After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Public Library, November 22, 2013

I hosted my event at the El Toro Public Library on Saturday.  The turnout was pretty good with 19 people attending and 4 games being played at any given time.

I continued with my current obsession with Russian Railroads at this event.  I managed to play two sessions of it and was able to play another new game as well.

I started the event by playing Russian Railroads.  For those that are not familiar with the game from my last two after action reports, Russian Railroads is a train themed worker placement game.  The goal in the game is to help industrialize Russia through building three train routes and building factories.  The person who can gain the most victory points to do this wins the game.

In Russian Railroad the players take turns placing workers on actions on the board.  These actions consist of building factories, upgrading trains, moving pieces up the rail or industrial track, and purchasing engineers.  Once all of the players have placed their workers, the round is over and everything is scored and the game moves on to the next round.  The game lasts seven rounds.

To review my discoveries about the game thus far, there are two good strategies to the game.  The first is to focus on building two of the rail lines trying to maximize the advantages you can get from them to gather as many points as possible.  The other is to focus on building factories and only build the track you need to gain bonuses to complete building a full set of factories.

I have also determined that there is importance in collecting some engineers especially if their abilities help you reach your goals.  There is also a 40 point bonus at the end of the game if you have the most engineers.  In order get engineers you must make sure that you go early in the turn order by using one of your workers to make sure you are the first player in the next turn.  The plus about using the worker in this way in Russian Railroads versus other worker placement games, is that you get to reuse the worker at the end of the round on another action.

The first session of Russian Railroads I played at this event I was forced down a path I had not expected to go.  I was hoping to try to refine my railroad building strategy more by changing my priorities.  Unfortunately, based on what the other players were doing in the first turn of the game, I was forced to readjust my thinking and try the factory building strategy.  Prior to the start of the game, I had not thought through the best way for me to go about doing this strategy.  Thus far I had always assumed that people would be obsessed with the factory strategy because it appears to be the easiest one to figure out the timing on, so I was focusing my energies on learning the timing on the railroad strategy.

I did not get my timing down very well on the factory strategy.  I ran into the end of my factory progress track and was not able continue because I did not have a factory in place.  I also was not able to complete an addition rail line so I was not able to do this strategy well and ended up in third place out of four players.

In the second session, I was able to try out the strategy that I wanted to try in the first game.  In all of the previous games I was in, most people, myself included,  were either focusing on building out one of the smaller rail lines first and then trying to build out the Transsiberian line as quickly as possible latter in the game or they were trying to split their efforts between the Transsiberian line and one of the other ones and not maximizing either line quickly.  With this in mind I wanted to see what would happen if I were to focus my effort on building out the Transsiberian line and worry about the other lines after I had gotten the fifth upgrade started on the line.

This strategy worked out a lot better for me than the factory strategy did.  I was able to start getting ago amount of points generating by the fourth round of the game get the fifth upgrade level started by the fifth round.  This started generating I was generating a lot of points each turn and was able to keep up with the leader.  I still did not win the game but my second place was much closer to the leader than any other time I played.

The other game I played was Amerigo.  The theme of Amerigo is the players are exploring and archipelago of islands of the coast of America.  Their goal is to each gain prestige by discovering new islands, build settlements, and collect their trade goods.   The person that has the most prestige at the end of the game wins.

As one of the game mechanics, the cube tower of Wallenstein and Shogun fame in reintroduced.  Instead of being used to resolve combat as in those two games, the cube tower is used to determine the number of actions that a player gets to perform.  There are seven actions that are performed during a round in the game.  They are exploration, where the player moves their ships to islands and set up settlements, weapon collection, so the player can defend themselves gains the pirates that show up at the end of the round, planning, where the player plans the expansion of their settlements, development, where the player can gain bonuses abilities, building, where the player builds the building that they planned in the planning phase, trade, where the player gathers trade goods from the market, and initiative, where the player can mover themselves up on the initiative track.

During each phase of the turn, the players take the action cubes of the color for the phase and drop them into the cube tower.  However many of them come out the bottom of the tower are the number of times they may perform that action.  If any other color cubes come out during that phase, the player may perform that action instead of the action they would normally do during that phase.  There are five turns in the game.

I had a little trouble at first in the game.  I was too focused on the tactical aspect of try to set up as many settlements on islands as quickly as possible to try to lock out the other players from islands if possible.  This is did give me a good jump in points early in the game and I and another player spent most of the game far out in the lead.  The thing that I underestimated was the number of end game points that could be gotten from trade goods.  I did not get as many of them as I would like and where I looked to be an good position early in the game, I fell back to third place after all of the end game scoring of trade goods was completed.

Here are my stats for this event:

 

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Russian Railroads	2	-	1	1	-	-	-	-		2.50
Amerigo	1	-	-	-	1	-	-			4.00
Totals	3	-	1	1	1	-	-		-	3.00