I attended the Board Game Night at Comic Quest on
Thursday. There were not as many people
there as normal this week. I believe
this had something to do with Comic Con having started. Since Comic Con is a fairly local event (San
Diego is about an hour drive from Orange County.), many of the locals go to the
event. There were about 20 people at the
game night this time.
I was able to play three games.
The first game I played was Trans America. Trans America is a game that is deceptively
easy to learn but is very difficult to master.
In Trans America the players are required to connect up five different
cities in different regions of the United States. The players start building track from their
starting post. If they connect up to
another player’s track, they can build off of that player’s track as well as
their own. In this way players wind up
helping each other out while trying to achieve their own goals.
An event regular that I introduced the game to a couple of
months ago requested that I bring Trans America this time because he wanted me
to show his fiancée how to play the game.
Since I like to encourage people to play games I naturally did this.
The game ended up being rough for me. During the first round I after I got my set
of cards I thought that I would have an easy round. Three of the cities I had
were clumped in the southwest with two cities in out laying areas. Unfortunately, I was only able to get to four
of the five of my cities and was four spaces away from my last city when the
round ended.
The second round was not much better for me. I had two cities in the northwest, a city in
the northeast and a city in the southeast.
I was able to get to all of them but one and ended up two away from the
last city.
The third round is where I fell apart. I only connected two of my five cities by the
end of the round fortunately I was very close to the other three cities and so
I only lost four points but it was still a bad end to the game for me. I ended up the third place out of four
players.
The second game I played was Lost Cities: The Board Game. In Lost Cities: the Board Game the players
are trying to complete archeological expeditions. The farther along on an expedition track a
player gets, the more points they score.
The player must be careful when starting an expedition because if they
do not move at least four spaces on that track they will lose points.
The players move along the track by playing out cards in the
color of the expedition in front of them in ascending order. The deck of cards has five colors. Each color has two cards ranging from 0 to
10. When a player plays a card in front
of them it cannot be lower than the last card they played in that color. Each time the player places a card in front
of them they move their explorer up the expedition track. As an alternative they players may discard a
card that can be picked up later may other players instead of drawing from the
deck.
The round ends when 5 player tokens are moved 7 or more
spaces up the expedition track or when the deck of cards is depleted.
On each expedition track there are bonus tokens available
that give out extra points, allow the player to move an extra space up the
track, or give the player a monument.
The monuments are worth additional points at the end of the game.
The first round of the game was a pretty good one. I chose to try to complete three
expeditions. It ended up that I chose
poorly on which expedition to put my big guy on and had to spend most of the
round getting him into a strong scoring position. This made me zero out on the other two
expeditions but I managed to get some good bonus points from the expedition
tracks and ended the round in second place.
I managed to have a horrible second round. I tried to complete three expeditions this
time as well. Again I chose the wrong
expedition to put my big guy on and was not able to move up very far on the
track. I just got him into positive
territory by the end of the round and other expeditions did not do much better
and I ended up with 25 points but I managed to get a bunch of idols of end of
game scoring.
In the third round I changed things up a bit. I focused my
efforts on getting the card for two expedition tracks. This worked out a lot better for me. I was able to get most of the cards I needed
to complete the expedition I chose to work on with my big guy before I even put
him on the board. I was able to get a
great score for the round and collect enough idols so I got a small bonus. This was not enough to offset the horrible
second round I had and I ended up in second place out of four players.
The final game of the night 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.
It looks like No Thanks has become my go to filler game at this
point. It is probably because I have
gotten in the habit of taking the games I bring out of my bag so that the card
games now get noticed more.
During this game of No Thanks I did fairly well. I did not manage to get stuck with too many
points at the end of the three rounds even though during the second round I did
take the 33, but I managed to offset it with the chips I got for taking it plus
the others I got by the end of that round.
Even though I managed things very well I only ended up in second place
out of four players. A win in this game
as eluded me since I started playing it again.
Maybe I will get it next time.
My stats for the event:
No comments :
Post a Comment