After Action Report – Game Night Southwest @ Little Shop of Magic, December 21, 2013

I have travelled to the Las Vegas area again.  This time it is for the Christmas holiday.  I got a chance to go over to Game Night Southwest and the Little Shop of Magic on Saturday night hoping that there would be some people there to play a game.  I was not certain how turn out would be being so close to Christmas.  I expected that most people would be traveling to visit family or be at a holiday party so my expectations were not too high.  It turned out that there were around 15 people in attendance and three games being played at any given time.

I was able to play three games while I was there.

The first was Coup.  Coup is one of the current trend of super light super quick card games that relies on heavily on bluffing and luck.  The theme of Coup is that the players control two members of a faction that are trying to stage a coup and take control of a government.  The members of the coup can come from any of five different group.  Each group has a special action that it can do in addition there are three other actions that a player can do.  To make matters interesting there are three characters from each group in the deck at the start of the game.  The goal of the game is to figure out what factions that the other players’ characters represent and root them out.  The last person with a character left wins the game.

This game was not too exciting for me.  I was not sure of the dynamic of the game so I sat back most of the game and took the least aggressive actions that I could slowly accumulating money so I could knock out one of the other players’ characters automatically and let the other players take themselves out.   My plan worked very well as the players spent most of the game ignoring me until it was down to me and one other player.  I was able to beat him to the punch and eliminate his last character before he got the chance to get mine and won the game.

I followed that game up with a new game from Z-Man called Blueprints.  In Blueprints the players are trying to construct buildings based on a blueprint that they receive.  The building blocks are dice that the players take turns using from a pool of dice there are four different colors of dice representing four different building materials which score points based on how they are used in a building.  The players spend six rounds building their buildings which are then scored based on accuracy to their blueprint and what materials that they used in the building.  After the buildings are scored the players receive victory point cards based on who scored the most for their building and other bonuses based on things like height and what the number facings are on their dice.  Once the victory points are given out the next round begins and goes on until the end of the third round.  The player with the most victory points wins.

I did horribly in this game.  This was mostly because I was not grasping the scoring for the buildings in the first round.  As a result I put myself behind.  I did a little better in the second round but missed one of the bonus victory point goals by making a mistake.  I finally was able to get some bonus points in the last round but by then the damage had been done and I finished the game in fourth out o four players.

The final game of the evening for me 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 or Doge Influence.

I started the game in a bad position.  I was in last position on Doge’s Influence so my first couple hands were not very good ones because I was the last player to choose their cards.  I did manage to place some councilmen in areas of the city hoping that they would pay out n victory points at the end of the game.  By the third round I was able to start moving up the Doge’s Influence track and was getting better cards so I spent effort building two victory point buildings so I would be able to get four victory points every turn for the rest of the game.  By the end of the game I was able o get myself into the third position on the Doge’s Influence track and was in good scoring positions in four of the six areas of the city.  This game me a slim victory in the game.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Coup	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-		1.00
Blueprints	1	-	-	-	1	-	-			4.00
Rialto	1	1	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Totals	3	2	-	-	1	-	-		-	2.00

If You Are Interested In Purchasing These Games: