The attendance at this week’s board game night was again a
little lighter than it had been previous to Comic Con. It makes me wonder if this
is going to be an ongoing trend or it we will see an increase in attendance
again.
There were 20 people at the event with five games being
played at any given time.
I played three 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.
This was the first time I have played Trans Europa with six players
in years and my game was a mess. I
decided that I would use a north to south strategy where I center my starting
post between my northern most and southern most cities and let the other
players get me near enough to my other cities that I can pick them up after I
am done building to the northern and southern cities. This did not work out for me in the first
round. I ended up connecting to only
three of my five cities and lost eight points.
Since my strategy worked out so poorly for me the first
time, I tried it again in the second round.
I decided that it could not end that badly for me again. I was wrong.
I ended up with very similar results.
I only connected to three of my cities and lost seven points. This put me past zero and the game was over
with me in sixth place out of six players.
I then played one of the games from the Empire Builder
family, India Rails. To review, in the
Empire Builder family of games 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. In order to win the game, the
player must be the first to have track connecting a number of major cities on
the board and have at least $250 million dollars.
India Rails is the version of the game that takes place in
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The
only added rule for this game is the ability for transporting pilgrims from one
region to another for a minimal payment inside India. I believe that this feature was added to help
offset a couple of major disasters that can destroy a player’s game if they do
not have the cash to build back track and they do not want to sacrifice their
current hand.
I had a very good start coming out of the westerns side of
the board in Quetta with three deliveries on a route that ended in Chittagong. I had the money to get to the first two stops
and would get the rest of what I needed in the first two deliveries. The plan worked out well. After the third delivery I had cards that
took me down to Sri Lanka. I tend to be
hesitant about building across the ferry but the payout was good enough that I
decided to throw caution to the wind and do it mostly because it got me closer
to two more of the major cities I needed for victory conditions. After the delivery to Sri Lanka the cards got
a little murky. They were okay but not
great and they seemed to have me follow a path I had already built so I kept
them. I managed to build out to the rest
of my major cities and accumulate the money I need to win by moving back to the
north and the east and then back to Quetta where it all started. I won the game on the way back to the south
coming in first out of three players.
The last game of the night was again 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.
This time I tried a different strategy that worked out
well. I took the first 30+ card that
came out and had a large number of chips on it.
In all three rounds it turned out to be one of the earlier cards in the
game. This gave me a large number of
chips and the luxury of taking other high cards that were around the card that
I had after they got a few chips on them.
In each round the chips that I had remaining offset 10 – 20 points and I
ended the game with the lowest score winning the game for the first time this
year.
After this the evening winded down.
My stats for the event:
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