After Action Report – Games Gathering @ Brookhurst Hobbies, August 3, 2013

It was a full house today at Games Gathering at Brookhurst Hobbies this month.  There were 25 people at the even with seven games being played at any given time.

I played four games at the event, three from the Empire Builder family of games and Thurn and Taxis.

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.

 The first game I played was India Rails.  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 decent set of cards at the start of the game.  With those cards I was able to get the money to build out about half the track that I need for the game.  Then I started to get mediocre cards that were giving me enough cash to continue on but not much other than that.  Instead of tossing like I should have, I kept fighting through them hoping the next card would be the solution to all of my problems.  Of course this was not the case.  By the time I worked my way to better cards, the damage had already been done and I lost the game.

The next game up was 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.

I calculated that I had enough money from the starting cash and my first two deliveries to get to my third delivery in the first set of cards, which gave me a good position to start with.  Once I was done with that set of cards, I had enough money to keep going and build the track that I needed but nothing spectacular to make me comfortable.  Midway through the game is when disaster struck.  I had a set of cards that would have given me a good infusion of cash and gotten me the cash that I needed for a possible victory.  Unfortunately I did not count out the amount of cash I would actually need and discovered I did not have enough cash to build to the first stop after I spent three turns building track and almost all of my money.  I was then forced to discard my hand and work with what I could get to make enough money to complete the track to the major cities I needed to win.  By that time it was too late to get the cash that I needed to win the game and it too turned into a defeat.

We then played Thurn and Taxis to change things up a bit.

Thurn and Taxis was the winner of 2006 Spiel des Jahres, an award given to the best family game each year in Germany.  Some of the games that win this award can be real stinkers as far as I am concerned, but many like Turn and Taxis are actually quite good.

The theme for Thurn and Taxis is the players are trying to set up postal routes in Germany in the 15^th century.  The rules are simple.  The play chooses a city card from a tableau of six cards on the board and adds one to their set of cards in front of them that connects to the city on the previous card.  There are special abilities that a player can use once a turn.  They may choose two cards from the tableau, add two cards to their set, replace all of the cards in the tableau, and extend their route by two.

To earn points in the game, the players must build route that are progressively longer starting with three card and going to seven cards.  When a route is scored, the player put post offices on selected cities on the route to show the establishment of their post office in that city.  They may be placed all placed in one region or one in each region the route goes through.  The player gets bonus points for having established post offices in all the cities of a region, having post offices in all of the regions, and length of the route when completed.

One of the things that I try to do in Thurn and Taxis is build my routes as long as I can before scoring them instead of scoring them when they meet the minimum required length.  I do this to try to capture the length bonuses early in the game and perhaps a region bonus or two as well.  In this game this strategy served me well.  I was able to get the cards that I needed to complete a seven card route in the game as my first route.  Even though in only got me the three card scoring card, it got me the seven card route bonus and a region bonus chip.

During the rest of the game, I was able to complete a total of three seven card routes and a five card route.  With the bonuses that I got in completing the routes, I was able to win the game handily.

The last game I played at the event was Martian Rails.  The game 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.

In this game I actually started with mediocre cards and only kept them because it gave me an initial route that I liked.  I was able to work my cards well enough for the rest of the game, so that I was the closest I had been during the entire day to winning one of the Empire Builder games.  I had everything on board my train that I needed to win when the game ended in another loss for me.

Even though it was a hard day for me, it did not hurt my stats much as all of the games were two player but it can be disheartening to lose at games you like to play and Iron Dragon too.

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
India Rails	1	-	1	-	-	-	-		2.00
Iron Dragon	1	-	1	-	-	-	-		2.00
Thurn and Taxis	1	1	-	-	-	-			1.00
Martian Rails	1	-	1	-	-	-	-		2.00
Totals	4	1	3	-	-	-	-	-	1.75