After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Library, December 28, 2013

I was back in Southern California after spending Christmas with family in Las Vegas in time for the Strategic and Adventure Game Association event at the El Toro Library on Saturday.  Even with people traveling for the holidays we had a turnout of 18 people including a couple of regulars that that had moved out of the area and had come back to visit family.  It is a bit humbling to have people take time out of their holiday to spend a day gaming at your event.  I guess that it means I am doing something right.  There were four games being played at any one time.

I was able to play three games at the event.

To start the day I played Iron Dragon one of the Empire Builder games.

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.

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.  As usual I will not review the major differences in this game from the others in the series as I have done so in previous reports.

I started the game with a decent set of cards.  They did not have the best payouts but they allowed me to start building track in an area of the board that usually has a high income potential throughout the game.  I did managed to spend all of my available cash to be able to get the product I would need meet my first three deliveries and get to the fist two destinations.  I normally try to deliver to two locations on my way from one end of my track to the other during my first run to try to maximize my return on the initial track investment but this time for a change I started in the middle of my track and went to the side that had only one delivery because I could not make the numbers work for doing the other way with the money I had at the start of the game but with one small delivery I could make the whole thing fall into place.  As the game progressed, my cards gradually go better and I only ran into trouble a couple of times.  The turning point was when I was able to make a single set of deliveries that got me over $100 million as a payout.  I coasted through the rest of the game and won it.

The second game I played was Ticket to Ride: Nederland.  This is the newest expansion the Ticket to Ride family of games.  As with most of the expansions of the game it comes with only the board and other items that you need for the variant rules but you need to have a set of the Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride Europe game for the trains and train cards.

The basic rules for Ticket to Ride: Nederland are the same as the other Ticket to Ride games.  The players start out the game with five tickets that have destinations that they can connect of which they must keep at least three.  They will also receive four train cards. An additional five train cards are placed face up by the side of the board along with draw decks of train cards and tickets

The train cards are the core of the game.  They come in eight different colors and there is a ninth card type which is a wild card and can be used as any color.  These train cards are what are used to make the connections between the cities.  Each connection is represented by a number of spaces that are a single color.  If a player wished to claim a connection between two cities they must turn in the number of cards of that color.  They then place trains from their reserve on that connection.  After a connection is claimed no other player may use that connection.

The players choose one of three actions to take during their turn.  The first is that they may take train cards from the five cards that are face up or from the draw deck.  The second option is that they may claim a connection between two cities.  The third option is that they may take additional tickets.

The variant rule that TTR: Nederland adds is that in order to claim a connection you need to pay a fee for the connection.  The fees are noted next to the connections on the board.  The first person to claim the connection between two cities pays the fee to the bank.  If there is the option to place another connection between the cities the second player pays the fee to the player the placed the first connection.  There is a bonus at the end of the game for the person that has the most money left over.

Since this was the first time that I played the game and I was uncertain of how difficult it would be to make the connections on the tickets, I decided to take only 3 tickets at the beginning of the game.  The most important thing that I noticed at the beginning of the game was that there was more benefit to placing connection early and often as opposed to waiting until you had all of the cards you needed to complete your tickets.  I took this to heart and as soon as I had the cards I needed to make a connection, I would place it in hopes that another person would need it and pay me the money for the privilege to make that connection.  I found that money was not as tight as I thought it might be and I was able to complete my first three tickets fairly quickly and took another set of ticket of which I kept two and completed those in a few turns so I took another ticket which I was able to do.  I could tell it was getting later in the game so I ran out the game collecting train cards so I could finish the game with a with a high point connection.  I did end the game with the top bonus for having the most money at the end of the game as my tactic of laying track early started to pay off towards the end of the game.  Unfortunately that did not help me win the game in the end as I came in second out of four players.

The final game for me at the event and most likely for 2013 was Martian Rails.  Martian Rails takes the science fiction and fantasy elements from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury and other authors and brings them to the game.  There are canals with water and forest and jungle terrain on the board, cities are called thing like Barsoom and Hinkston Creek, and you even have loads like Roddenberries and Thoats.

I had a dodgy start to this game the cards were not kind to me and I started my track in an area I preferred not to be in but I wanted to see how it would go.  I was able to get some synergy going early on in the game but it proved to be difficult to keep that going and I had to flip cards way too often to be able to get a set of cards that had a marginal pay off.  This put me firmly into second place of three players in the game.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Iron Dragon	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-		1.00
Ticket to Ride: Nederland	1	-	1	-	-	-	-			2.00
Martian Rails	1	-	1	-	-	-	-			2.00
Totals	3	1	2	-	-	-	-		-	1.67

If You Are Interested In Purchasing These Games: