After Action Report - Games Gathering @ Brookhurst Hobbies, June 1, 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 18 people with five games being played at any one time.

I played three games from the Empire Builder family at this event:  Iron Dragon, India Rails, and Martian Rails.

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.

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 board so that in the next play of the game the players start with a fresh board.

First we played Iron Dragon.  This is my least favorite version on the Empire Builder series for two reasons.  First it is full of added features that the other Empire Builder games do not have, like conductors that change the cost of track depending on what type of terrain you are building on, that seem to just add to the complexity of the game.  Second it is the one I get the least practice on.

The setting for Iron Dragon is a fantasy world filled with things like dwarves, elves, and orcs.

I did fair better this time versus last week at SAGA.  I managed to build to all the major cities and was three turns from winning the game myself.

The second game that I played was India Rails.  India Rails takes place in India.  The only added rule for this game is the ability for transporting pilgrims from one region to another for a minimal payment.  I believe that this feature was added to help offset a couple of major disasters that can destroy a player’s game if they do not have the cash to build back track and they do not want to sacrifice their current hand.

I had a good start to the game, but then I started getting marginal replacement cards and could not draw myself out of them.  Again I came in second with only a couple turns to go to win.

The last game of my day was Martian Rails.  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.

My initial hand had me building in an area that looks lucrative, but since there are large distances between cities really is not.  Instead of discarding the hand in favor on replacements, I toughed it out in hopes that I could build my way out of the problem.  This proved to be my undoing.

After my first set of cards I was not able to get a truly good set of cards to carry me into the lead.  I still managed to be only two to three turns from victory in the game, but I still took second.

Here are the results for this event.

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Iron Dragon	1	-	1	-	-	-	-		2.00
India Rails	1	-	1	-	-	-	-		2.00
Martian Rails	1	-	1	-	-				2.00
Totals	3	-	3	-	-	-	-	-	2.00