After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Public Library, July 13, 2013

The attendance for this event was lighter than normal.  There were 10 gamers in attendance and 3 games being played at any given time.

I had a day of Crayon Rails today.  I played two of them during the event.

The first was Empire Builder, the flagship game of the series.  It is a 2 – 6 player game of rail building and goods transportation in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

In the game 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.

My game started well enough.  The demand cards I got set me up to build track down the middle of the United States and into Mexico, which can be a solid starting position because it leave your options open for future building out to the major cities.  That is if I had gotten some strong cards, which was not the case.  While I was struggling with may card even at one point discarding them for new ones three turns in a row, the winner did not have that problem.  In fact he had such a strong run of cards he blew everyone out of the water with his victory.  It was so bad the fourth place player did not even get his track built to his last major city before the end of the game.   I managed to come in third.

The second game was my least favorite of the series Iron Dragon.

The setting for Iron Dragon is a fantasy world filled with things like dwarves, elves, and orcs, which is great if you are playing Dungeons & Dragons, but not my preference for a rail game.  I have explained the major differences between this game and the others in the series enough in previous posts that I will not go into them here.

The games started out typically enough for me.  I had too much track that need to be built to complete my deliveries that I was very late in upgrading my train, which is normally the kiss of death in these games.  It was to the point that I would have considered it to be a personal victory to complete building out my track to the major cities I need to qualify for a win.  Based on my position everyone including myself thought I had no chance of winning including myself.  We were all even joking about it.  However as the game continued the leaders hit a bad run of card and I started to hit a good run of cards.  I kept thinking that this is good at least my loss would not be as embarrassing as I thought it would be.  Every turn I kept expecting one of the other players to call victory, but it did not happen.  The game kept going until I found myself over the threshold for victory but had to delay calling it until the following turn until after the effect of an event card ended.  Once that was done, two of us called out victory conditions and it turns out I won the game by seven points.

Even with the victory, I still do not like playing Iron Dragon.

Without further ado here are my stats for this event.

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Empire Builder	1	-	-	1	-	-	-		3.00
Iron Dragon	1	1	-	-	-	-	-		1.00
Totals	2	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	2.00