After Action Report – Game Day @ The Duck Club, April 13, 2014

On Sunday I went to Game Day at the Duck Club for a short time.  There were around 50 people there and nine games were being played at any one time.

I was able to play two games in the short time I was there.

The first game I played was Euphoria.  Euphoria is an interesting worker placement game.  The premise of Euphoria is that you are leading a team of workers and recruits to become the leader in a dystopian world.  The player’s workers are represented by dice. The higher the number on the dice the smarter the workers are and if you have 16 or more smarts in workers available you will lose a worker.  The recruits are cards with special abilities that the player keeps and uses during the game.  Each turn the player can place a worker on the board and take that action.  Actions include getting resources, using the resources to find artifacts, get more workers, dig tunnels to other factions, build markets, recover their workers, get more workers, or place prestige.  If a player had any dice that are the same number they may place them in a single turn.  The key to winning the game is to gain prestige.  The first player to place all 10 of their prestige markers wins the game.

A player can place their prestige on markets they have helped build, on recruits that they have in factions that have a high enough influence, or paying the cost and placing the prestige directly on the faction.

I played this game once before in January but managed to crater in that game because I did not get my head around it well enough.  I have wanted to play it again to see if I could redeem myself.  I finally got the chance.

One of the mistakes I make in the first game was that I focused too much effort on getting and keeping three or more workers.  This time I knew I wanted to try to have three workers as often as possible but I would not worry if I was not able to maintain it the entire time.  I also knew that I wanted to participate in as much construction as possible and then add prestige markers to each of the market places after they were built if I did not help build them.  I would then look to place my remaining prestige markers on my recruits and in the faction areas as the opportunity presented itself.

Armed with this plan, I started the game with recruits from the power generating and food generating faction in my hand with the power recruit played out.  I focused my early efforts to increasing the influence of the power generating faction in order to gain bonuses for using those actions early and got other resources as the opportunity presented itself.  I did mostly mining to get the resources I needed to build marketplaces and was able to build two of them on my own.  As the game progressed I was able to add my markers to three more markets.  I was able to get two more markers on to recruits as their factions gained prestige and two other ones on the factions themselves.  Unfortunately, the game ended the turn before I was able to place my last prestige marker and I lost the tie breaker ending the game in third place out of three players.  Even though I came in last in the game again, I feel redeemed because I was so close to winning.

The other game I played was Zahlen-Mobile.Zahlen-Mobile consists of a set of cards showing "dice mobiles". These consist of a main bar with two additional bars attached. From each of those two bars, two dice hang down, with each of the four dice having a different color. The bars are either straight or slanted left or right.  Each player has a set of dice (one in each color) and a dice cup. Players reveal one card, then simultaneously roll their dice, trying to roll results that would fit the current mobile card. (If all three bars are straight, that would be four of the same number; if the two lower bars are straight, but the top one is slanted to the right, then the two dice hanging from the right side must be higher than the two on the left.) The first player to roll a "solution" that fits the card gets the card (in a two-player game). With more players, the first player gets two cards and the second one gets one card. After a certain number of rounds, the player with the most cards wins.

The game was a fun quick game which consisted of lots of dice rolling and pattern matching.  I was able to keep up very well and managed to come in second out of three players.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Euphoria	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	3.00
Zahlen-Mobile	1	-	1	-	-	-	-			2.00
Totals	2	-	1	1	-	-	-		-	2.50