I am now back in the groove after Anime Expo. I am back to attending the gaming events that
I go to regularly. On Thursday I went to
the Board Game Night at Comic Quest.
Attendance for this event has gone up since Paradise Perks
closed its doors and their Thursday night event ended. There were 30 people at the event with six
games being played at any one time.
I played three games during the event.
First I played Eurorails twice. Eurorails is one of the games in the Empire
Builder family. For those that are
unfamiliar with the Empire Builder games here is a brief description of how
they are played. The players own
railroad companies that are competing to build rail lines and move freight from
one city to another based on a set of demand cards that they have. Once a demand on a demand card is completed
the player discards it and draws a new one from the deck. Included in the demand card deck are a number
of disaster cards which include things like derailments and river floods which
impede the player’s progress to victory.
The unique feature of the Empire Builder family of games is
the free form building of track that it allows.
The player uses special crayons that are included with the game to draw
their track on the board. Between games
the marking from the previous game are erased from the game so that in the next
play of the game the players start with a fresh board.
Eurorails is set in Europe from Kaliningrad in the east to
the western shores including the United Kingdom and Ireland. The goal in Eurorails is to collect $250 and
for the player to have connected six of the seven major cities in the
game. In the current edition of the game
the option of building the Chunnel between France and England is now
available. The cost is prohibitive and I
would not recommend it unless there are four or more players in the game and a
player is spending most of their time moving to and from England.
In the first game, I started by building track from the northwest
to the southeast and delivered two loads in that direction. I then built into Switzerland and from there
down into northern Italy to be able to pick up marble. After a couple of more deliveries I extended
my track into Spain and made a couple of runs back and forth from there to the
rest of Europe. By this time I had
completed upgrading my train and building out to six of the seven major cities
I would need for victory conditions. I
after a few more turns I decided that I would build to London to complete my
major cities requirement. This turn out
to be the right choice as a few turns later I got two cards with Marble loads
going to England. I was able to win the
game by delivering the two loads.
In the second game, I started with a slightly more
traditional track build going from Ruhr down into Spain. The only variance I had was that I built a
spur into Torino in order to pick up the second load I needed to complete the
track across Spain to the valuable cork city.
From there I did do some slightly different things. I built to the east using a southern route
instead of the northern route one would use based on the track I had built
earlier in the game but the track that I built turned out to be slightly more efficient
for me based on the cards I had. I did
become concerned about how I was doing in the middle of the games because I
insisted on keeping a couple of mediocre card sets longer than I probably
should have but everything turned out fine as I edged into another victory in
this game.
The last game of the night for me was No Thanks. No Thanks is a simple quick play card game
that is a great filler game. It consists
of a deck of cards that a numbered in sequence 3 to 35 and 55 red plastic
chips. At the start of the game each
player is given 11 chips. The deck of
cards is shuffled and nine cards are removed from the deck face down. The remaining cards are placed in the center
of the playing area. The players then
turn over one card. The first player
decided whether to keep the card or pass it on to the next player. If the player passes on the card they place
one of their chips on it and play continued on to the next player.
This continues until the card is taken by one of the
players. That player also takes all of
the chips that are on top of the card.
Then the next card is revealed and the process begins again until the
deck runs out of cards. If a player ever
runs out of chips then they must take the card that is face up.
The way the game is scored is that the player adds up the
numbers on the cards. If a player has a
number of cards that are in a sequence then they only add the lowest number in
the sequence to their score. The player
then subtracts one point per chip they have remaining from this score. The player with the lowest score wins. The game is usually played for three rounds
in order to even out the scores.
I like to use No Thanks as a filler game. We had a little time left at the end of the
evening. It was not enough time for use
to get in a long game so we chose No Thanks to fill the time. This time we did play the game for three
rounds.
In the first round everything turned out great for me. I ended up taking a few low numbered cards
and ended the round with the lowest score.
In the second round I fell flat on my face. I ran myself out of chips calculating that
another player would be stuck taking a fairly high card. The thought was that the next card that
turned up should be lower and I would be able to make a good score. Unfortunately it turned out the card was much
higher than the last card I passed on. I
as forced to take it with very few chips on it and the problem compounded as I
was forced to take more cards because I did not have the chips to pass on them.
I
went from first place to a distant last place.
I played the game a little more aggressively in the final
round. I did have to take cards I did
not want but I kept a handle on my score.
I was only able to make up some of my deficit and ended up in fourth
place out of five players.
My stats for the event:
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