I hosted the Strategic & Adventure Game Association Game
Day at the El Toro Public Library on Saturday.
Unlike the game night at Comic Quest the turnout did not seem to be
affected by Comic Con. We had 21 people
at the event with five games being played at any one time.
I played three games at the event. Two of them were from the Empire Builder
family.
The first game I played 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. As usual I will not review the major
differences in this game from the others in the series as I have done so in
previous reports.
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.
I decided to play the game more conservatively than I
normally do this time because the last few time I have gotten myself into trouble
with my normally aggressive style of play.
I decided to focus on completing two medium payout loads that were in a
location that would get me a good set of base track with my first set of cards. I had the track built and ended up with a
level two train and money left over at the end of the initial build which I
almost never do. It seemed that it was
going to work out for me. I was able to
start expanding out my track and deliver some decent sized loads.
However about half way through the game I felt a little
stuck. I had two more major cities to
connect to in order to meet victory conditions, but I could not decide which
ones to build to. It took me a couple of
had discards to decide but I was able to make the decision and built out to
Eaglehawk and to the Underground. I had
deliveries out to the Eaglehawk area and was not able to get the demand cards
for load going the other way in my initial draw so I again discarded my hand
and drew three cards that would be with great payouts but they all delivered to
Eaglehawk. I noted that if I delivered
them I would be able to win the game so I decided to deadhead back east to get
the loads and try to deliver them back out in the west. I hoped that I would have enough time to do
it before someone else ended the game.
It was not meant to be. Another player ended the game two
turns before I was able to get to the destination. I ended the game in third place out of four
players.
The second game I played was Empire Builder. Empire Builder is a game of rail building and
goods transportation in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. 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.
Two of the cards I started with had loads of Coffee as
demands so I decided to start the game completing them. I had been a long time since I had had
requests for Coffee loads at the start of the game that I figured it would be
good to try out the strategy. I was able
to build a good set of track up the center of Mexico into the United States
with branches into Santa Fe and Kansas City at the start of the game.
After I completed delivering my coffee loads I extended my
track west to Los Angeles and San Francisco to deliver a load of swine and pick
up some sugar. I then built to Atlanta
to deliver the sugar and eventually to Chicago and New York to deliver silver. I was doing well at this point. I had built to all of the required major cities
and had the highest level of train. I
then started to get some mediocre cards and even after tossing them a couple of
times they were not improving so I would do a delivery with a set and the toss
the cards again. I started to get some better cards but the damages had been
done and I ended the game in third place with no chance to get even close to
winning.
The final game of the day for me was a not so quick game of
Bazaar. 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.
This was the most difficult game of Bazaar I have had in as
long as I can remember. The trade
options we had favored getting white and blue gems but there was no other way
to trade them to get other colors. The
hardest colors to get were red and yellow.
The selection of cards that we were getting to purchase were heavily
weighted to needing red and yellow.
Throughout the game my opponent and I were struggling to get the gems we
needed to purchase the cards. We were
happy to get one point when we took a card which is unusual. I also spent more turns rolling the die to
get a gem I could use than I would have ever thought necessary in the
game. At the end of the ugly session my
opponent edged into victory ahead of me.
My stats for the game:
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