Friday, November 8, 2013

After Action Report – Thursday Night Gaming @ Paradise Perks, November 7, 2013



I returned to Paradise Perks this week for the Thursday Night Gaming event after my trip to Comic Quests Halloween event last week.  There were around 15 people there with 3 games being played at any one time.  This was a fairly small crowd for them as they usually get over 20 people and have at least five games going.

I was able to play two games at the event:  Compounded and La Boca.

The first game up was Compounded.  Compounded is a chemistry themed game.  The players are scientists who are working in a lab trying to mix together elements to create compound.  They score points for each compound created.  The more complex the compound and the more rare the element that make up the compound the more points it is worth.

There are four rounds in each turn.  The first round is the Discovery Phase where the players collect elements.  The players take a number of elements from the bag of elements based on their discovery score.  They may then trade the elements with other players.  Once this is done play moves on to the Study Phase.

In the Study Phase the players take turns claiming compounds they wish to work on from the compound cards that are face up on the table.  After this is done play moves into the Research Phase where the players take the elements that they got in the Discovery Phase and ad them to the compound that they have claims on.  A turn ends with the Lab Phase where any complete compounds are scored, any ability adjustments are made, lab fires are resolved, and new compounds are added to replace the ones that are scored.

The game ends when the first player reaches 50 points, a player has all four of their abilities maxed out, or there are no more compound cards left.

I liked the concept of the game but ended up having very poor execution during it.  I thought that the most important thing was to be able to get and use as many elements as possible so I focused my strategy on getting the compounds that would increase my abilities to do those things and ignored the skill that would allow me to claim more compound to work on.  This cause me a lot of problems as the game progressed because I was able to get a bunch of elements but I did not have any place to use them as many compounds require a number of turns to capture.  I was able to get my first increase in the number of compounds I could claim as the game ended and was not able to gain back any ground.  I managed to come in a distant third out of four players with the player in fourth being a point behind.

We did not have much time left after we finished Compounded so we decided to follow it up with a quick game.  We settled on La Boca to be that game.

La Boca is an abstract game in which the players team up with another player and solve a three dimension puzzle using a set of 10 different shaped blocks (11 blocks in the case of the advanced game.).

The players are shown a challenge card.  On each side of the card is a different pattern.  The players then use the blocks to build the pattern so that both players solve their pattern correctly in two minutes or less.  The players gain victory point for the amount of time they spend solving the puzzle.  The less time you spend the more points you get.

The game ends when each of the players has teamed up with all of the other players twice.

People that have been following my blog know about my love of abstract games that I find very difficult to win them.  This time however I was able to do quite well.  I was able to complete every one of the puzzles I did in less than a minute, which is great as one of the other teams did not finish one of theirs.  Since I did so well, I was able to win the game which is one of the best victories I have had in a while.

My stats for the event were:


Game
No. of Plays
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th
8th
 Avg.
Compounded
1
      -
      -
      1
      -
      -
      -
      -

  3.00
La Boca
1
      1
      -
      -
      -
      -
      -


  1.00
Totals
2
      1
      -
      1
      -
      -
      -

      -
  2.00

 If You are Interested In Purchasing These Games:


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