The PAX East 2024 Experience

Every year in Boston, Massachusetts, tens of thousands of gamers of all kinds gather to celebrate, explore and experience the glory of gaming at PAX East. This year’s conference was held March 21–24 and was smaller, yet livelier than last year’s, and just as fun and exciting.

The concept of PAX is to “welcome home” gamers to a safe and inclusive space, one that features not only videogames both large and small but also tabletop experiences ranging from Dungeons and Dragons to horror experiences and everything in between.

PAX in general is a special event and one that caters to the consumers of the gaming world rather than developers, media or publishers. While I am there as a media representative, aside from a few small situations I experience the show just like every other attendee and that makes it truly special.

PAX East covers such a wide array of activities and areas that it can often be overwhelming. But if you plan out your week, there is so much varied content to experience. Knowing what to look for is a big part of getting the most out of the event.

Gaming Expo Hall

The first thing you will experience as you head into the massive Expo Hall in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center is the wide array of booths featuring videogames and similar experiences. This year at PAX East, the vast majority featured smaller independent games, but major players like Larian, Nintendo, Pokemon and Square Enix had presences too.

Wandering this part of the Hall can be a tad overwhelming to the senses as there is so much to see and do, so I always suggest that on the first day you just walk around and note what looks interesting. While I had many appointments already booked, by simply walking around I was able to pick a number of experiences I would come back to later in the conference.

There were games covering all genres and styles, as well as some from schools, and others that were very experimental. As major players like Sony and Microsoft were not there, there were few AAA gaming experiences, but that was OK as there were so many amazing games to check out. Keep an eye on this site as I will be discussing many of them in future articles.

Tabletop Expo Hall

Just past the Gaming section is a equally massive and diverse tabletop area. Here there are rows of tables to use for on-demand tabletop matches, and also an opportunity to enter tournaments in all sorts of board, TCG and RPG games.

The Tabletop focus at PAX is one of its major differentiators, helping to make it a truly remarkable experience. There is nothing like wandering away from the videogame section and getting a chance to demo a new tabletop experience or join some friends for a Magic the Gathering or Lorcana match or tournament.

There are vendors selling or demoing games as well as organized tournaments which reward players with prizes. Games like Dungeons and Dragons, Lorcana and MTG are featured here, but there are literally hundreds of experiences to choose from that make this area one that can be visited over and over again.

While the gaming Expo Hall shuts down at 6pm each night, Tabletop is open till midnight (except Sunday) which allows people to hunker down, borrow a game, join a tournament, and just play all night. This is an incredible feature of PAX East and one that everyone should experience.

Panels and Concerts

Although there are hundreds of videogames and tabletop experiences to check out on the show floor, the real bulk of content at PAX East is in the form of the varied panels and events hosted between 10am and midnight each day.

Panels, speedrun tourneys, Jackbox play events, handheld tournaments, retrogaming lounges and more are around every corner. The days and weeks leading up to PAX have an ever-expanding schedule to peruse in the PAX NAV App, where all of these great experiences can be reviewed and added to an agenda.

Panels run the gamut of topics, from “Behind the Scenes: 28 Years of EverQuest Development” and “Careers in the Game Industry Part 1: Getting in the Door” to “Video Game Tinder: Swiping on Our Favorite Characters” and “In this Economy?!” (another frank discussion on being a content creator).

These varied panels look at all aspects of being a gamer, whether it be how to get into the industry or being an LGTBQ+ person in this complex environment. The sheer depth and breadth of the panels can be staggering, but my advice is to look through the schedule and find what really clicks and attend those discussions; you don’t need to see and hear everything.

On top of all of this, there are concerts, hallway events, the Omegathon and an Acquisition Inc live session. The concerts always happen Thursday and Friday, and this year feature Pink Navel, Chipzel, Videri String Quartet, Insaneintherain, and Dom Palombi’s Game Night. The Acquisition Incorporated game happens Saturday night and the final of the Omegathon happens at the end of PAX East on Sunday night.

All of this amazing content literally guarantees a full and interesting PAX East for anyone. You could experience it as a chill exploration event, or as a jam-packed content overload; both are viable and available.

Everything But the Kitchen Sink

But wait, there’s more! On the show floor there are also vendors selling dice, RPGs, games, albums, toys, shirts, plushies and even coffee! All around the conference center cosplayers are wandering showing off their amazing costume creations.

There are foodtrucks inside and outside with many options to choose from. This year there were even Mountain Dew and Dunkin’ booths, which I found hilarious.

There is also a scavenger hunt called PAX XP that allows con goers to wander around (encouraging exploration) and find all the QR codes to scan. Handheld lounges, a beer lounge, and escape rooms were also available to enjoy.

Bottom line: Even outside of the conference proper, there is so much to do and enjoy at PAX East. This yearly event is a fantastic way to converge with like-minded people, geek out, and have a tremendous amount of fun.