This year we stayed with the rest of the Mesa Mundi team in Norwood (about 25 miles out of town) and rode with them to and from the convention. We got to spend a lot more time with them this year and even met Toby and Rebecca’s kids. It felt more like we were members of the team.

See all the pictures of the Mesa Mundi booth.

As usual, we had one touch table and 1/4 of the booth to use to run our games. We were busy all the time. Convention goers were always quick to step up to play a game though lines were rare. It is hard to describe how big this convention is. The expo hall was expanded this year and there are 255 exhibitors. When the convention is running it takes 5-10 minutes just to walk from one end to the other and there are always people walking by or checking out the booth.

We mostly played Pair Soup and Dungeon Raiders along with quite a bit of Fas Jack and Got It. But we played most of our quick games at some point during the weekend. The new games – 20 Questions Wrong and Egyptian Ratslap, were popular among the competitive groups. We also had some very competitive Pair Soup groups. One group from 2014 came back to set a high score. They set a great score, but they were blown away by a new group that stopped by a couple times on Sunday.

This year we had a new game launcher that was full screen and looked more professional. A combination of that and having eight new games changed people’s reaction to our table. After finishing an intro game and dropping back to the launcher, people often commented at the quantity of games available. I don’t know if that will turn into any touch table sales but it did seem to help people’s opinion of spending $4000 on a gaming system.

We didn’t get out to see much of the rest of the convention. Bill got a ring from CritSuccess. Also nearby was a board game booth selling Pixel Glory. Bill bought the game and talked to the creator about making a touch conversion. He was familiar with Mesa Mundi and our other board game conversions from Gen Con, and was excited to see his game converted. I guess it wasn’t new this year, but this was the first time we saw the “Condom against Humanity” from the “Cards against Humanity” booth.

While it didn’t snow much at while we were in town, Boston was still recovering from the blizzards. The parking lot at PAX had a 20-30 ft mountain of snow, but more impressive was the ubiquitous hedge of snow next to the roads. It was around 6 feet tall all along every road we saw. There were cut outs for the driveways and parking lot entrances. It was difficult to spot the entrances to stores and to see traffic when pulling out onto the roads.

I always feel a little out of place in the exhibit hall at PAX. The exhibit space is not cheap and the exhibitors, including Mesa Mundi, have spent a lot of money to be there. While we are selling games, we aren’t really expecting/needing to make a living from it. So there is a dissonance between how the other exhibitors are behaving/feeling, what the convention goers are expecting, and what we are doing. This year, one of the other exhibitors openly expressed confusion about why we had created so many games – many of them freeware or not for sale – for such a small market. We are excited to just get some positive feedback from attendees and one or two sales, while other booths are trying to sell some number of units to break even, and other booths are just staffed by employees of a big company.

We were on a 60″ table using the new SensaTouch IR sensor and modular wooden table frame. It did mean that we were standing all weekend, but it was actually easier than sitting and leaving over to touch the coffee-table sized screen we were on last year.

From the time the hall opened at 10, till it closed at 6, we were always busy playing games. We mostly played Pair Soup because it is super easy and cooperative. People could walk up and join a game any time. By the end of the weekend we had played 160 games of Pair Soup. That adds up to about 13 hours! We were really glad to have the new tile sets.

There was an overhead walkway above us, and many people stopped at our booth saying that they had seen the game from above and had to try it out. We also played quite a bit of Fas’Jack, Dungeon Raiders, Got It and Yacht with people who stuck around for a second or third game.

We played several games of Fire Platoon and people seemed to enjoy it. People didn’t have trouble learning the game and controls and the tablets worked well. The WiFi was much better than last year, but it was still hard for some people to connect to the game.

The other quadrants of the booth were occupied by d20 Pro; a system for running a role playing game, another game table running a fast paced competitive game called WhackIt, and a demo of the modular table system.

There are lots more pictures of PAX and a few of Boston in my gallery.

Machine code games was assigned one of the touch tables at the booth and we ran demos of our software. The booth was very busy and people were playing our games almost all the time. We were very happy with the reactions that we got from people. They seemed to really like the games and were always impressed with the touch hardware. You can see more pictures of the booth during PAX here.

All the vendors are in 1/2 of the 516,000 square foot expo hall. Even with all that space, the floor was crowded with a large portion of the 90,000 PAX attendees. Another 1/4 of the hall is used by the board game vendors and game tables and the PC free play area. The final 1/4 is for lines and a food court.

We arrived Thursday afternoon to help with the setup of the booth and to get our software running. This was the first time that we had seen Mesa Mundi’s new Monolith table. It is a very nice piece of hardware that combines a high end Samsung TV with a narrow IR touch sensor in a steel frame. It feels very solid and looks great. The picture is very good and the tempered glass means that touching the screen (even pressing firmly) doesn’t create any distortion in the picture.

Setup was fairly simple for the Mesa Mundi booth, but some of the larger vendors had large crews and rigging to assemble miniature buildings for their booths. We also saw the Intel people setting up the PC free-play area. This was a bank of 360 computers where attendees could play a wide variety of games.

When the expo hall opened on Friday, the line of people waiting to get in was huge. It was about 15 people wide and stretched back 500 feet. When the hall opened there was a mad rush of people to the big name games and vendors. They aren’t allowed to run so there was a lot of fast walking. During this rush to beat the lines, our booth was all but ignored. But it wasn’t long before the hall was full of people, and for the rest of the day the booth always had about 15 people checking out the tables.

We attracted people to our table with “Pair Soup“. It is a quick and easy cooperative game that made it less intimidating for people to come over and play. If they liked the game and seemed interested in seeing more, we would play “Fas Jack” or “Got It“. These games are competitive, but still pretty easy to learn. For most people, this was enough. They were ready to move on or to hear about the hardware itself. But some people wanted to keep playing. Over the course of the weekend we played all the games that were for sale (except Hansa Teutonica) many times. We even played a bunch of our incomplete games.

A lot of people were pleasantly surprised that the tables were for sale now, that they were running on windows PCs, and that most TVs can be converted to a multi touch table. I think that some people’s initial impression was that the table just ran MCG’s games. There was a lot of interest in the tables for both business and personal use. Some of the best reactions we saw were from people who had played our games for a while and said “I’d love to be able to run my D&D games on one of these.” When we pointed them to the next screen, which was running d20pro, they were so excited!

We were really happy to see how much people enjoyed and liked our games. We even gave an interview and signed autographs for someone collecting autographs from game developers. Several people commented about how great it was to be able to sit around a table and play games and a couple people said that it was the coolest thing at PAX. Considering that we were sharing the expo hall with huge game companies featuring their multi-million dollar titles, it was nice to see people interested in such a low budget production.

There were a couple of disappointments: We had hoped to demonstrate our system for transferring game controls to a phone, but we couldn’t get a WiFi network setup. We brought a wireless router along, but we couldn’t get a good connection even though we were just feet from it. I had also hoped that there would be more interest from board game players. I had expected some people to have heard of “Hansa Teutonica” and want to see the computer version, but that didn’t happen.

Overall it was a very good experience. We came back with a lot of ideas for improving our existing games and making new ones. We made contact with some interesting people and learned a lot about the state of the game industry.