Space-Cast! #37. Pax Relationships
In her second-ever appearance on the Space-Cast!, today we’re joined by Matilda Simonsson, designer of hand-crafted games Turncoats and Pax Penning! As we discuss her second hit, we also delve into why she decided to create an entry in the Pax Series, the difficulty of writing history, and how every single historical board game except hers is wrong to use coins as their primary form of currency.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
TIMESTAMPS
1:50 — introducing Pax Penning
7:44 — why the Pax Series?
22:40 — making history: coins vs. currency
46:64 — theses both intentional and unintentional
58:02 — chess pieces and component limitations
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Posted on May 20, 2024, in Board Game, Podcast and tagged Board Games, Milda Matilda Games, Pax Penning, The Space-Biff! Space-Cast!. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
SPACE-BIFF! 
Great interview Dan, as usual. I really enjoy how interesting it is to hear two people speak about a game I have very little chance to play and yet being able to enter the “mind-space” of said game. You certainly know how to pick your guests! Thank you.
Talking about the Pax series, is there a way to listen to the seven episodes of the previous Space-cast? They don’t seem to be available anywhere anymore.
Thanks for the kind words, Chips. Sadly, those episodes are long gone. I have them on an old hard drive somewhere, but there’s no real chance that I’ll dig them out again.
Man I’m so eager to try this one. We’re exploring the world of Pax games with our group and we really appreciate the wild sandbox it provides, tricking each other to twist the winning conditions in their favor.
Welcome to the journey!
I wonder how dependent this one is on the group playing it. We tried it a few days ago and found it didn’t really land for us. Perhaps we were just too cautious!
No-one wanted to “lose” their stones from Sigtuna to other people, so these gradually diminished until the dice we had available were very limited. This meant few pairs, so little agency. The roads became blocked quite quickly, and a thegn’s victory was well out of reach as the silver never moved from the bottom of the hierarchy and never flipped. In the end, it was a jarl’s victory for the player who happened to be placed at the top of the hierarchy at the start. The positions had changed once, and changed back, but no more pairs came up.
It’s probably group-dependent to some degree (everything is!), but something similar happened to us in our first couple of plays. After a while, we loosened up a bit. There’s some cool stuff you can do to ameliorate holding other houses’ stones, such as building runes for them in out-of-the-way spots, putting other factions’ stones in Sigtuna for commerce, etc. With more plays, it’s also more common to take pawn actions as a delaying tactic, which results in more stones in Sigtuna. Maybe give it another try. I’ve found that people need a session or two to warm to it. Once that point hits, it’s a powerful little game.