After Action Report – Thursday Night Gaming @ Paradise Perks, September 5, 2013

I am back in Orange County so I went to my regular Thursday event this week at Paradise Perks.  After a two week absence (One week was when I was the Las Vegas, the other was going to the Comic Quest event) it was great to be back.

The event started a little late but it was great to see some familiar faces.  I was able to get updates from Railcon where among other things there was some excitement about the Ticket to Ride World Championships.

There were 20 -25 people in attendance at the Paradise Perks event with an average of 5 games being played at a time.

The only game I played at the event was Rialto.  Rialto is an area control game that uses set building to get things done.  The theme is that the players are powerful noble houses in Venice who are trying to exert their control over the city by owning and influencing things, like the Doge, money, buildings, bridges, gondolas, and councilmen.

The game take six turns and is set up in three phases.  The first phase the player collects the cards for his hand.  The second phase the player plays the cards from the hand they collected gaining additional power over the items they use their cards for.  The third phase the player activates victory point buildings.

The player gain victory points for the for having control of areas at the end of the game, in order to get control they need to place the most councilmen during each turn in the active area in the city.  If they do not add councilmen in the area during the turn it is active, they will not be able to go back to add them later in the game.

The players can also get victory points for buildings as well.  Each of the buildings has special powers based on when they can be activated in the game.  Building that can be activated in the hand creation phase add cards to a player’s draw and allows them to keep more cards in their hand going into the second phase.  Buildings that can be activated in the second phase affect cards.  Buildings in the third phase add victory points of Doge Influence.

I started out the game focused on gaining Doge influence.  I figured that got me the best options for getting the cards that I wanted in later turns.  I spent two turns pushing myself as far forward on the Doge Influence track as a could almost to the exclusion of everything else and the following two turns moving it forward slightly. This gave me control of the first player of the turn for five turns of the game.  I focused other efforts on building buildings during the second and third turn.  The fourth and fifth turn I actually placed councilmen on the board.  The sixth turn I focused on a major building effort to get victory point buildings and was able to active them for a number of victory points at the end the turn.  Most of my victory points in the end of the game came from buildings.  Unfortunately it did not propel me to victory.  I did manage to come in third after being in last place most of the game.

The rest of the evening was spent chatting with people about what was going on while I was gone, my impressions of the Las Vegas board gaming scene, and how conventions went for people.

My stats for the event were not a great start to the month, but are below:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Rialto	1	-	-	1	-	-			3.00
Totals	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	3.00