After Action Report – Thursday Game Night @ Paradise Perks, November 21, 2013

I went to the Thursday Game Night event at Paradise Perks again this week.  There were 25 – 30 players there and 5 games being played at any one time.  We had what passed for weather out here which most likely contributed to the higher attendance.

I played only one game during the event.  I had the opportunity to try my hand at Russian Railroads again so I took it.

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 eight rounds.

This time when I played the game I wanted to try out a variation on them railroad centric strategy that I played the previous time I played the game.  Instead of spreading my rail line growth over the train line evenly, I wanted to focus on completing the expansion of the line that give bonus points first then focus on growing the Transsiberian line in the second half of the game.  I also wanted to see if could get the engineers that were beneficial to me.

I started having problems from the beginning with my strategy.  It relied on being able to upgrade trains as quickly as possible, but the other players were not upgrading their trains so I wound up getting stuck in my expansion.  By the time I was to the halfway point in the game I still had not completed that line and I needed to move on to the Transsiberian line or I would not be able to keep up.  The only thing that was sort of working for me was that I was able to get a number of engineers while I was working on my track.  This did help me out as I moved in to the second half of the game, but I was still having trouble keeping up on the score.  I was able to get the most valuable track out on the Transsiberian line a turn sooner than I did in my first game but that did not help me as much as I had hoped.

The other thing that I learned in this session was that using a worker to move to first of second player can be useful if you have engineers.  Instead of hoping to use the worker on the board you are better off counting on using it on one of your engineers.  If you do this the use of that worker is much more valuable.

I did end up not doing as well this time I played.  I did manage to come in third, but only bearly.  This compared to the second place from the previous game.

My stats for the event:

 

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