After Action Report – Game Night Southwest @ Little Shop of Magic, November 30, 2013

I was in Las Vegas again this Saturday so I decided to stop by the game event they have there every Saturday night at Little Shop of Magic.  There were around 20 people in attendance and 4 games being played at any one time.

I was able to play two games at the event.

The first was Tsuro of the Seas.  The game plays exactly like Tsuro.  The players take turns placing one of the three tiles that they have in their hand to extend the route that their ship takes.  If the player runs their token off the board or into one of the other players token they are eliminated from the game.  The player with the last token on the board wins the game.

Tsuro of the Seas changes the theme to the players traveling the oceans in ships and adds Daikaiju tiles.  The Daikaiju tiles are sea monsters that are moved around the board based on dice rolled at the beginning of each players turn.  In addition to running into other players or off the board being was that the players are eliminated, if the tile their token is on is landed on by the Daikaiju or it gets in their path, the player is eliminated.

The Daikaiju add an element of randomness to the game that limits with skill of the player, which I do not know if I like.  The game went fairly quickly with two of the players being eliminated in the first three turns of the game mostly by the Daikaiju.  I used a strategy of trying to stay away from the Daikaiju unfortunately as the game continued and three other players were eliminated I started get cornered by the Daikaiju and one of them finally crossed my path and the game ended with me in second place.

The other game I played was Archipelago.  I had heard a lot of positive buzz about Archipelago, but even then I did not know what to expect.  The theme is the players are explorers that are sent to explore and exploit lands in the New World.  That alone underwhelmed me because that theme has been done to death in games of late.

A turn in Archipelago is divided into six phases.  The first four phases are for bookkeeping and could really be made into one big phase.  The players reset their workers, markets effects on population are determined and turn order is auctioned.

 In the fifth phase the players then take actions.  This is where you start to get into the meat of the game.  These actions also them to harvest goods, build buildings or ships, explore, sell or trade on the foreign or domestic markets, expand their population, or move their workers to another hex.

In the sixth phase the players may purchase evolution cards.  The evolution cards consist of characters and actions that the player may purchase and they are other players may use as actions during the action phase.

There is a different main goal that is public to all of the players that scores them victory points.  In addition, each player has a private goal to gain more victory points.  The private goals include different end game terms and the games ends when any one of them is achieved.  The game can also end if the number of belligerent natives outnumbers the colonist, in which case no one wins unless one of the players has that goal.

I played this game horribly.  I did not read my goal card correctly and was not doing anything toward achieving my victory point goal.  I was only concerned about my end game terms, which in my mind was not going to be able to be achieved for a very long time into the game.  It was not something I should have been concerned about because the game ended after a number of revolt events came up back to back and ended the game through uprising giving the player with that victory goal the win.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Tsuro of the Seas	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.00
Archipelago	1	-	-	-	-	-	-			-
Totals	2	-	1	-	-	-	-		-	1.00