than six feet from a gaming booth. Still, part of me wishes these eating zones were part of the expo hall’s barricaded, blacked out zone—where I would have preferred people eat in shame (kidding, kind of).