After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Public Library, June 22, 2013

The Strategic & Adventure Game Association event at the El Toro Public Library had 15 people in attendance.  There were 4 different games being played at any given time.  It looks like now that summer has officially started we are starting to see summer attendance levels at the events. 

Summer attendance at the events in the area is on average about 20% lower than during the rest of the year.  We will see this lower attendance level until the middle of September.

I played four games at this event.  All four of the games were train themed.

The first game I played was Australian Rails.  Australian Rails is one of the games in the Empire Builder family.  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.  In the case of Australian you need to connect 3 major cities plus the city of Perth.

There are generally two strong strategies for victory in Australian Rails.  The first is to start building your track and do deliveries up and down the east coast of Australia where the majority of cities are and then once you have enough cash build out to Perth on the west coast.  The second is to immediately build track connect Perth to the east.  Which one of these you do depends on your initial set of contracts.

In this game did neither of these.  My first set of contract had the best payouts for me by building up the west coast.  Doing this I ran the risk of not getting follow on contracts that I could do along my track and not have enough money to build out to the east coast to make deliveries with high payout.  It looked like this would be the case.  In order to make deliveries that would get me close to $100 million I needed get to Tasmania, but I only had enough cash to build a little over three quarters of the way there.

Fortunately, the other two players had built there east to west runs of track, so I build as much of the track that I could making sure I was connected to my destination.  The track I did not have enough money to build I rented from one of the other players.  By the time that I got my destination, I was down to $1 million, but was able to get the big payout which I used to build out the rest of my track.  With this success, I still only managed to take second, but I now have a strategy that does not seem to be as hopeless as I first thought.

The second game I played was British Rails another game in the Empire Builder family.  This game takes place in England, Scotland and Wales and is played the same as other Empire Builder games.

The best way to win this game is to build track going north to south connecting the four major cities on the board build very little off of your main north south line.  Unfortunately, my contracts did not lend themselves to this option.  Instead they had me going from the London area out towards Portsmouth and Penzance.  I did this hoping that it would pay off by me getting a number of clay loads.

Clay is resource that is only available in Portsmouth and gives high payouts if you get the card with it on them.  Unfortunately I only manage to get one clay card throughout the entire game while it seems every third card the other players were getting had clay on it.  The game ended badly for me with me coming in third.

Next up was Ticket to Ride: Europe.  This was the second game in the Ticket to Ride family of games and is my preferred game in that family.  We used the 1912 tickets in the game and did not use the warehousing option.

In the Ticket to Ride games, the players are given a number of tickets that have a start and finish destination and a point value.  The players then attempt to connect these cities using sets of cards of single card to link up cities between these their destination cities.  If you succeed in connecting up the destination cities on your ticket by the end of the game, you get a number of points equal to the value on the ticket.  If you do not connect the destination, you lose the number of points equal to the value on the ticket. 

The thing that makes the game a challenge is that there are a limited number of links between cities.   Once a player claims on no other player can use that link.  The reason that I like Ticket to Ride: Europe is that it has a game mechanism called stations that allows a player to use another player’s link as if it were his own for purpose of completing tickets which helps mitigate being cut off from your destination.

This, however, did not help my game.  I was able to get to all of the destinations on my tickets, but because I took tickets that were for shorter runs and as such were not worth as much,  I failed miserably and came in last in the game.

The final game that 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.

As is usual for me in this game, I seemed to get cities that were the farther away from each other than any of the other cities on the map and suffered for it.  I came in third.

So ended a day that had started out fairly well with second place in a game using a new strategy for me only to have my hopes for a victory in any game dashed by the time the Ticket to Ride Europe game came to an end.  With that here are my standings for the day.

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Australian Rails	1	-	1	-	-	-	-		2.00
British Rails	1	-	-	1	-	-	-		3.00
Ticket to Ride Europe	1	-	-	-	-	1			5.00
TransEuropa	1	-	-	1	-	-	-		3.00
Totals	4	-	1	2	-	1	-	-	3.25