#PAX UNPLUGGED FULL#
Like how I feel after spending a full summer day at the beach. My first Friday pass through the Expo Hall lasts 90 minutes and only covers a third of the Expo Hall before I feel bone-deep exhaustion. Over the next three days, virtually all 44,400 of my total steps and 18 of my total miles will have been walked in or around the Expo Hall. The Expo Hall: 528,000 square feet of pure, unadulterated tabletop gaming fare.
#PAX UNPLUGGED FREE#
The remaining third are hundreds of folding tables and chairs set aside for board game, Magic, and Pokemon tournaments minis painting, First Look (a library of new and newish games, imports and hard-to-find titles for open gaming) and free tables open for bring-your-own and do-it-yourself game-playing 14 hours a day.
Two thirds of the Expo Hall comprises 291 exhibitors camped in 270+ booths. The sun around which most PAX Unplugged attendees orbit for three days is the Expo Hall, a massive space the length of five-and-a-half American football fields. It’s an unintentional and unfortunate metaphor that the PAX Together space – which “ celebrates diversity, underrepresented groups and stigmatized topics, both at PAX and in the gaming community at-large” – was also housed in this architectural speakeasy – like Baby in the corner at the end of Dirty Dancing. Several popular spaces including Unpub (prototypes and playtests), Learn and Play, the Classic Cardboard game library, and publisher CGE (Czech Games Edition) live on the ground floor just past the main entrance intake, in a nondescript corridor with “pssst” back alley body language. I take my chances with the honor system and leave my bags near other people’s luggage within the eyeline of a PAX staffer sitting with their laptop open to Slack, the World Cup stream, and umpteen other open tabs.Ĭompared to last year, 2022’s PAX Unplugged layout is sub-optimal, with all its PAX parts siloed and spread out across multiple floors and blocks. It looks like an adoption event for more of those dorm room fridge board game dufflepacks that are in most of the cages. Complimentary lockers (first-come, first-served) are all in use – rows of padlocked black wire cages stacked three-high.
I have four hours until hotel check-in so I plop down in the media room. I receive cryptic Twin Peaks-esque instructions from a local: “find the huge paint brush.”Ĭlaes Oldenberg’s “Paint Torch”sculpture (2011) outside the entrance to the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art on North Broad Street. Lost, I overshoot by that exact half-mile difference before finally asking for help. The bad news: PAX has radically changed its layout since 2021 – including its main entrance on Broad Street and not Market Street – a half-mile difference. The good news: it’s my second PAX in a row so I know to use City Hall as North Star navigation. I walk 20 minutes from the train station to the convention center. The train ride south buzzed with enthusiastic, non-Quiet Car chatter: someone lamenting their forgotten lucky D20 a hot take argument about octopus familiars a long soliloquy titled “The Three Perfect Story Arcs of Andor.” The Walgreens was full of thickly backpacked PAXers making last-minute snack and energy drink decisions, taking care not to spin too fast and knock merch (or friends) to the floor.ĭue to contractual obligations I visited the Warhammer booth at PAX Unplugged 2022 each day. These backpacks are blocky, wide, and tall – roughly the size of a dorm room fridge (and maybe just as heavy). I saw dozens of people with the same premium board game duffle backpacks double-shouldered on their backs as they idled in the cavernous atrium and hostile architecture ( no seating ) of Moynihan Train Hall. It was easy to spot who else was Amtrak-ing it to the Philadelphia Convention Center for an all-things-games weekend. I was in Penn Station waiting for the Amtrak’s Keystone Service train to take me ninety miles to PAX Unplugged, a three-day board game and tabletop gaming convention which takes place each December.
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