I went to the Board Game Night at Comic Quest on
Thursday. The turnout was much larger
than I expected with 30 people being there. Much of this had to do with Paradise Perks, a
local coffee shop which also hosted a Thursday night game event closing its
doors after five years. At least six
people that used to attend Paradise Perks regularly attended this week’s Comic
Quest event. There were six games being
played at any one time.
The ending of the Paradise Perks event was also the second
blow to the Orange County gaming community after Monday Night Gameing with
Marieke ended the previous week. Even
though I had not been to either event in quite a while, I know that both of
them will be missed.
I played two games at this event.
The first game was No Thanks. No Thanks is a simple quick play card game
that is a great filler game. It consists
of a deck of cards that a numbered in sequence 3 to 35 and 55 red plastic
chips. At the start of the game each
player is given 11 chips. The deck of
cards is shuffled and nine cards are removed from the deck face down. The remaining cards are placed in the center
of the playing area. The players then
turn over one card. The first player
decided whether to keep the card or pass it on to the next player. If the player passes on the card they place
one of their chips on it and play continued on to the next player.
This continues until the card is taken by one of the
players. That player also takes all of
the chips that are on top of the card. Then
the next card is revealed and the process begins again until the deck runs out
of cards. If a player ever runs out of
chips then they must take the card that is face up.
The way the game is scored is that the player adds up the
numbers on the cards. If a player has a
number of cards that are in a sequence then they only add the lowest number in
the sequence to their score. The player
then subtracts one point per chip they have remaining from this score. The player with the lowest score wins. The game is usually played for three rounds
in order to even out the scores.
This time instead of playing a three round game we played a
single round. The strategy I used was to
wait to take a card until the number of chips was at least half the number of
the value on the card. I would then use
this card as the anchor with which to build my later purchases on.
I took my only card during the game early on. It was 23 with 12 chips on it. These 12 chips in addition to the 11 I
received at the beginning of the game were enough to let me survive the rest of
the game without taking another card. I
was fortunate in that the person that was playing before me was taking the
cards around the one I had and that no one seemed to want to get too greedy and
send cards around to soak up more chips.
I ended the game with two chips and a score of 21. This was not enough to get me the win though
as the winner had only 17 points.
The other game I played was Airlines Europe. Airlines Europe is an economic game were the
players collect stocks from the different airlines that are available in the
game. The value of the stocks increase based on how well the routes of the
airlines are developed by the players in the game. The more development that occurs for an
airline the more valuable the stock becomes.
The players gain victory points based on how much of a stock they own in
the airlines and how valuable the stock is.
If the player owns the most stock in a certain airline they gain the
most victory points based on the valuation, the player that owns the second
most, gets the second most victory point.
I started the game with a hand of stocks with a number of
duplicates stocks in them, which can be a good thing when playing the game
because it can give you an idea on which airlines you should focus your early
efforts on. I placed my two initial
shares out and then allowed a strategy to unfold. I decided that I would work on improving the
airline that I was holding shares in that was highest in value as a
priority. I would then pick up either a
stock that was the most improved or one from the top of the stock deck after I
completed the improvement. In this way I
hoped to diversify my holdings into the top scoring airlines. I would ignore the Air Abacus shares until
after the first scoring round as well and use only the weakest of the airlines
to get the shares.
The strategy worked out fairly well. I also managed to time my share placement
well only missing putting out the shares I wanted during one of the scoring
rounds. I managed to tie for second
place in points but lost the tie breaker which was the number of Air Abacus shares
that were owned by the players and came in third place.
My stats for the event:
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