After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Public Library, September 14, 2013

The Strategic Adventure & Game Association event was very well attended for a second Saturday.  Second Saturdays are when we compete against two other local events.  There were 19 gamers in attendance with four games being played at one time.

The most popular game of the day by far was Bruges, a new game from Z-Man Games.  It was played six times during the day.

I was not one of the people that played Bruges.  For me it was a day filled exclusively with train games.

The first game that I played was Nippon Rails.  Nippon Rails is one of the games in the Empire Builder family.  It is theme around building a rail network and delivering goods in Japan. 

Like in all games in the Empire Builder family, 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.

I had a strong start getting a strong set of cards.  My biggest problem during the game was that I got hit by event cards that caused me to lose turns on five separate occasions during the game, which really hurt even though I was getting demand cards that worked very well with the rail network I was developing.  The continual hits from the event cards wound up taking their toll and I game in second in the game.  I was two turns out from winning the game myself when it ended so if I had not been an event magnet I would have had a good shot at winning.

The next game is was Trans America.  Trans America is a game that is deceptively easy to learn but is very difficult to master.  In Trans America the players are required to connect up five different cities in different regions of the United States.  The players start building track from their starting post.  If they connect up to another player’s track, they can build off of that player’s track as well as their own.  In this way players wind up helping each other out while trying to achieve their own goals.

The game was over in only three rounds.  I did fairly well in the first two rounds and only lost four points total.  In the third round actually reached all of my cities first.  The leader lost a point.  The third player in the game managed to end the game by going past the post.  I ended up in second place again.

The third game of the day for me was Empire Builder, the flagship game of the series.  It is a game of rail building and goods transportation in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

The basics of the game are the same as Nippon Rails so I will not go into them again and instead go directly into the game play.

We had five players in the game which is something that does not happen very often.  Two of them were new players so the three experienced players focused on teaching the game.

I was dealt a decent set of cards at the beginning of the game and started building from the west coast toward the east figuring that I would be able to improve my situation from there.  I turned out to be very wrong about that.  During the second turn in the game when I was delivering my first load, the event cards started to mess with me again.  I was hit with a derailment and lost the load that I needed for a later delivery.  Not only did that make me lose a turn, I had to spend the next three turns going back to pick up the load I lost and getting back to where I was.  This killed my game. 

I continued to get hit by event cards in this game as well but had the added bonus of getting mediocre demand during the rest of the game as well.  This made it impossible for me to recover and I lost the game badly taking fifth place.

The last game of the day was Santa Fe Rails.  Santa Fe Rails is a network development game that was design by Alan R. Moon a few years before he created Ticket to Ride.

In Santa Fe Rails, the players are trying to influence the routes that five major railroads take across the western United States by trying to maneuver the track that is placed for the railroads to go through certain cities.  The cities that each player cares about are determined by which ones they draw from the deck during the game.

During the game players gain points for connecting new cities in a rail network and at the end of the game they will get points for each different railroad that connects  to the cities that they have played in front of them.

Game play is simple.  The players draw their hands up to four cards.  They can choose from the city deck or the special cards to the side of the deck.  The special cards allow the players to place branches in the rail lines, build extra track or improve some of the cities.  Once the player has filled their hands the chose a card to play and turn them over at the same time.  The players then place track in turn order twice.  The turn order them shifts to the left and the next round begins.

The game ends when all the tracks the five railroads have are used up or there is no legal placement for the track from those railroads.

I started the game by focusing on laying as much track as I could to try to get as many first to a cities bonus points as I could.  Unfortunately the other players were doing a better job of that than I was so about a third of the way into the game, I changed over to playing out as many city cards as I could.  I figured I could get a lot more points doing that than I could get in bonus points.  When I changed to this strategy I also focused on getting as many railroads connected to the cities I was playing.  By the end of the game I was in the strongest position when it came to city control.  I wound up winning the game handily.

My results for this event are:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Nippon Rails	1	-	1	-	-	-	-		2.00
Tans America	1	-	1	-	-	-	-		2.00
Empire Builder	1	-	-	-	-	1			5.00
Santa Fe Rails	1	1	-	-	-	-	-		1.00
Totals	4	1	2	-	-	1	-	-	2.50