After Action Report – Games Gathering @ Brookhurst Hobbies, May 4, 2013

Games Gathering is a monthly board game event that is currently run at Brookhurst Hobbies, a game and hobby store in Garden Grove, California.  The event runs from 12pm to 6pm.

The attendance for the day was 12 people with three games being played at any one time.

The game space that Brookhust Hobbies has is nicely sized with 7 tables in the area.  They also have a good selection of store copies of games to choose from, which adds to the selection of games that the players bring to the event.

Even with six hours of play time, I was only able two games, Empire Builder and Merchants of Venus.

First up was Empire Builder, which is a 2 – 6 player game of rail building and goods transportation in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

In the game 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.

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.

Based on my demand cards, I my initial build was from Mexico up into the Plains States, which is not something I do very much.  From there I built east.  After that I delivered back to Mexico and picked up and delivered a couple of loads to the Pacific Northwest.  At that point I got into trouble and had to turn set of cards to get something that would work for me going anywhere but where I was and burned a number of turns doing that. 

It was at that point the games deteriorated for me.  I would get some cards that worked and I would not be able to follow them up with additional cards and would go through the pitch and draw a new set again wasting more time.

At the end of the game I came in second out of three players.

Merchant of Venus was the next game I played.  It is a 1 – 4 player game which is a reissue/update of the 1980s game of the same name.  Even with the updates, you can tell that it had its origins in the 1980s. 

In Merchant of Venus the players take the roles of traders that travel the trade routes of the known galaxy trading goods and using the money they earn to improve their ships and get more goods to trade.  You also have the option to complete missions which can get you additional bonuses during the game.  The person with the most money at the end of the game wins.

We made a couple of mistakes which made this game take well beyond the 3 hour play time that was recommended on the box.  The first was that we played with a brand new unpunched set.  The second is that I was playing with three players that had played the original edition of the game but were not familiar with the new standard edition rules.  This added an hour to the play time as we punched the bits out and familiarized ourselves with the rules.

I spent the game wandering known space picking up and dropping off what I could, but focused a lot of my time completing mission, which from what I understand is a new feature in the second edition of the game.  This was a mistake because delivering goods gets you a lot more points.

I managed to get third place even though I had never played either edition of the game before and I was playing against three other players that had played the game many times before so I guess I should take that as some sort of moral victory.

Here are my stats for this event.

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Empire Builder	1	-	1	-	-	-	-		2.00
Merchant of Venus	1	-	-	1	-				3.00
Totals	2	-	1	1	-	-	-	-	2.50