After Action Report – Board Game Night @ Comic Quest, August 28, 2014

I attended the game night at Comic Quest on Thursday.  The attendance was lower than is has been in previous weeks with only 17 people at the event and four games being played at any one time.  The Labor Day holiday coming up on the weekend probably has something to do with it. 

The upside to it was that I did get to play two games that I had not played before.  One of them I got to play three times.

The first game I played was Princes of the Dragon Throne.  Princes of the Dragon Throne is an area control game that uses a deck of cards that the player builds during the game to do things.

The board is broken up into six regions inside each region are spots for each of the six guilds in the game.  In other words, each guild has one spot in each of the six regions.

Each player controls a faction each faction starts the game with a deck of cards, control chips, supporters, and dragon lords.  The cards represent the people that are in the player’s faction.  The cards are used to gather resources that are specific to each card with cards purchased later in the game where the players may place their supporters.

The players use the resources that they receive to recruit additional cards to their deck as the game proceeds.  The cards that are recruited during the game can be used to collect resources or insert supporters into the regions or guilds that they have influence with.

The players may opt to do one of the following things.  They may gather resources.  They may recruit cards.  They may add supporters to the board.  They may mover supporters from one location on the board to another location.

If the players gain a majority in a guild spot they may place a dragon lord in the palace.  There are six areas with five spots each in the palace.  The game ends when all thirty of these spots are filled.

Victory points are gained when a place gains control of a guild spot or for recruiting certain cards during the game.  The majority of the victory points are gained in end game scoring for majority control of regions, guilds, having the most of each of the two types of cards and control of areas of the palace.

Early in the game I decided the most important thing would be to star by recruiting as many cards as I could as quickly as I could in order to be able to have the supporters I needed to gain control of the guild spots.  I focused on placing my supporters in one type of guild spot first and expanded to other guilds as the game progressed.  I also tried to get the majority in two of the six regions. 

My planned worked out well until about halfway through the game.  My deck started getting clogged by having too many cards and I was not able to get the resources I wanted when I wanted them.  This allowed one of the other players to overtake me.  I also did not fully understand how many points the areas of the palace would be worth in the end of game scoring so I did not spread myself properly there.

As a result of my errors I ended the game in second place out of three players.

The other game I played was Abluxxen.  It will be released in the United States under the name Linko.  Abluxxen is simple card game that makes a great filler game. The deck consists of sets of eight cards of numbers 1 – 13 plus five wild cards for a total of 109 cards.

Players are dealt a hand of 13 cards the remaining cards are the draw deck.  A card row of six cards is created by placing the top six cards from the draw deck face up next to the draw deck.

The players take turns playing sets of cards from their hands.  Each set can only have cards that are the same number and may include wild cards as well.  The set placed may consist of any number of cards.

If a player later in the turn places a set of cards that has the same number of cards that one of the other players placed and is a higher number, the player may opt to take the cards from the earlier player’s set or allow the earlier player to take the cards back into their hand or draw cards from the card row or the top of the card deck to replace the discarded cards in their hand.

The game ended when one of the players no longer has any cards in their hand.  The score is determined by counting the cards that the player has in front of them and subtracting the number of cards that they had remaining their hand.  The person with the highest score wins.

We managed to play this game three times with the time we had left after we finished Princes of the Dragon Throne.  My strategy during all three games was to try to get rid of my smaller sets as early as possible and if I was forced to draw more cards try to add to sets that I already had in my hand to make them more difficult to beat when I finally placed them.  This worked out well for me in the first two games as I came in second out of three peopled in the first game and first out of four people in the second game.  In the third game I missed how few cards people had in their hands and started to get rid of my large set too late to help me and ended up in fourth place out of four players.

My stats for the event: