After Action Report – Thursday Night Gaming @ Paradise Perks, September 19, 2013

Attendance for Thursday Night Gaming at Paradise Perks was light this week with less than 20 people in attendance.  There were 5 games being played at any one time.  The attendance was light for this event and what is worse the one of the regulars who brings some of the more interesting games did not attend.

I played one game this evening.  It was called Evo.  The theme of the game is you are scientists that are helping a reptilian species evolve and survive on an alien planet that is going through severe climactic changes.  During the game you will earn mutation points, which are the games victory points, to help your reptiles to adapt to their surroundings.  You earn these points based on the number of your reptiles survive until the next climate change.  The game ends when a meteor hits the planet and everything dies.

Each turn is broken up into five rounds.  First the climate change happens.  Then the players bid for and purchase their new mutation.  Next the players may move their reptiles around the board. The birthing round comes next followed by the survival phase where the reptiles that are not in the correct environments die.

I started the game is a bad position compared to the other players there was not much in the way of good terrain in my area so I was not able to get more reptiles on the board quickly enough.  So I was forced to play my game aggressively and move towards my two opponents quickly to ensure that I would be able to take the optimal environments in later turns. 

I knew I needed to get mutations as quickly as possible as well in order to move quickly and be able to fight as necessary.  Unfortunately I spent too much on the mutations throughout the game which would hurt my final score. I did get the flying mutation and many movement mutations ones as well as the only horn to come out.

I was able to recover and my reptiles thrived because of my good care for them and I was able to keep the other players’ populations low, but the damage to my score had already been done.  I was not able to recover from my low population early in the game or my out of control spending.  I managed to take third place.  It was a close game as only two points separated me from the winner, but it was still third place.

Since there were not that many new and interesting games for me at the event, my heart was not really into it Evo was the only game I played.  I was also surprised that no one brought pirate games to the event.  With it being International Talk Like Pirate Day I did fully expect there to be at least on pirate themed game to be at the event.  I did watch the first round of a game of Samurai Swords, an old school conquest game based in feudal Japan that was like risk on steroid, which took about 30 minutes and then took off.

My stats for the event were:

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