After Action Report – Boardgame Night @ Comic Quest, May 15, 2014

I went to Boardgame Night at Comic Quest on Thursday night.  The attendance was much lower at 15 people.  It may have been because people did not want to go out in the heat which exceeded 100 degrees.  There were four games being played at any one time.

I did play four of what I consider lighter games at the event.

The first game I played 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 started out the game well by winning the first round.  I used the North – South strategy and was able to make the other players in the game lose a bunch of points.  I ran into problems in the second and third round and took two points during each of those rounds and ended the game in second place out of three people.

The second game I played 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.

I did a lot better this time than I had the last couple of times playing this game.  I was able to leverage a number of patters to be able to target getting the one star and later in the game two star cards and in doing so won the game handily.

The third game 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.

We were playing the game with three players which drops the double lines to single lines which makes the game significantly harder.  I forgot about this and took a route that went into Chicago and do not secure a line into there early in the game.  This proved to be a problem as I spent most of the second half of the game and most of my trains trying to get into Chicago as one player managed to take all but one route out of the city and it was tough to get there from the way I had built my track.  I did manage to do it and ended the game shortly after that.  Even only getting two tickets during the game I manage to come almost win the game coming in a very close second.

The last game of the night was Tsuro.  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.

I started the game off well.  I managed to run one of the other players off the board fairly quickly.  Unfortunately I managed to get myself stuck on one side of the board and could not get my piece moved into the center of the board.  I get going for five or six turns but in became inevitable that I would run off the edge and did so coming in second out of three players.

My stats for the event: