After Action Report – Thursday Night Gaming @ Paradise Perks, February 20, 2014

I went to Thursday Night Gaming at Paradise Perks for a night of gaming.  There were 2- 35 people at the event with 5 games being played at any one time.

I played three different games at the event and was even able to play one of them twice.

The first game of the evening was Tsuro, which was the game that I played two times.  Tsuro is a light game in that if it takes more that 20 - 30 minutes to play you are doing something wrong.  Tsuro consists of a 8 tile by 8 tile playing area.  The players take turns placing tiles on the board and moving their pieces along the trail on those tiles.  Once the player’s piece goes off the edge of the board or runs into another player’s piece they are out of the game.  The last player with a piece on the board wins the game.

In the first game I was able to keep moving my piece around the board away from the other players.  One of the players was eliminated after about half of the tiles were placed leaving three of us to continue on.  I then made a mistake and placed a tile that ran me one of the other players and ended the game by eliminating both of us.

Since the first game ended so quickly and not many people had shown up to the event yet, we decided to play Tsuro again.  I was eager to play again because I wanted to redeem myself for the boneheaded move I had made in the previous game.  Unfortunately it was not meant to be.  After half of the tiles were played one of the other players managed to push me to an edge tile row and I was not able to make my way to the center of the board before I went off the side of the board and ended up the first person out of the game.

The next game I played was Family Business.  In Family Business each player takes in control of a gang of mobsters from the Prohibition era.  The goal of the game is to be the player with the last gangster living.  To do this players take a hand of five cards from the action deck.  The actions include different types of contracts that can be played against other players to put their gangsters on the firing line, cards that can be used to remove a gangster that are already on the firing line, interrupt cards that can be used to stop one of your gangsters from being put on the firing line and give you the next turn.  Once 6 gangsters are on the firing line a gang war starts and the gangsters on the firing line get eliminated from the game until there are no other gangsters on the firing line or peace is declared.

I started the game off fairly well.  I was able to get a number of other player’s gangsters eliminated and keep mine safe.  I was about the wipe out another player when the rest of the players noticed I still had all of my gangsters while each of them had some loses.  At this point they all started to target me and even though I was able to eliminate one of the other players first, I was knocked out of the game shortly after him.

The last game of the night for me was Ticket to Ride.  The theme of the game is that the players are owners of train companies that are building rail lines in the United States.   The goal is to establish routes between the cities on the tickets that the players receive.  If the players connect the cities on a ticket they will receive bonus points at the end of the game based on the value on the ticket.  If they do not connect the cities on one of their tickets the player loses the number of points on the ticket.  Points are also scored for placing trains between two cities on the board more trains needed the more points are scored.

Game play is simple.  The players start out the game with three tickets that have destinations that they can connect of which they must keep at least two.  They will also receive four train cards. An additional five train cards are placed face up by the side of the board along with draw decks of train cards and tickets

The train cards are the core of the game.  They come in eight different colors and there is a ninth card type which is a wild card and can be used as any color.  These train cards are what are used to make the connections between the cities.  Each connection is represented by a number of spaces that are a single color.  If a player wished to claim a connection between two cities they must turn in the number of cards of that color.  They then place trains from their reserve on that connection.  After a connection is claimed no other player may use that connection.

The players choose one of three actions to take during their turn.  The first is that they may take train cards from the five cards that are face up or from the draw deck.  The second option is that they may claim a connection between two cities.  The third option is that they may take additional tickets.

I started the game with two tickets, Vancouver to Santa Fe, and Portland to Phoenix.  I figured it would be easy to get these tickets done because they were so close together and form my recollection there are not many tickets in the western U.S.  To my surprise, all of the players started the game building in the west.  I was cut off by other players twice before I managed to connect up both tickets.  Even after having to make my way the long way around and still had quite a few trains left so I took more tickets and kept Los Angeles to Chicago and Denver to Pittsburgh.  My track connected into both Denver and Los Angeles and it appeared that I had a clear shot into both cities and it would use all but four of my trains.  I was able to connect to both Chicago and Pittsburgh with little problem other than collecting the right colored train cards and ended the game the turn after I connected.  The other players were having more difficulty connecting their cities than I did and I was able to get the victory even without the longest track bonus.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Tsuro	2	-	-	1	1	-	-	-	-	3.50
Family Business	1	-	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	4.00
Ticket to Ride	1	1	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Totals	4	1	-	1	2	-	-		-	3.00