After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Library, December 14, 2013

Since it was a second Saturday we had the expected low turnout because of being scheduled against a number of events as well as there being only 2 more shopping weekends until Christmas.  There were 12 people in attendance with 3 games being played at any time.

We also had a treat.  Tim Fowers, the designer of Paperback came to the event.  He comes to the event regularly to have people play test some of his ideas.  When he was designing Paperback he tested it a number of times at our previous events.  This time he brought a reporter for the Orange County Register who are doing an article on him so that they could get pictures of people playing Paperback.

Those of you that are part of the Kickstarter may want to know that the printer is sending out finished copies of the game to Tim now and he should be able to start shipping them later this month if all goes well.

I was able to play 3 games at the event.

The first was Paperback.  Paperback is a word puzzle deck building card game.  Players start with a hand of 10 cards, which consist of 5 consonants and five wild cards.  They end deal themselves 5 cards and using the letters that they get plus a common vowel they use the hand to make a word.  They score buying power based on the letters that they use in the word and can use that buying power to get more letters or victory point cards.  The game ends when two of the piles of cards are depleted.

This is the first time that I played the game.  I like word puzzles but am not a fan of Scrabble.  Since it was my first time playing, I spent a lot of my effort purchasing the letter cards so I could explore them instead of focusing on the victory point cards.  This hurt me toward the end of the game as I was not able to pick up victory point cards fast enough.  I came in third out of four players.

The second game I played was another card game called Kashgar.  The theme of Kashgar is the players run merchant companies in late Medieval / early Renaissance Europe.  Each player controls three caravans which they use to fulfill contracts which provide the victory points.  Each caravan consists of cards that represent people that work for the caravan.  Each person has a special ability that they can do.  The special abilities center round getting resources to be exchanged for completed contracts of cards that allow the player to complete a contract.  The caravans are laid out in a pile.  The special ability of any person can be used when they are the top card.  After the special ability is used the card is placed at the bottom of the caravan pile and can only be reused when they are the top card again.  When a player reaches 25 points the game ends at the end of the round.

I started the game with no card that would allow me to complete a contract.  I knew that they were in the deck but I would have to wait until I could get to one.  In the mean time I focused my efforts on getting and using cards that generated the resources so that they would be able to complete the best possible contracts when I did get the contract completion cards.  I was able to get one contract completion card so I started to alternate my caravan that had that card with the one that generated resource income and got a very effective operation going.  I was the one that triggered the end of the game and only came in second based on the tie breaker which gave the game to the other player because he got his last contract later in the turn.

The last game of the day for me 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 of Empire Builder was again a very tough one for me.  I started the game with most of my track in the south.  Unfortunately so did everyone else.  While I was not competing with the other players for loads in appears that I was competing with them for cards.  By the middle of the game I was having difficulty getting cards that meshed with my track which leads me to believe that most of the cards in the area were played out early in the game.  I spent about a quarter of the game trying to find cards that worked.  This put me way behind and I only came in third.

My stats of the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Paperback	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-		3.00
Kashgar	1	-	1	-	-	-	-			2.00
Empire Builder	1	-	-	1	-	-	-			3.00
Totals	3	-	1	2	-	-	-		-	2.67

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