After Action Report – Board Game Night @ Comic Quest, May 1, 2014

I decided to go to Board Game Night at Comic Quest this week instead of Paradise Perks for a change of pace.  It had been a while since I had attended that event and I wanted to see if anything had changed.

There were 15 people in attendance at the event and four games were being played at any one time.  Unfortunately only one table actually had board games being played.  At the rest of the tables miniature games were being played.  That is not a problem to me because I feel that it is good to see any tabletop games being played but if the majority of games are not board games on a board game might maybe the name of the event should be changed.

I was able to play four games during the event.

The first game was Ingenious.  Ingenious is a tile laying game where the player score points based on the number of like colored spaces that they can connect to the tile they place.  If they maximize the score of one of the six colors they get an extra turn.  It is important not to concentrate on a single color or group of colors too much because the player’s final score is based on their lowest score in a color.

I was able to do much better this time than I did last time.  I was able to consistently have a set of tiles that had all six of the colors so I was not leaving one color too far behind the others.  I was able to get a good score and cut the other player in the game off from being able to get more of their lowest color scored and managed to come in first out of two players.

The second game of the event was Bazaar.  In Bazaar the players are gem traders trying to fulfill gem orders from demand cards in competition with the other players.  They do this by using two trading boards that represent the exchange rates for the market.  For example one red gem can be traded for two blue gems.  The players use the exchange to fulfill the demand cards as efficiently as possible to maximize their points.

In a two player game they way I like to go is to try and turn in sets as often as possible without regard to how many gems I may have left.  I figure that it is more important to run out of cards as fast as possible and even if the other player can get one or two good scores I can make it up in volume.  It looked like this was working in this game even with the other player making a couple of good scores I was able to keep up in score.  Unfortunately the game went a little too long and they were able to lurch ahead of me at the end of the game and in second place.

The third game was The Hanging Gardens.  The theme in the Hanging Gardens is that the players are architects in ancient Babylonia that are trying to design the best monument in the city.  As they complete areas of their monuments, they are given rewards that are worth victory points.  The more of any type of tile a player can get the more victory points the tile is worth. 

It is a game that has tile placement and set collection elements in it.  The players take turns adding tiles which are actually cards divided into six sections.  1 – 3 of the sections will have features on them that the player needs to combine in groups of 3 or more sections.  Once a player gets a large enough group of tiles together, he can then earn tiles that score points depending on the number of similar tiles he collects.  The larger the section the player can build before scoring it the more options the player will have in scoring tiles.  The player must then block one of the spaces in the section they scored with a temple.  This space is blocked and cannot be covered with a new card.

I had been over six months since I played the game the last time so I was a bit rusty going into it.  I tried to score areas as quickly as possible unfortunately most of the sets I was scoring were under the special six spaces that give you the extra tiles.  This meant that I was doing gathering tiles the hard way.  The other player was able to build up to six space areas and getting the extra tiles.  So while I was moving my temples more often and score areas more frequently they were keeping up on tile count.  When the game ended I was one point behind the other player and ended the game in second place.

The final game I played at the event was Blue Moon City.  Blue Moon City is the sequel to Blue Moon.  The players are trying to rebuild the city of Blue Moon after the devastating battles that took place there in Blue Moon.  The players contribute to the rebuilding of the neighborhoods by using the proper colored cards once the all the contribution spots on a neighborhood tile are filled in, the players that contributed to the rebuilding are rewarded with various items including cards, crystals, and dragon scales.  The crystals can be used to rebuild the obelisk in the center of the city.  Once a player completes the number of sections in the obelisk based on the number of the players in the game, they win the game.

We were able to finally get a third player to play with us for this game.  I decided to keep with the strategy of trying to be in on as many builds as possible.  I was the third player so I was able to follow behind the starting player and take the site from them getting the bonus for the first two turns until my cards changed enough so that I needed to go off on my own.  One thing that I noticed about a third of the way into the game was that the dragons were not being summoned to the building sites that often so that the extra crystals that come from the dragons scales were not being distributed that much.  In fact we were only able to get those distributions twice during the game.  This would cause us to get an infrequently occurring end to the game.  The game ends in one of two ways.  The first is that one of the players places enough crystals into the monolith at the center of the city.  The other ending which we had was that all of the districts in the city were rebuilt without one of the players getting the win.  This was what happened in this game.  What was worse is that we had a three way tie and had to break that by determining who had the most crystals left over.  That gave me the win in the game.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Ingenious	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	1.00
Bazaar	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.00
The Hanging Gardens	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.00
Blue Moon City	1	1	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Totals	4	2	2	-	-	-	-		-	1.50