After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Library, May 25, 2013

The Strategic & Adventure Game Association had good turn out this time.  There were 19 people in attendance throughout the day with a number of new people in the mix.  Many people were surprised that the turnout was so large with it being a holiday weekend with a convention going locally in Los Angeles.

I told them that generally the Strategicon events do not interfere with SAGA because they do not have events that most of the people that go to SAGA would be interested in and that they would prefer to go to an event that was free and had the games they wanted to play versus pay to go to an event that did not have the games they were looking to play.

This time it was all about crayon rail games for me.  For those that are not familiar with the term crayon rail games refer to Empire Builder and all of the various editions of the game.  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.

The first crayon rail I played was Lunar Rails.  This edition of the game takes place on the moon in the future when there are sprawling cities that need a way to get cargos from point to point so the players come in to help them with that.

Lunar Rails is the most unforgiving of the crayon rail games.  You have to be careful to keep enough money on had because there are disasters that can knock out a chunk of your track between you and where your next delivery.  Generally it will hit you when you do not have enough money to rebuild the track to be able to reach your destination.  We had this happen to someone in our game even though we warned them repeatedly.

I had a good start to the game.  I was able to build a solid set of track to start with.  I did not upgrade my train as quickly as I normally do in these games, which had me worried that I would fall behind, even though I my track building would not have been able to keep ahead of the speed of my train if I had spent the money upgrading.

It did not matter though.  I was able to keep myself in cards that I was able to deliver for decent amounts of money and manage to win the game.

The next game we played was Iron Dragon, which is my least favorite of the crayon rail games.  The setting for the game is a fantasy world in which the players run magical trains around the world.  I think that the creator of the Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, Eberron took the idea of mystical trains for that setting from this game.

What I do not like about this game extra features that it adds.  The first one of these is the Conductors, which allow the players discounts when building on the terrain they have an affinity for.  The other feature is ships, which allow you to ferry your train across bodies of water.  To me these features clutter the game and add to the length of it.

I had a horrible time of it in the game.  I started with a set of cards that were marginal enough that I probably should have pitched them and gotten a new set and the game went downhill from there.  I had not completed building to all of my cities by the time the game was won and came in last place.

The results for this event are below.

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Lunar Rails	1	1	-	-	-	-	-		1.00
Iron Dragon	1	-	-	-	1	-	-		4.00
Totals	2	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	2.50