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    Teasers for Indie Games Night Market at PAX Unplugged 2025

    tonyheth Posted on

    by W. Eric Martin

    PAX Unplugged 2025 takes place on Nov. 21-23 in Philadelphia, and among the 400+ listings on BGG’s PAXU 2025 Preview are multiple listings for independent productions that will be available solely at Indie Games Night Market, which takes place at 19:00 on Saturday, Nov. 22.

    As organizer Daniel Newman writes on the IGNM page of his New Mill Industries website:

    The event will feature 30 designers with small tables (listed below), selling games that would otherwise have had no channel for purchase. The intention was to feature games that have not been signed by publishers, had no intention to go on Kickstarter, and may otherwise not be available. This is meant to be an outlet for interesting ideas that may not have wide appeal.

    ▪️ Let’s sample a few of these titles, starting with Mac McAnally‘s This Is Not a Game About a Pipe, a trick-taking game inspired by René Magritte’s painting, “The Treachery of Images”.

    The deck has four suits — pipe, card, trick, and winning — with cards valued 1-12. More importantly, each card has a partial sentence such as “This ______ a pipe” or “This ______ winning” near the bottom of its face and either “is” or “is not” near the top.

    When you lead to a trick, you use two cards, with the top card indicating the suit and the bottom card completing the sentence. If you lead with a card in the “winning” suit, for example, you must flip around the second card (which can be any suit) underneath the winning card so that the sentence will read “This is winning”. After all, you’re leading to the trick, so your card is currently winning that trick. The value of your play is the sum of the two cards played.

    Players must follow suit, if possible, and someone playing a lower-valued card in the winning suit must make their sentence read “This is not winning”.

    The other suits have their own quirks: Card must always have “This is a card” for its sentence since indeed the item played is a card. Pipe, as you might expect, must have “This is not a pipe”. Trick is “This is not a trick” unless it’s the final card in the trick, in which case “This is a trick”.

    I’m a fan of surrealism, so I’ve purchased a copy of the game, but have yet to play since I haven’t had the right group at the table yet. Gameplay seems like it might be tedious thanks to the card flipping and the need to choose two cards for each trick, but as I said, I’m a fan of surrealism, so I’m game to give it a try. (“Un Chien Andalou” is a mesmerizing film, but one viewing was enough.)

    ▪️ Marceline Leiman participated in the initial IGNM in 2024 with High Tide, and she’s back with a new title from her Roly Poly Games line: Heavenly Bodies.

    Here’s an overview of this two-player card game:

    Inspired by classic card games like Gin Rummy and Koi-Koi, in Heavenly Bodies players meld three or more cards in sets and runs, aiming to pass thresholds for each suit in order to score points. Each turn, players may either draw two cards from a shared deck, then discard a card to either of two discard piles OR draw all the cards of either discard pile, melding any that they can into sets, then taking the remaining as penalty cards.

    Once players have melded cards, with the number of cards depending on the suit, they score points. Each suit in the game — planet, moon, comet, and star — has a different composition of ranks based on a pyramid, and card thresholds worth different amounts of points.

    Each hand is a race to 5 points. Once a player reaches 5 points, they can stop the current hand and collect one star fragment OR “Nova” and push their luck to reach 10 points before their opponent reaches 5. If they Nova successfully, they collect two star fragments; if not, their opponent collect one star fragment instead.

    Whoever collects four star fragments first wins.

    ▪️ Taylor Shuss debuted in 2022 with Stonewall Uprising, and like Leiman he’ll release his second title at IGNM, with Fold & Fly! being “a short family-style game for 2-50 players.”

    Here’s how Shuss describes the game: “Each round, players fold lines on their airplane templates, then throw towards the finish line! Will your airplane make it past the finish line first? Or will a rival craft an even more aerodynamic machine? Or will planes collide — dashing hopes in the process!”

    ▪️ Jamie Sabriel and Triple Rainbow Games will have the two-player game Fight Sequence, which features a fun concept:

    Fight Sequence is a tactical reverse action-programming dueling game about psychics THINKING about fighting! Players build sequences of attacks and responses that resolve in reverse order, representing the ebb and flow of a theoretical fantasy fight scene two psychics are projecting into each other’s minds. Planning your own moves isn’t the only key to victory; you’ll also use your psychic and magical abilities to manipulate when — or IF — actions resolve!

    Players select one of the four characters in a diverse cast of psychic combatants, using their unique skill sets to emerge victorious. Every character deck has its own strengths and weaknesses, with a depth of tactical play that ensures no two fights are the same.

    ▪️ Justin at YouTube channel Board Game Animal has previewed more than a dozen of the IGNM titles that will be available at PAXU 2025:

    Youtube Video

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    tonyheth
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