After Action Report – Game Day @ Brookhurst Hobbies, October 5, 2013

Game Day at Brookhurst Hobbies was lightly attended as most events over the last couple of weeks have been.  15 – 20 players attended the event with 3 – 4 games being played at any one time.  It was a windy day so the Pathfinder players that normally play their game outside were moved indoors so the game room was very crowded even though there were not as many board gamers there.

I was able to play two games at the event.

The first game that I played was Circus Train.  The theme of Circus Train is the players are owners of circuses in the 1920s.  They are traveling the Northeast and Midwest o the United States by train trying to put on shows and hire additional talent to improve future shows.  Every time a player’s circus performs, the players score the show based on the demand of the show.  If the score is better than their previous best show, they will receive a bonus in their payment for the performance.  Victory points are scored at the end of each month for the top three performances and who has the most of a certain type of performer.

The players move around the board using a set of eight cards that allow movement and actions to be performed.  The players may only play a certain card once until all of eight of their cards are used.  They may then start reusing them.

We were playing this game because one of my friends asked me to show him how to play his copy of the game after he found out that I had played it once.  Unfortunately the one time I had played was over a month ago and my recollection of the game was getting spotty.

I gave the players a haphazard explanation of the rules and we started to play.  I started isolated from the other players and was able to start out with a pretty good first performance, which got me into the lead early in the game.  The other player started to target me by stealing my performers when they could and my shows later in the game suffered, but I was still able to maintain my lead and was able to win the game.

The second game I played was Empire Builder.  It 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.

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.

My game this time in Empire Builder was almost as rough as the last game I played.  I was not able to get a decent set of cards beyond the first set in the entire game.  I was able to get two good cards at best.  Ad this was even with discarding a number of times throughout the game.  Add to that getting hit by two derailments back to back and my fate was sealed.  I managed to come in third out of three people in the game.

My stats for the event are:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Circus Train	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-		1.00
Empire Builder	1	-	-	1	-	-	-			3.00
Totals	2	1	-	1	-	-	-		-	2.00

If You Want to Get the Games Mentioned Here: