After Action Report – Board Game Night @ Comic Quest, May 8, 2014

I went to Board Game Night at Comic Quest again this week.  They are supporting the new Meetup group that we created with space for events so I want to support their store events as much as possible.

There were 25 people at the event with six games being played at any one time.  The number of miniatures versus board games was much more balanced than last week with three of each being played.

I was able to play two games at the event.

The first game I played 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 played the game with two other players this time.  The strategy I used was a refinement of the one I used the last time I played.  The idea behind the strategy is to concentrate early on in the game on reaching the top of one of the colors as quickly as possible and once I have done this work on moving my lowest color as often as possible.

In order to be able to do the first step effectively you need to focus you efforts on whichever color the other players in the game are working on.  In my case I was able to get people to work on purple so I was able to build that color up along with others that they were placing.  During the second step, I went off on my own more.  At one point in the game I had none of my lowest color so instead of waiting to see if I could draw my way out of it, which killed me in a game a couple of weeks ago, I immediately replaced all of my tiles.  This helped me get into the lead and I was able to win the game.

The other game I played 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.

I played the game two player again this time.  I focused capturing cards as quickly as possible at first but then I started to fall behind so I changed things up a bit.  I focused my efforts on getting cards with as few gems left as possible and went after the higher value cards.  Doing this I was able to get myself into the lead taking two cards.  I maintained the lead throughout the rest of the game and won.

My stats for the event: