After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Public Library, November 9, 2013

On Saturday I hosted my event the Strategic and Adventure Game Association at the El Toro Public Library.   The attendance was rather low even for a weekend where we are up against two other events.  We only had 9 people attend.  There were three games being played at any one time. 

We should start seeing better attendance for the second Saturday date starting in January because one of the events we are competing against is changing their schedule and will no longer be having their event on the same day.

I was able to play three games at the event.  Two of them were Empire Builder family games.  The other was a game that I was able to play twice.

The first game of the day was game in the Empire Builder family that I have not played for at least a year called Russian 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.

Russian Rails starts in the Soviet Union era and can extend to after the fall of communism.  The board includes the western half of the Soviet Union extending east to Alma- Ata in what is now Kazakhstan.  The game plays similarly to all of the other games in the Empire Builder family.  The game was the first to add bonus deliver cards in a big way to the game.  It also has a unique hazard card that causes the fall of communism which takes away 20% of all of the player money and adds a toll for people entering Russia from the other countries that used to make up the Soviet Union.

I started the game with an okay set of cards that got me the prime set of track that I generally look for in the east so I opted to keep those.  I was able to deliver my first load without any problems but then I got hit by a derailment card which caused me to lose one of my loads.  Unfortunately in order to make any progress in the game I had to back track and pick up the lost load which delayed my game quite a bit.  To add to my problems I kept getting cards that did not conform to my track or my current location so I spend a lot of time delayed trying to get cards that worked.  I limped through the game and ended up in third place out of three players.

The next game I played was Iron Dragon.  The setting for Iron Dragon is a fantasy world filled with things like dwarves, elves, and orcs, which is great if you are playing Dungeons & Dragons, but not my preference for a rail game.  I have explained the major differences between this game and the others in the series enough in previous posts that I will not go into them here.

I started the game with a set of cards that was so bad that I had to discard them and draw a new set.  I knew this would put me slightly behind and was prepared to have as bad a game as I had in the Russian Rails game.  My replacement cards actually turned out to be very good.  With them I was able to build a good base of track in an area that I normally would not think to build and upgrade my train most of the way.  The cards continued to work out in my favor the rest of the game adding to my current base of track in areas that I needed to go and making me the money I needed.  I actually wound up winning the game that I expected to lose because of my rough start.

The last game that I played was Organic Soup.  One of the people that played Compounded with me on Thursday brought it with them to show me a game with a chemistry theme that they really liked.

Organic Soup is a card game in which the players collect cards to create chemicals and chemical reactions.

The players start the game with a set of chemicals they can create, one simple, one complex, and one amino nucleic.  In addition there are basic chemicals available for creation on the table.  The players take turns either collecting carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen or oxygen atoms from 12 face up cards in the center of the table to create any chemical that is face up on the table or use atom from reaction is front of them to place a chemical in their hand down.  In addition when they are creating a new chemical they may steal unprotected atom from other players.  The game ends when there are no more atoms in the deck to place out or when a player creates the first amino nucleic acid.

We played the game twice.  The first time I did not quite understand the rules so I was not making more of the simple and complex compounds out of the face up atoms until late in the game.  The game ended when the atom deck ran out.  I won the game because I had control of two complex compounds the next player had only one.

The second time, with I much better understanding of the game, I focused on gathering the atoms I needed in order to complete my amino nucleic acid early on as I was building my first simple and complex chemicals.  This allowed me to create my amino nucleic acid the turn after I created my complex chemical and won the game again.  Not bad for a guy with a liberal arts education.

My stats for this event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Russian Rails	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-		3.00
Iron Dragon	1	1	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Organic Soup	2	2	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Totals	4	3	-	1	-	-	-		-	1.50

 If You Are Interested In Purchasing These Games: