Thursday night I went to the Board Game Night at Comic
Quest. There were 20 – 25 people at the
event with five games being played at any one time.
Over the last few events I have been having a hard time with
the games I am playing. The trend
continued at this event. I played three
games at the event and did not win a single game. Let’s look at the games.
The first game I played 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.
When I played the game last week I actually won it but this
time I had one of my worst games of No Thanks ever. The first two rounds went fairly well. I got stuck with some high cards but was able
to get enough chips to offset them and score 10 points in the first round and 5
points in the second round.
In the third round everything fell apart. I was not able to get a card with many chips
on it early in the round so I held off too long and was forced to take a high
card with one chip on it when I ran out of my own chips. I had to do this three more times before the
round was over and ended up with 110 points putting me securely in last place
out of five players.
The second game I played was Martian Rails. Martian Rails takes the science fiction and
fantasy elements from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury and other authors and
brings them to the game. There are
canals with water and forest and jungle terrain on the board, cities are called
thing like Barsoom and Hinkston Creek, and you even have loads like
Roddenberries and Thoats.
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.
I thought the game was going to be a good one. The initial track I built was exactly the way
I like it and optimally set up for victory.
The problem I had throughout the game was that the cards I got were not
working with my track. I had to discard
my hand over 10 times during the game to get one or two good cards. Even then I was able to keep up with the
other players but it was not enough and I ended up in third place out of three
players.
The final game of the day was one I had not played in five
to seven years called Through the Desert.
Through the Desert is an early Reiner Knizia where the players are part
of nomad tribes that are trying to control the oases and water holes in the
desert. This is done by placing pastel
colored camels on the board to capture the oases and water holes.
After the board is seeded with water holes that are worth 1 –
3 points and oases, the players take turns placing five pastel camels on the
board as the starting points for each of the groups of their tribe. Each of the
camels is one of five colors and all of the player have one camel of each
color.
On each turn after the initial set up phase the players
place two additional camels to their groups.
The goal is to place a camel on a water hole to capture it and earn the
points or try to get you camels to touch one of the oases. Other players may not play in the same space
that a player has already placed a camel.
In addition to the points that a player gets for capturing things
during the game they score points for having the most camels of one of the five
colors and points for each space the cut off from the rest of the board.
All that I remember from the first time I played the game was that it had cool camels that were in pastel colors. With that in mind and a shaky understanding of the rules
I started the game. I got the hang of it as the game went on. Unfortunately my initial placement was not so
great but I did manage to capture my fair share of water holes and get to a
good number of oases. I even managed to
cut off a decent sized area. It was not
enough to win the game but it was enough to get second place out of three
players which was the highlight of the night for me.
My stats for the event:
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