Friday, January 10, 2014

After Action Report – Thursday Night Gaming @ Paradise Perks, January 9, 2014



I went to Thursday Night Gaming at Paradise Perks.  This event is the first of three events over the next four days that I will be attending.  My goal for the weekend is to improve my win ratio since during the first two events my results have been so poor.   If Thursday night is any indication of how I am going to do on Saturday and Sunday, I am in for a disappointment.

There were 25 people at the event with five games being played at any time.  I was able to play 2 games during the event.

The first game that I played was Coney Island.  In Coney Island the players each represent a family of performers that is trying to help build up an amusement park at Coney Island.  The player spend their turns doing actions until they have done each of their actions once or they run out of resources to perform actions.  This is after the player receives an income based on the number of performers he has in the park.  The actions include hiring performers for the park, clearing new land for the park, building attractions for the park, hiring special character, and using the ability of a special character the player owns. 

The more performers that a player has in the park, the better their income in victory point, cash, and victory points are.  In order to place performers there needs to be open land available in the park.  In order to place an attraction there needs to be performers set up in the shape of the attraction inside the park.  The performers are replaced with the attraction and victory points are awarded to the owners of the performers and the player who built the attraction.  This will lower the players who performers are replaced by the attraction until they place them out in the park again.

The game ends when all but eight spaces are filled in the park, this is only counted after all of the land is cleared, two of the three amusement types are completed, or a player reaches 60 victory points.  You have to manage your performers carefully because each of them that are still in the park at the end of the game causes you to lose 2 points.

I became very clear tome early on that you needed to get your cash and building materials performers out on the board early so that you could a steady income of the these resources early in the game and then graduate to victory point performers later and hope you or another player would knock them out with attractions as the game progressed.  You also had to keep an eye on the other players so they did not get too much of an advantage over you or they would start to run away with the game.  I was able to balance this well enough during the game as I was in the lead before end of game points were counted.  Unfortunately I did not spend enough effort on collecting the end of game points and I fell from first place to third when they were counted.

The other game that I played was Coal Baron.  Coal Baron is a worker placement game where the please each own a coal mine that they are trying to exploit in order to complete contracts which give the players victory points.  In addition to giving the player victory points when they are completed, the contracts provide additional points during the three scoring rounds based on who had the most of a type of coal, a type of transportation, and cleared areas in each level of their mine.

During the game the player uses their workers to select and action on the board.  The actions include getting more money, selecting new contracts opens new sections of their mine, removing coal from their mine and transporting coal to complete a contract.  The players may select an action that they or another player has used during the game by replacing the workers already there with a total of one more worker than was previously there.  For example if a play used one of their workers to claim an action, the next player may use that same action as long as they place two of their workers on that action.  A game round ends when all of the players have used their workers.  There are three scoring rounds in the game.

I started out of the game strong during the first round and a half I had a strong plan.  My first goal was to complete a high scoring contract during the first three actions so that I could get the points quickly using as few workers as possible.  I was going to follow this up by completing a group of contracts with similar modes of transportation hopefully by the end of the first round, but if not during the second round.  I was able to do both of these things by half way through the second round.  At that point I lost my focus and started to complete contracts individually which caused me to lose ground during the third round.  By the time we were completing the third scoring round, I had fallen so far behind that I was not able to catch up to the other players and ended up in last place.

My stats for the event:

Game
No. of Plays
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th
8th
 Avg.
Coney Island
1
      -
      -
      1
      -
      -
      -
      -
      -
  3.00
Coal Baron
1
      -
      -
      -
      1
      -
      -


  4.00
Totals
2
      -
      -
      1
      1
      -
      -

      -
  3.50

Hopefully I will do better at my event on Saturday.

If You Are Interested In Purchasing These Games:



     

No comments :

Post a Comment