After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Public Library, August 10, 2013

The Strategic & Adventure Game Association event was back at the El Toro Public Library after last time’s location change to Comic Quest.  The attendance to the event was light as it normally is on the second Saturdays because it is competing against two other events on that day.  There were 13 people there with three games being played at any given time.

I was able to play five games at the event.

The first game was Paris Connection.  It is a relatively simple Network Connection stock holding game that came out a few years back.  The players take turns adding track to railroads or getting more shares in them.  Connecting the railroads to cities adds to their value.  A railroad’s value is use as a multiplier to the shares that they hold in a railroad.  The pieces in the game represent both the track being laid and the shares of stock.  The more shares that are held by the players, the  track that can be laid and thus the less points that railroad will be worth at the end of the game.

I played the game quite poorly.  I fixated all of my effort on improving railroad that I started with at the beginning of the game as opposed to increasing my holdings.  As a result I wound up coming in third out of three players.

Then I played Iron Dragon.  This is my least favorite Empire Builder game, yet I keep getting dragged into it.  It would be funny if it were not so sad.

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 started the game with a plan that would be tight to complete, but still barley possible.  It became a slam dunk when the Rainbow Bridge card connecting two major cities came up as the first card drawn in the game.  This is the first time it came up early enough in the game to make a difference.  It did help me out because it made it possible to complete one of my higher pay out cards without having to do one of the intermediate deliveries.  Unfortunately I wound up running into problems soon after that when I did save up enough money to reach my next set of destinations and had to do some alternate deliveries to make up the money.  The game did not improve for me as it progressed.  I was able to get about half the money that I needed to win, which is better than normal for me.  Even with that, I still ended up last out of three players.

The next game I played was Airlines Europe.  Airlines Europe is an economic game were the players collect stocks from the different airlines that are available in the game. The value of the stocks increase based on how well the routes of the airlines are developed by the players in the game.  The more development that occurs for an airline the more valuable the stock becomes.  The players gain victory points based on how much of a stock they own in the airlines and how valuable the stock is.  If the player owns the most stock in a certain airline they gain the most victory points based on the valuation, the player that owns the second most, gets the second most victory point.

I pursued the strategy that I have been using the last few games focusing on diversity in my stock holdings.  It proved to be enough to get me second place in the game.  It appears that I am still going to have to refine the strategy in order to get a win in this game.

I played Trans America after Airlines Europe.  Trans America is a game that is deceptively easy to learn but is very difficult to master.  Like Trans Europa, which I played back in June, in Trans America the players are required to connect up five different cities in different regions of the United States.  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.

Generally if you have one bad round in this game, it is difficult to recover from, which happened to me in the second round of the game.  Even though I was able to play very well the rest of the game being the first one out or the only losing one point in a turn the damage had already been done.  I finally succumbed to the inevitable and came in last out of four players.

The last game I played was Tsuro.  Tsuro is a light game in that if it takes more that 15 – 20 minutes to play you are doing something wrong.  Tsuro consists of a 8 tile by 8 tile playing area.  The players take turns placing tiles on the board and moving their pieces along the trail on those tiles.  Once the player’s piece goes off the edge of the board or runs into another player’s piece they are out of the game.  The last player with a piece on the board wins the game.

I did quite well in the game I was able to keep my piece out of trouble until the last turn of the game when I had no choice but to run off the side of the board.  I even managed to set two players up to run into each other a couple of turns before my demise.  As a result I came in second in this game.

I did not win a single game this time, but I did still manage to have fun while losing.  Is there something wrong with that?

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Paris Connection	1	-	-	1	-	-	-		3.00
Iron Dragon	1	-	-	1	-	-	-		3.00
Airlines Europe	1	-	1	-	-	-			2.00
Trans America	1	-	-	-	1	-	-		4.00
Tsuro	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	2.00
Totals	5	-	2	2	1	-	-	-	2.80