I returned, once again, to the halls of PAX East this weekend! When I wasn’t just wandering around, reading RPG books, or running sessions at Games on Demand (two sessions each of A Stern Chase Is A Long Chase and Fabula Ultima this time) I was sitting down to try games out. In case you’re attending PAX East 2026 Sunday Edition, I’ve provided the booth numbers you can find these games at to peruse them, but by and large I expect this will be something for folks to follow up on afterwards – so please peruse the many fine and elegantly crafted links to these fine and elegantly crafted games!

re;MATCH – Booth: 12097

Brought to us by Brother Ming Games, re:MATCH is of the put-a-video-game-on-the-tabletop genre, like Retrograde from a few PAXi ago. In this case it’s a 1v1 fighting game, with unique characters and a falling marble puzzle-like mechanic.

In order to attack your opponent you pick red, yellow, or blue-colored balls out of the arcade machine – both players have one column that only they can pull from, and share the middle column. One ball moves for each color are pretty simple, and get the fans of that color (the kind that stand in the background of a fighting game) on your side. Two and three-ball moves are increasingly more complex and powerful, and the balls you pick have to be horizontally or vertically connected to one another when you pick them. If you have the same color of fan as the move you make, you get an additional bonus effect before resolving the move. Once the move is done, the balls are dropped back into the arcade, where they’ll fill the board back in.

The goal of the game is to deal ten damage to the opponent’s buttons, one of each color. When a button is broken its owner has to spend a coin to stay in the fight and loses access to the moves of that color, but can use balls of that color to link up scattered balls of the other colors. Doing so also heals the button, and doing that enough will eventually un-break it. If you can have enough of your opponent’s buttons broken at one time, or break one when they are out of coins to spend, you win the game.

A lot of the appeal is that every character plays differently. I had Trickster, who is all above placing cards face-down for a given color of button – if my opponent wanted to attack that button, they would have to flip the card over and take its effect. Sometimes that could be damage, sometimes it could be healing – because if they don’t go for it, I could either use it myself or discard it. A lot of Trickster’s moves involve discarding, getting back, or otherwise manipulating those cards, and the two-yellow Don’t Blink that deals damage per discarded card is what won me the match.

re:MATCH is currently live on Kickstarter until 3/31/26 and has fully funded – there are a fair number of campaign exclusives, including the glass marbles and acrylic standees pictured above (opaque plastic and cardboard are in the game’s future with the BM web store, I hear), and the base game will run you $99.

Buy the Vote! – Booth: 11114

Buy the Vote! is, in concept, exactly what it says on the tin – spending money to get votes and trying to become the President. Published by Coozies Games, it is a secret bidding game where you have to outthink and (strategically) outspend your opponents.

At the start of the first round three states are placed on the table, each one being worth a certain number of votes. Players then, within their little voting booth, place bids to gain them and then reveal their bids at the same time. A player bid the most? They get that state. If a state had no bids placed upon it then it stays on the table, and as more states get dealt it start to build an ever-more-valuable stack. There was a tie? The money still gets spent, and the state also stays on the table.

You start with a budget that has to last you several rounds before you get an influx of fresh cash – a flat amount plus bonus money for every state you control at that point. As more rounds go on, the total number of states available goes up. To make things even more complicated, several states are Swing States. Those are worth votes as well, but they also allow you to steal the most recently gained state from another player. In the demo I played through Swing States kept being slotted in right after big-value states like Texas, which caused chaos as we all tried to get lots of votes without getting them immediately stolen – California changed hands twice.

After the last round the votes get counted – if anyone got enough, they become the President, but if not two players can try to combine their votes and become co-winners as President and Vice-President.

It was a surprisingly tense and exciting game, and the best experience I’ve had involving an American presidential election in the last decade for sure.

The 2024 edition – the game gets updated with the most-recent electoral vote number and swing state status – can be found for $32.50 instead of the millions getting thrown around in-game.

Birdhouse – Booth: TT32A

The Unpublished Games Network (Unpub) section of a con is always worth checking out, because you’ll find games that are either fresh from the forges of game design or actively being pummeled upon the anvil. This time the Unpub table I was able to grab a seat at was for Birdhouse, appropriately brought to us by Goosepoop Games.

A card-based ‘stacking’ game for 2-4 players, the goal of Birdhouse is to build a Birdhouse with the most seeds. After choosing and placing your first piece, you spend each turn picking another piece and stacking it on the card below it, having to angle it to fit with lines on the piece below. Each part of the house has a certain number of seeds, and the most recently placed piece will also have some kind of bonus that will get you more based on the other traits of the cards in your house or the house overall: a certain number of angles, different environment types, how tall or short your house is, and so on. Don’t build your house at too sharp of an angle, though, or you’ll be hit with a penalty as gravity has its way with the Birdhouse.

Once the deck runs out of cards, the game is over and everyone counts up their seeds.

Birdhouse is launching on BackerKit 5/4/26 as part of Pocketopia, and with only 18 cards in the deck it certainly fits the event’s M.O. as being pocket-sized! You can give the project a follow here.

Cyberpunk Trading Card Game – Booth: 12087

WeirdCo is bringing us back to Night City, choom, with an official trading card game.

You don’t start play with a lot – you have three Legends that grant abilities and can even be sent out to fight, but once you know what they are you flip them face down and scramble them. These Legends can be Spent (tapped) as Eddies to pay for other cards, but that’s all they can do for now. Then you get six cards: Units that can be sent on runs, Gear that can be given to them, and Programs that have instant effects.

Every turn starts by drawing a card (simple enough) and gaining a Gig – you do that second one by grabbing one of the dice off to the side, rolling it, and adding to your zone of Gigs. What you rolled adds in to your Street Cred, which certain cards are going to need to trigger abilities. Once the card is drawn and the Gig is got, you unspend (untap) anything that was used up the last turn.

There are two once-a-turn options: you can ‘sell’ a card with an Eddy symbol to place it face down, creating more Eddies you can spend to play more cards in the future. You can also spend two Eddies to flip a Legend face up, putting their abilities into play and potentially even bringing them into the action. Finally, you can spend as many Eddies as you can/want to put more Units, Gear, and Programs into action.

The final part of your turn is sending your Units out to attack. By default they can’t attack on their first turn (although some Gear and abilities can change that), but you essentially have two choices – you can attack an opponent’s Units, but only the Spent ones, or you can steal a Gig. Attacking a Unit is a straightforward ‘who has the highest power’ showdown, while going after a Gig is just as easy – provided no enemy Unit can interfere, you steal the Gig and add it your own collection. If you get six Gigs, you’re about to win the game – your opponent has one turn to steal one back or otherwise acquire a sixth Gig of their own to trigger an overtime round.

It was a fairly easy game to pick up, there was some exciting back-and-forth, and my opponent and I were moments away from starting the last desperate turns to resolve a tie when we had to shake hands due to time – given that being taught the game, playing it, and pausing to ask the exhibitors a few question all took place in 30 minutes, that made for a lot of action in little time.

The Cyberpunk TCG is live on Kickstarter until 4/17/26 – the campaign looks, to me anyways, like it is geared more towards retailers with some very big and expensive tiers, but the basic tier where you get both a starter merc deck and a starter Arasaka deck is $49.

A Little Wordy – Booth: TT22A, TT22E, TT23A

Acquired at Battlegrounds rather than at a distinct booth of its own, A Little Wordy is a two-player game from Exploding Kittens with Scrabble vibes, but in reverse: you’re trying to figure out what word the other player has created. Each player gets a small stack of consonants and vowels and forms a word behind the screen. Once both have done so, written the word down via dry erase marker, and hidden it away, each player hands the other their entire collection of tiles.

Every turn a player can choose to either use a clue card or guess at the other’s secret word by assembling one out of tiles. Clue cards can involve figuring out the length of the word, which letters go where, and so on. Some Clue Cards will just get you some information. Some will involve a bit of give-and-take. All of them involve giving your opponent a certain number of berries.

If you can guess your opponent’s word and you have more berries than them, you win! If you have less berries than them, they have one more try to guess your word before you win; if both guesses are correct, then the tiebreaker is done first by who has the most berries, and then by a quick who-can-assemble-a-new-word-fastest face-off.

It’s fast, has a fair bit of replay value with the different clues, and is pretty accessible in coinage at $14.99.

Gravitas – Booth: 10091

Gravitas here is, I suppose, technically an honorable mention because I didn’t get to play it myself. This is entirely down to the fact that, despite making an effort across two days worth of the con to swing by as often as possible, the game was too popular for me to squeeze my way in to the booth proper. However, it’s just kind of neat, so I thought I should give it some page space!

The ‘original Vermont stone-stacking game’, Gravitas is about stacking these hand-crafted stones – each one has a number value, and you roll a 1d6 to determine which one(s) you need to add to the stone base or the growing tower of stones. Any stones that fall or touch the table get added to your collection, and the goal is to successfully place your final stone before anyone else can.

There are two, four, and six-player versions of the game ranging from $29 to $139, some of which are travel-friendly. If you make it to the booth, awesome, but you can also find them all here – there’s a discount both at the booth and online until midnight tonight 3/29/26.

Zero-Day: Genesis Bleed – Booth: TT11B

You didn’t think there wouldn’t be any TTRPGs in this roundup, did you? Part of PAX Together, Zero-Day: Genesis Bleed is a game-within-a-game, er, game. No, it’s not like DIE, where you are playing a character who is now inside of the game they were playing. Instead, you’re playing a character in the ‘real’ world and their MMORPG avatar, with different character sheets for each. Depending on how things are going you might be playing through game events as their Avatars or tangling with the AI breaking out into reality as the players – either embracing it with game abilities or pushing back against it with real-world skills.

Another honorable mention – I didn’t get to be a TTRPG player this weekend – but it’s definitely one that I’m going to be following up on.

You can go here to follow the Kickstarter pre-launch page and find links to the Discord and playtest document!

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Alright, that’s it for now – I have a lot more reading to do and some games to play, but I’m home for the day and desperately need to rest. Next time, no 9pm Games on Demand start times for me. What games did you come across at PAX East that were worth a look?

I’ll see you there next year!