After Action Report – International Tabletop Day @ Comic Quest, April 5, 2014

The positive feeling I got from this event last year was the thing that motivated me the most to start this blog.  I left it very excited about the idea of sharing my passion for Tabletop Gaming.  As a result, I was looking forward to attending again this year. 

There were a number of positive changes compared to last year.  The main one being that Comic Quest now had a gaming space connected directly to their store unlike last year where the gaming space was at the far end of the strip mall from where the store was.  There were also a number of game companies and designers in attendance at the event.  The most recognizable of these were AEG, Cryptozoic Entertainment, and Victory Point Games all of which have their offices located in Southern California.

The only drawback was that there were no tournaments at the event.  Which was probably a good thing since table space was limited.  There were times during the day that there were more players than table space available.

There were 10 games being played at any one time and 80 – 90 people attended the event.

I played five games at the event.

The first game of the day for me was Lost Cities.  Lost Cities is one of the games from the first generation of Euro games that made it to the United States.  It is a two person card game.  The theme attached to the game is the players are leading expeditions to five lost cities.  What the players find in each city is represented in a deck of cards that consists of 5 suits of card that have cards numbered 1 – 10 and three multiplier cards.  Each player starts the game with a hand of 8 cards and they take turns either playing a card in front of them or discarding a card into the appropriate suit’s pile and then taking a card from the draw deck or one of the discard piles.  The game ends when the discard pile is depleted. 

When playing the cards in front of them, the players must place them down in numerical order from lowest to highest.  If a player is going to play a multiplier card for the suit they must play it before they play any cards with numbers on them.  To add a challenge to the game each suit that is played in front of the player starts with a score of -20 so it is possible to have a negative score for an expedition if you do not plan well.

I started the game with a less than good set of cards.  All of the cards I got were in the middle of their corresponding sets.  I started to work on getting rid of the less than optimal cards that I had be discarding cards for the first five turns of the game which did get me some better cards and a direction to go in the way of what expeditions I wanted to work on.  I then started to build out my sets on the table hoping I would get the cards I needed to get at least 20 points in each of them.  Unfortunately I became too focused on the three sets I wanted to play out instead of looking at the possibility of working on one of the other sets and got myself into trouble.  I ended the game with a score of -1, which was not bad considering the other player had a score of 0.

The second game I played was The Doom that Came to Atlantic City.  The Doom that Came to Atlantic City was a Kickstarter that Cryptozoic Entertainment stepped in to save.  It was brought to the event by Cryptozoic to show.  In the game the players are the Elder Ones that appear in Atlantic City.  Their goal is to move around the city, trying to open gates to their dimensions by destroying all the buildings in a neighborhood.  These building then become one of the currencies in the game along with cultists.

The board is set up like a Monopoly board.  The railroad spaces are replaced with gates that allow the player to move to another space without moving over the intervening spaces.  The Chance cards are replaced the Chants cards which are one time special abilities that are paid for with houses and cultists.  The Community Chest cards are replaced with Providence cards which give the Elder Ones extra powers.  In order to win the game the player must complete the mission on their Doom Card or open 6 gates on the board.

I had fun with the game.  On the first turn I got a Providence Card that had me move counter clockwise around the board which was one of the abilities I kept throughout the game because it amused me. I spent the first half of the game in my own little bubble not really accomplishing much while the players were opening their first few gates but I was gathering a lot of cultists and houses.  After a used a card to actually capture one of the other player’s gates, I started picking up new gates rather quickly.  I was on my way to getting my sixth gate when one of the other players ended the game.  I managed to come in second out of four players.

The next game I played was Blue Moon City.  Blue Moon City is the sequel to Blue Moon.  The players are trying to rebuild the city of Blue Moon after the devastating battles that took place there in Blue Moon.  The players contribute to the rebuilding of the neighborhoods by using the proper colored cards once the all the contribution spots on a neighborhood tile are filled in, the players that contributed to the rebuilding are rewarded with various items including cards, crystals, and dragon scales.  The crystals can be used to rebuild the obelisk in the center of the city.  Once a player completes the number of sections in the obelisk based on the number of the players in the game, they win the game.

It had been a while since I brought the game out so I was a little rusty on how to best play it.  The one thing I did remember was that it was good to be part of as many constructions as possible even if you were not the top person in it because it was better to get something rather than nothing.  With this in mind I kept moving around the board leaving contributions every where I could I getting what dragon scales I could so that I could get the bonuses for having the most dragon scales as much as possible.  I also remembered that It was better to only go to the center when you could build more than one section of the obelisk at a time.  With both of these things in mind and even with the cards not cooperating with me at times I managed to win the game.

The fourth game was one of the demo games that Victory Point Games had on display call Knockout.  In Knockout the players are boxers fighting in the ring.  The player uses a hand of cards to move around the ring and fight until one of the players is knockout.  The only way for a player to replenish their hand is to take a breather.  If they have to do this at the wrong time it could cost them the game.

Knockout is a very quick play.  Never having played the game before, I decided that it would be best to be as aggressive as possible.  So I moved to the fight immediately and got knock back just as quickly.  I did manage to get the upper hand for a while but ran out of cards.  This allowed the other player to get the upper hand and I was handed a loss shortly afterward.

The last game I played at the event was The Adventurers:  The Temple of Chac.  The Adventurers is a press your luck game where the players are treasure hunters that are going searching for treasure in the Temple of Chac.  The temple has many traps like a room with moving walls that can crush the players, a room with pieces of floor that can break a drop the players into lava, a river where they can get treasure but if they have too heavy a load they may not be able to get out of in time, and a bridge that chance break and drop the player to their doom.  The player must out run these traps, gather as much treasure as possible, and get out alive in order to win the game.  The more treasure a player gathers, the slower they move so there is a balance to be made between greed and speed.

I started the game with the idea that I would gather six treasures and rush for the exit.  With all the bad things that could happen to everyone I figured that that would be a safe number.  In the first room, which was the sliding walls, I spent enough time to look at three of the lava room clues and picked up a treasure to make sure that I stayed well ahead of the boulder.  I then made a dash to the lava room and was able to navigate it successfully and get three more treasures.  We were very fortunate that the boulder was moving slowly.  I was able to get to the river before the boulder was half way through the lava room.  I then picked up my final two treasures in the river got out and was the second one to the exit.  With all of this effort I only managed to make it to third place out of five players.  Surprisingly we only lost one player inside the temple.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Lost Cities	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.00
The Doom That Came to Atlantic City	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.00
Blue Moon City	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-		1.00
Knockout	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.00
The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac	1	-	-	1	-	-	-			3.00
Totals	5	1	3	1	-	-	-		-	2.00