After Action Report – Games Gathering @ Brookhurst Hobbies, May 3, 2014

On Saturday I attended the Games Gathering at Brookhurst Hobbies.  20 people attended the event and five games were being played at any one time.

I was there for a short time because I wanted to go to Comic Quest late in the afternoon to support their Free Comic Book Day event so I only played two games at the event.

The first game that I played was Martian Rails from the Empire Builder family.

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.

Martian Rails 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.

I had two good cards that had me taking Replicants from Utopia in the north to Crater 47 and Atmosphere Plant in the south.  Bother were decent pay outs but I did not have a solid return card.  I decided to worry about that later.  After I delivered those loads I got a couple of cards that had me stay on the southern half of the board.  I was able to connect to another major city and upgrade my train twice while I was down there.  The cards that I got them gave me a reasonable return trip north and I was able to finish upgrading my train the next two steps and I connected to another two major cities.  It took me a while to decide on the last major city I would connect to because they were about equal distances from my existing track and I was not getting any cards that were taking me any closer to them.  I finally just picked on as I was getting to the $200 million mark and built to it.  I was in a good position to win the game then my momentum broke and I was not able to get the cards I needed to finish the game until it was too late.  I did manage to come in second out of three people.

The other game I played 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.

I had been almost a year since I played the game previously.  The last time I played I managed to come in last in a five player game.  I was in a five player game this time.  Learning from my mistake from the last time I played which was I did not take a long route.  I made sure to take one this time.  In this case it was one I had not had ever before which was Palermo to Moscow.  I took a second route that would extend my track to Petrograd discarded the rest of my initial tickets.  The idea was to not be too aggressive because it was a five player game.

The other thing that I decided to do was not build my track through the center of the board.  I have learned that there are too many tickets where you need to build track through the area and limited options if you get cut off by another player in the mid game.  With this in mind I built along the edge of the map in the south until I thought I was far enough east that I would not be a threat to any of the other players and then built north to Moscow.  This worked out well for me as it appeared that I had the east to myself while the other players were fighting over the center of the board. 

I was able to pick up five more tickets during the course of the game that connected to my track and I only had to use one station.  I ended up winning the game by a significant margin.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Martian Rails	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.00
Ticket to Ride Europe	1	1	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Totals	2	1	1	-	-	-	-		-	1.50