After Action Report – Thursday Night Gaming @ Paradise Perks, May 9, 2013

Thursday Night Gaming at Paradise Perks had great turn out.  There were 30 players there and many new faces.  Both of these are good things because it shows that interest in board gaming is still increasing where many other types of table top gaming are decreasing in interest.

Paradise Perks is Coffee House in Irvine, California.  They have all the standard coffee drinks and a great selection of teas that they serve hot and iced.  It is a great place to sit and play games for a number of hours.

I played shorter games at this event than I have been recently.  I was able to fit in four games and my performance was poor.

The first game that I played was a game called Just In Time.  It is as one person called it, like a bad game of Tetris.

In this game you are required to fill in a number of boards using pieces that look like they came from a game of Tetris on your computer.  On each board, there are numbers.  Any number you do not cover, counts as your score.  The game is also timed based on the time starting once the first player has finished their puzzle.  If you are playing against someone that better than you are at these types of puzzle games, you are in serious trouble, like I was.

The game did not go well for me at all.  I first thought that the objective of the game as to score the least amount of points as possible.  I was wrong and was not able to recover from my blunder for the entire game.  Even the game’s catch up mechanisms were not enough to dig me out of last place at any point during the game.  I managed to come in fourth out of four players.

Next up was Keyflower.  Keyflower is a city building strategy game, which I am usually pretty good at playing.  This was not the case with this game. 

You bid workers to be able to capture tiles which are then added to your town, or you use the same workers to activate tiles to gain resources to upgrade the tiles for victory points.  The game lasts for four seasons.

I just blew this game from the start.  For some reason I though the game lasted for eight season, so I was trying to build for the long term, and not trying to get my economic machine going quickly.  I got into a worker deficit early right from the start, which it does not appear you are able to recover from.  I manage to come in fifth out of five players.

Thebes was the third game I played.  Thebes was a nominee for Spiel des Jahres in 2007 in Germany, which means it was considered one of the best family board games released in 2007.

In Thebes the players are archeologists at the turn of the twentieth century competing for fame by digging up the treasures of the ancient world.  The players do this by moving around the board and taking cards which represent expertise in particular type of ancient history.  They eventually go to one of the dig locations to look for the treasures.  Everything that a player does takes a number of weeks in a year.  The person further behind in weeks is the one that take actions.

The player with the most points, based on the treasures they find, the exhibitions they put together, and their knowledge of areas of ancient history wins.

I has a good start to the game.  I used the strategy of getting a little knowledge on a couple of areas early and be the first one to dig for the treasure.  In the first location this did not work out for me.  I had 10 draws from the dig back and was only able to get two items.  The second dig was much better in that I got a number of high point items in six of my nine draws.

Then my momentum slowed.  I went back to research and put together an exhibition with my treasures and was only able to dig one more time before the end of the game.  My strategy of constant digging to get treasures to exhibit failed me and I took third out of four players.

The last game of the evening was the Great Heartland Hauling Co.  This is a pick-up and delivery game.  If you would like more detailed check out my review here

I tried a more aggressive strategy of just using all of my cards of a certain type to pick of a resource in hopes of getting the cards I needed to deliver them later instead using half my cards of a suit to pick up and holding on to the rest to deliver later.

I think this would have worked except that I kept getting fuel cards on random draws from the deck instead of freight bills.  At one point I had four fuel cards and only one freight bill in my hand.  Needless to say I did not improve over either of my previous plays and got third out of four players.

I hope to try this strategy the next time I play with better results.

Here are my results for this event.

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Just In Time	1	-	-	-	1				4.00
Keyflower	1	-	-	-	-	1			5.00
Thebes	1	-	-	1	-				3.00
The Great Heartland Hauling Co.	1	-	-	1	-				3.00
Totals	4	-	-	2	1	1	-	-	3.75