UPS delivered the game a day early. That doesn’t make up for me being at the end of the list at the distribution center but it helps. I had Pax Pamir on my Christmas List last year and by the time my mom looked at the list, the game was sold out. Much to my surprise, there was a second printing being funded on Kickstarter a few months later and I didn’t miss it.
Pax Pamir is, from what I understand after reading and watching a video, a game where the players control factions on the board based on their loyalty to a faction. I watched a long video where a player who seemed behind the entire game won because he changed his loyalty at the end to a faction that had almost no markers on the board. It was weird and I’m sort of excited to play a weird game like this.
The game has a very interesting design. Beyond players simply building a tableau of cards, they also control armies, build roads, deploy spies, and a few other things. The armies are pieces that stand on end when they represent an army and are laid on their side across a border when they are a road. The spy pieces are also used as tribes, or something like that, when they are placed on the board but act as spies when placed on cards. The idea of reusing pieces like this is great because the game can then have a smaller number of better looking pieces.
I bought a small tube of antiquing paint and I’m going to rub it on the road/army pieces. This is commonly done in this game and I think it will make the game visually stunning. The picture below is not mine since I have not yet painted the pieces; It shows how cool they look with the paint wash on them. This printing comes with painted ruler tokens (the wood pieces) instead of the etched versions in earlier games. At least I won’t need to worry about how to paint the wood.
I’ll write a review of the game after I play it once or twice. I suspect that the game will go badly and make no sense the first time. Speaking of that, I need to write an update for my barrage game review – I got a chance to play it again and the other two players did much better than before; I did crappy and got 1/4 of the highest score.