After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Public Library, August 24, 2013

There was a pretty good turnout of the Strategic @ Adventure Game Association event at the El Toro Library this week.  There were 23 people in attendance with a number of new players and infrequent attendees there.  There were 5 games being played at any given time.

I was able to play only 3 games including a marathon session of Martian Rails.

Martian Rails was the first game I played at the event.  The theme of Martial rails is that the players are developing railroad lines on a fantasy version of Mars.

The game takes the science fiction and fantasy element 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.

As you may already know from my previous entries, 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.

We started with the standard start of three cards.  I was able to build out the track to my initial destination with only a few dollars to spare.  It was so tight that if I had a track washout at the end of my track I would have been doomed.  After I delivered my first two deliveries, I was not able to get that good of a synergy going with my cards.  I was in the position of only having one card with a decent load going one way on my track going one direction on my track with a good return load during the first half of the game.  In the second half of the game, I need to discard my hand once or twice after every delivery to be able to get a card that worked and never really was able to get a good run going. 

In the Empire Builder games it is important to be able to have two or even all three of your cards with loads that work together in order to really be able to get ahead in the game.  If this does not happen, odds are you are not going to win the game.

Add to the situation that we had an inexperienced player in the game that would not take much coaching and was playing badly as a result, doubling the time it took to play the game.  The game seemed interminable.

Even with my problems, I was still doing well during the game until I had to start turning my hand after every delivery.  As a result I ended up third out of four players.

After a three hour play of Martian Rail we knew we would not be able to fit another Empire Builder game in the time left comfortably so we opted for a five player game of Saint Petersburg.

Saint Petersburg normally a four player card drafting and set collection game.  Players take turns doing actions during each round, which include purchasing a card from a tableau of cards, playing a card from their reserve, or activating a special power on a card until all of the players pass.  We opted to add the fifth player expansion to the game as well as another set of expansion cars

A generally successful strategy for the game is to get cards the generate money early game in the game because money is very tight throughout the game and then use that money to get cards that generate as many victory points as possible as the game progresses.

In Saint Petersburg I normally try for the aristocrat strategy which is to get as many unique aristocrats as possible for a big end game score.  A side effect of this strategy is that it generates income for a player a second time in a round.  Money is still tight in the game, but you usually have enough money to do what you need to do.

This time I decided to do a building strategy because everyone else seem to be going for the aristocrat strategy and you very rarely win if you are doing the same strategy as everyone else.  Unfortunately I was not used to the strategy and forgot I would not get the second infusion of cash in each round so I fell behind in generating cash by the end of the second round of the game and could not recover.  I wound up in fourth place because of this mistake.

The last game of the day was Bazaar which is a game that I really enjoy.  In Bazaar the players are gem traders trying to fulfill gem orders from demand cards in competition with the other players.  They do this by using two trading boards that represent the exchange rates for the market.  For example one red gem can be traded for two blue gems.  The players use the exchange to fulfill the demand cards as efficiently as possible to maximize their points.

I did capture four demand cards in the game but I was too sloppy in my exchanges that I would have too many gems left over so I was not able to get very many points out of each demand card.  Things would have been different if I had been able to get the fifth demand card but the game ended just before the turn I would have gotten the card.  I only managed to come in third out of four players.

It was a pretty good day overall.  I got to play two games I do not get to play all that often so that it almost made up for the interminable Martian Rail session.  My stats for the scorecard did not improve as you will see below, but I still may have a chance to recover before August is over.

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Martian Rails	1	-	-	1	-	-	-		3.00
Saint Petersburg	1	-	-	-	1	-	-		4.00
Bazaar	1	-	-	1	-	-	-		3.00
Totals	3	-	-	2	1	-	-	-	3.33