After Action Report – Thursday Night Gaming @ Paradise Perks, April 17, 2014

Thursday Night Gaming at Paradise Perks was lively this week.  There were over 30 people again and one of the regulars who bring new games was back this week.  This gave me an opportunity to try a few games that I had not played before.  There were seven games being played at any one time.

At this event I was able to play five games all of them on the shorter side.  I liked this because it gave me a sampling of games that would be suitable to add to my collection to fill the first / last game of the event space.

The first game of the night 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.

In this game I was able to lock into a strategy that worked out for me.  My idea was to target a number for each level that the dice were hung from.  Of dice that were lowest I would target a five or six.  If they were in the middle I would target a 3 or a 4.  If they were at the top of the mobile I would look to roll a one or a two.  Using these rules I was able to win the game handily.

This was the bright moment of the evening.

The second game I played was Mythe.  Mythe is a Japanese import.  The game is a press your luck game.  The theme is that the players are mice and they need to save their princess from the dragon that lives in the mountains above their town.  The mechanics of the game are interesting.  At the start of the game a deck of cards is created based on the number of players in the game.  It will include movement cards, artifact cards, which can be used as movement cards or to defeat the dragon, and disaster cards which stop a player’s turn and does not let them take advantage of the cards they already pulled.

The cards are divided evenly as possible among the players at the start of the game.  The players then take cards from the other players’ hand of cards one at a time until they end their turn and move up to the trail based on the movement points they earned or if they draw a disaster card they end their turn and do not get to move.  The play then takes the cards that they took from the other player and the cards that they held previously and distribute them between themselves and all of the other players but the one whose turn is next.

In order to defeat the dragon the player needs to play to play one of the artifact cards from their hand and be able to move into the dragon’s space by taking the correct number of movement points from the other players hands.

At the start of the game I was able to move up two spaces quickly unfortunately my progress slowed down and I was only able to move one space at a time after that or I manage to get hit by disaster cards.  I still managed to do better than one of the other players in the game who managed to get hit by a disaster card every turn most of the time it was the first card that we drew.  Unfortunately my efforts were not enough to get me even close to winning and I ended the game in third place out of three.

The third game of the event was Wurfel Bohnanza.  Wurfel Bohnanza is a dice game that uses the art and bean theme from the Bohnanza card game.  The game consists of seven dice and a deck of cards.  The each face of the dice has a different type of bean on it.  The goal is to roll the dice and match them to your order card.  Each order card consists of seven different set of beans that the player needs to plant in the field.  When a player matches a set of beans they move up the card to the next set.  The player needs to complete a minimum of four sets to be able to earn anything off of their field.  If the complete all seven sets they earn four coins.  The player who controls the dice my roll them as many times as the player wants.  After each roll the player must place at least one die they want to use to complete a set in the field.  Once the player runs out of dice they claim the sets on the card that they can complete from their field.  They may use a die in more than one set.  During the active player’s turn the other players my try to complete sets on their own order cards using only what is rolled by the active player and has yet to be added to the field.  The first player to 13 coins wins the game.

This being my first play of the game, it seemed to me to be critical to get as many set complete on your turn as possible and hope for maybe getting one set on other players turns.  I also wanted to turn in a order for coins once it would be able to pay out and not wait for maximum pay out.  Having these ideas in my head caused me a number of problems during the game.  When I was the active player I had the tendency to try to use the dice to fill in the sets that were coming after the first set that I needed to complete before completing the results for the first set.  This caused me to not be able to complete any sets twice during the game when I came across a difficult set I needed to complete before I needed to move on to the next one.  This would leave me a difficult set to complete during the time I was not the active player which slowed my advancement even more.  I was not able to make up for these errors and I ended the game in fifth place out of five players

The next game I played was Deeku.  Deeku is another Japanese import.  The players are carpenters in medieval Japan that go around and help rebuild the castles of Japan after their civil war.  They gain prestige by completing their construction projects.  The player with the most prestige at the end of the game wins.  Each player starts the game with 10 ryo, the money of the game, and four carpenters on the board.  During each turn the player can take two actions.  They can add a carpenter to one of the building sites and pay the cost to do so.  They can move a carpenter to another build site, paying the cost to move the carpenter, so long as the roads are not blocked.  The player may pass the action to gain 1 ryo.

The goal is to gain control of a build site by having at least one more carpenter at the building site than any of the other players.  As long as a player does this with a minimum of two carpenters the player may pay to complete a project and gain the prestige for that project.  The game last four years or 16 turns

One thing that I could tell was that money was going to be tight in this game.  The only way to get money was to pass a turn or get income every four turns by have a number of carpenters on a single project.  I decided to take to strategy of completing projects quickly each year and spend the rest of the year trying to make more money so I could repeat the cycle the next year.  Unfortunately all this seemed to do for me was make me perpetually cash poor.  I ended the game in fourth place out of four players.

The last game I played was Trans Europa.  In Trans Europa, the players are required to connect up five different cities in different regions of Europe.  The players select these cities from a set of cards.  Each player must take one card of each color.  These colors represent each of the five regions on the board.  During the first round of the game the players place their starting post on the board.  The starting post is where the player will start building their track from during the rest of the round.  It may be placed anywhere on the board except where another player has placed their starting post. 

In the following turn, the players start building track from their starting post.  On their turn each player may place up to two pieces of track on the board as long as it connects to their starting post.  If they connect up to another player’s track, they can build off of that player’s track as well as their own.  In this way players can end up helping each other out while trying to achieve their own goals. 

A round ends after the first player reaches connects all five of their cities to their starting post.  All of the other players reduce their scores, which start at 13 points, by the number of spaces they missed hitting their cities by.  Then the game continues to the next round.  The game ends when one of the players loses all 13 of their points.  The winner is the person who has the most points remaining.

Using my standard north to south tactics did not work out so well for me in this game in the first round I lost the most points of all of the players.  I was able to make up for it in the second round by only losing two points.  In the third round I continued to struggle losing three points.  Fortunately for me two of the other player cratered in the round and went below zero so I ended up taking second in the game. 

The problem I faced in two of the three rounds was that the north – south cities were on the edges of the board and I wound up helping the other players too much with very little return for me.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Zahlen-Mobile	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	1.00
Mythe	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	3.00
Wurfel Bohnanza	1	-	-	-	-	1				5.00
Deeku	1	-	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	4.00
Trans Europa	1	-	1	-	-	-	-			2.00
Totals	5	1	1	1	1	1	-		-	3.00