More than 100,000 people filtered through the Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center in Boston for PAX East 2026 this past weekend. The show floor was packed with dozens upon dozens of vendors that seemed well split between tabletop games and video games. Some of the biggest spectacles, like Pokémon Champions, had painfully long wait times. But for every major vendor with long lines, there were at least 10 smaller games attendees could play after signing up.
Despite spending the majority of the weekend onsite, I feel like I couldn’t even get to everything I wanted to try. That said, here’s a look at the five best tabletop games I played at PAX East 2026.
1
Magic: The Gathering booth activities
My first stop when I arrived onsite was Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering booth, which was split up into four experiences. Next to a shop selling the So Salty Secret Lair, attendees could take a brief quiz to see what Magic color was best for their playstyle. (Naturally, I got green.) Nearby, a bunch of tables were set up for rolling casual play. I play a lot of Magic, but rarely with strangers. Actually shuffling up with a few randos was a fun experience, to say the least.
On the other side of the Magic booth was a photo op environment spotlighting the upcoming Secrets of Strixhaven set. And another quiz! This one sorted you into one of the colleges at Strixhaven. While I cooked the results on my color assignment so I’d get a green deck, I took this one honestly and got Silverquill.
Perhaps my favorite experience at the booth was nearby: groups were seated around tables and given a free play booster pack. But instead of Secrets, it was from 2021’s Strixhaven: School of Mages. Four strangers and myself ripped our packs and then played a thematic variation on Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity. We played five rounds. In one, we had to pick a creature to be our partner in a tag-team battle. In another, we had to select a spell as our trump card to defeat a bully. (I managed to have the Expel card which drew a lot of laughs from the table.) The winner received a second free pack. It felt like a pretty fun way to rip packs and is something I would absolutely try with friends.
2
Riftbound: Unleashed
Though I’ve collected a number of cards from the Riftbound: Spiritforged set, I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to learn how to play until I sat down with senior game designer Jon Moormann for a tutorial matchup. He ran a preconstructed Vex deck, and I had one focused on Vi throwing lots of big punches — both from the upcoming Unleashed set..
Coming into the experience as a longtime Magic: The Gathering player, the game immediately clicked — at least on a conceptual level. The Vi deck has a “go big and smash” strategy focused on stacking might. As your legend, her core ability lets you pay two energy and one fury rune to double her might, an ability you can use as many times as you can afford to obliterate anything in her path. Midway through our match, I was able to buff her to 24 might, which allowed me to bulldoze through a major threat.
What I found most striking about Riftbound is the focus on fighting over locations rather than the more generic battlefield of Magic. You don’t win by attacking your opponent directly. You accrue points by conquering and holding battlefields, which makes for a very different strategic experience. Spending valuable runes to buff Vi was fun — and it could have been game-winning in Magic — but in hindsight it felt like a misstep in Riftbound. If we’d had the time for a rematch, I might have come closer to winning. Ultimately, even losing left me eager to try again.
3
Godzilla: The Roleplaying Game
The Kickstarter campaign for the Godzilla: The Roleplaying Game ends later this week, and it already smashed through its fundraising goal to earn more than $210,000. After my meaty two-hour playtest session at PAX East 2026, I’m beginning to see why. The game is based on the IDW Comics series in which prolonged kaiju activity led to the discovery of Kai-Se energy that essentially transforms some people into superheroes. We assumed the role of G-Force recruits sent on a mission to investigate a remote facility in the desert. It was attacked by Godzilla some time ago, but a recent surge in Kai-Se energy coincided with the disappearance of the clean-up crew.
Playing the Godzilla TTRPG feels a lot like playing post-apocalyptic sci-fi Dungeons & Dragons. But rather than rolling dice, it utilizes an intuitive suit-based system with a traditional deck of playing cards. It also emphasizes roleplaying first and mechanics second. Our DM (Deck Master rather than Dungeon Master) encouraged us to describe what we wanted to do based on our characters’ kits, selecting which abilities, gear, and traits we wanted to use to boost our attempt. But traits like Imaginative and abilities like Tactical Awareness are broad enough in most cases that they can apply to all sorts of things.
For fans of the Godzilla franchise, especially those who love the IDW Comics, this feels like a really approachable game for those who are curious about TTRPGs but haven’t taken the plunge into D&D yet.
4
Slay the Spire: The Board Game
With Slay the Spire 2 still dominating Steam charts, the Downfall expansion for Slay the Spire: The Board Game is crushing it on Kickstarter, having raised over $4.7 million with more than a week left to go. Despite the game’s modest footprint on the PAX East show floor, it saw a lot of action.
Before the video game sequel launched with co-op, the board game was the only way to experience multiplayer Slay the Spire — and that remains its strongest selling point. Discovering all the broken combos in a character’s expanding deck makes it engaging, and working together to do exactly that becomes an absolute delight as you’re giggling alongside a real person at the table.
You’re still progressing up the Spire with the same familiar map, fighting your way through the rooms and selecting various upgrades. But in the board game, some of the more complicated mechanics like Vulnerable and Poison are simplified through the use of tokens. It’s seriously impressive that the board game adaptation works as well as it does. The video game can feel very complex at times, but because it’s all automated, it’s manageable. Making it work on the tabletop should have been impossible, yet Contention Games made so many thoughtful adjustments to pull it off.
5
Cyberpunk TCG
The Cyberpunk TCG from WeirdCo Games is on the cusp of becoming the highest-funded tabletop-based Kickstarter of all time, so going into PAX East, it was toward the top of my list of must-play games. And it did not disappoint. Though Alpha playtest sessions were kept to a brisk 30 minutes, that gave me just enough time to almost win.
Each deck has three Legends — the most powerful and distinguished members of your crew. For me that was Jackie Welles; the ripperdoc Viktor Vektor; and V, Corporate Exile. For anyone with a lot of enthusiasm for the broader franchise or the Cyberpunk 2077 video game specifically, the Cyberpunk TCG is a dream come true. The game even features characters from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which is an added bonus. Part of what makes the Pokémon TCG so wildly popular is because of the connection people have to the characters. Lorcana also has that going for it. Whereas a game like Magic relies more on card mechanics to drive enthusiasm for specific cards.
Cyberpunk TCG seems to be aiming for a blend of both.
Your Legends act as anchors for your strategy, while the rest of your deck builds out your crew with Units that you buff with Gear. Over the course of the match, you’re completing Gigs, gaining Street Cred, and trying to stockpile enough Gigs to meet the win condition. Your Gigs take the form of various dice sizes that you roll at the start of each round, and you can steal an opponent’s Gigs by hitting an opponent directly. The whole thing feels intuitive enough that even for a first match, it felt like my opponent and I were both executing on meaningful strategies. That’s usually a good sign for a new game. More importantly, I whined a bit when we ran out of time because I wanted to keep going. So far, the Cyberpunk TCG feels like more than a Kickstarter success story. It might just have some real staying power at the table.
