PAX EAst! The best time/worst smell you will ever experience!!

PAX East 2014 was an epic pulse pounding thrill ride that did not even put brakes in the damn car let alone not use them. I laughed, I pooped, I ate food and I rolled dice! It was a time and a half! Me and lines are not friends so sadly I can not report on the major stuff but man o man did it look awesome!

Pax east this year really blew my mind again. So many amazing costumes, such great personalites. The first thing that I noticed was the tabletop section exploded! It was huge! They had a fantastic library of games on demand! Games on demand is great! I tried to keep my schedule agile so I did not use it, but you can just go there with your party and sign up for a game, then they will assign you a game master and you will have a small session. A really neat feature that definitely makes your $50-$80 badge worth it.

Crystal and I demo'd an amazing tabletop RPG called "Torchbearer". This game was really something special. Sadly we did not play a full session, as was available at the "Games on Demand" table at PAX, but we did get to enjoy an amazing 30 min demo. The Game master was incredible! I can't recall his name but he was very enthusiastic about the demo and I was very glad to have him mastering for us. We were lucky enough to get paired up with this other nerd couple who were really nice and into the game already! I got the cleric and crystal got the Dwarf adventurer. The mechanics were so fresh and the conflict resolution really charmed me. It is completely abstracted! Which is so refreshing! The combat is all narrative based and pretty much every action everyone gets to do something! Not to mention the art is so old school, but with more of a deliberate aesthetic then the beautiful Dungeon Crawl Classic book. 

As for the video game that I played that shattered my mind into 1 million pieces is "The Crypt of the Necrodancer". This game is really,really creative! It is a pretty standard graphical rogue-like with some beautiful 16-bit arcade style animation. The amazing part is that there is some awesome electronic dance music as the sound track and you can only move on the beat of the song! Also there is of course full Dance Dance revolution dance pad functionality! So you can just go HAM on a dungeon crawl with your dance pad! Its sick! This game and studio, Brace Yourself Games, will be one to watch! Fresh is the name of the game!

PAX east was truly a wonderful experience this year, and will continue to be in all the years to come! Set your calendars now because the tickets to next years is going to sell out faster then the Mountain Dew at in the soda machine! If you like games at all this is the place to be!