I attended Board Game Night at Comic Quest on Thursday. There were 25 people at the event and five
games were being played at any one time.
I played six games at the event including one game twice.
The first game I played 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 draw 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 number of the blue cards including
one multiplier but not enough to offset the -20 points for starting the
expedition. I set out the multiplier and
started to discard card from the other colors I did not want yet to try to get
more blue cards. I noticed that the red
pile was growing and I was getting more red cards as I took cards from the draw
pile so I started to collect the red cards and was able to get more than enough
to complete a set with two multipliers. I
then started playing those out and finally started to get more blue cards and
some white cards so I started placing more cards in those expeditions. At the end of the game I had positive scores
in all three of my expeditions.
Unfortunately the other player scored better on one of his expeditions and
I ended up in second place.
The second game of the night was Trans Europa. Trans Europa is a game that is deceptively
easy to learn but is very difficult to master.
In Trans Europa, the players are required to connect up five different
cities in different regions of Europe.
The players start building track from 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 wind up helping each
other out while trying to achieve their own goals. A round ends after the first player reaches
their cities. All of the other players
reduce their scores, which start at 13 points, by the number of spaces they
missed hitting their cities by. 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.
I used a northeast to southwest strategy this time. I won the first round very quickly and hit
every one with large point loses. In the
second round I only lost two points two of the other players managed to lose
more than that. In the final round the
game ended as one of the players lost six more points from his total. I won the game.
The third game was Bazaar.
In Bazaar the players are gem traders trying to fulfill gem orders from
demand cards in competition with the other players. They do this by using two trading boards that
represent the exchange rates for the market.
For example one red gem can be traded for two blue gems. The players use the exchange to fulfill the
demand cards as efficiently as possible to maximize their points.
This was one of the plays of the game I wish I could
forget. It was one of my most horrible
loses in the game to date and set the tone for me for the rest of the
evening. I could not make the trade
options in the market work in my mind to give me the gems I would need to
complete the cards most of the game. I
only managed to capture two of the cards in the game. I ended up in fifth place out of five players.
The fourth game was Take It Easy. In Take It Easy, the players have a hexagonal
board which is divided in to 19 hexes.
Along with the board the players receive 27 pieces that each has 3 lines
going through them. The lines have a
point value assigned to them. The goal
is to be able to make a line of point values run across the board in a
row. If the player can accomplish that
they can score the points the line is worth times the number of spaces in the
row.
One of the players is designated the caller and turns their
tiles face down while the other players keep their tiles face up. The caller turns over the pieces one by one
and all the players place the same piece on their board wherever they want. The player who can place the highest value of
lines across their board wins the game.
I was able to get some solid sets going early in the
game. Unfortunately as the game
progressed my board became clogged up and I ended up not completing a third of
the sets on the board. I ended up in
fourth place out of five players.
For the fifth game I went back to Trans Europa. Unlike the first time I played that
night. I could not make anything go
right this time that I played. I used
the northwest to southeast strategy this time.
This did not take into account that I had cards in the northeast and southwest
as well so I managed to lose six points in the first round. I did slightly better in the second round an
only lost two points but I managed to do so horribly in the third round that I
lost seven points and ended the game in fifth placed out of five players.
The last game of the night was Ticket to Ride Europe. This was the second game in the Ticket to
Ride family of games and is my preferred game in that family. We used the 1912 tickets in the game and did
not use the warehousing option.
In the Ticket to Ride games, the players are given a number
of tickets that have a start and finish destination and a point value. The players then attempt to connect these
cities using sets of cards of single card to link up cities between these their
destination cities. If you succeed in
connecting up the destination cities on your ticket by the end of the game, you
get a number of points equal to the value on the ticket. If you do not connect the destination, you
lose the number of points equal to the value on the ticket.
The thing that makes the game a challenge is that there are
a limited number of links between cities.
Once a player claims on no other player can use that link. The reason that I like Ticket to Ride Europe
is that it has a game mechanism called stations that allows a player to use
another player’s link as if it were his own for purpose of completing tickets
which helps mitigate being cut off from your destination.
I knew this game was going to be a rough one when my long
ticket did not match any of the routes on my other tickets. I opted to get rid of the long ticket and
hope that I could get more tickets that I could complete as the game progress
to offset what I was going to lose for not taking it.
I took me longer than I expected to finish the first two
tickets I had so it put me behind in getting more tickets but I did and had to
struggle to complete the next two tickets I got. I then took another one that I thought I
could finish before the end of the game but not without some risk. I had to complete a six tunnel with no back
up cards and then complete another link before the game ended. I tried the tunnel and failed. The game then ended the following round and I
was not able to complete the ticket.
Thus ended a game that I knew was going to be rough with me in fourth place
out of four players.
My stats for the event:
No comments :
Post a Comment