After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Public Library, January 11, 2013

I attended the Strategic & Adventure Game Association event on Saturday at the El Toro Public Library.  There were 17 people at the event and there were 4 games being played at any one time.  I was coming off of mediocre results on Thursday so I was hoping that I would see some improvement in results from the games I played at this event.  I did get to play three games at today’s event.

The first game that I played was a new one for me called Yunnan.  In Yunnan the players are tea traders in ancient China.  As the person in charge of the trading company you are trying to get your tea to the farthest markets in order to make the most profit so you can build your wealth and prestige.  You have to watch out for the inspector in the provinces because they will send an unlucky trader back to the home province where they will earn less for their tea.

Yunnan is a worker placement game.  The players take turns placing their worker in order to purchase more workers, better horses, more border passes, greater influence, and structures or to become traders.  Once the players have placed all of their available workers they the move the workers they have made traders along the trade route.  They can only send them as far as they quality of their horses and their border passes will allow.  After the all of the traders have been moved, the players then receive their income which they can convert to cash or victory points.  The game ends when someone reaches 80 victory points.  In addition to converting income to victory points, the players can receive three victory point gift if they make some of the early deliveries of tea in the provinces farther along the trade route.  The can also get 12 victory points for each tea house they establish.

I had a hard time with the game.  I started the game with the preconception that one of the best things that I could do was establish tea houses for end of game scoring.  It turns out that the best thing to do is to get your income growing as quickly as possible.  I figured this out by the third turn and even though I had a bunch of workers I was too far behind in income at that point to make up the difference and ended the game in third place.  Yunnan is definitely a rich get richer game and if you make a mistake you are going to pay for it which gives it points against it in my estimation.

The next game I played was my favorite game of 2013, Russian Railroads. 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.

I tried the building the Transsiberian rail line strategy that I used in the last game that I played to see if I could make it work better for me this time.  Unfortunately another player was trying the same strategy and we spent much of the game competing for the same actions.  This hurt both of our games and made it so I was only able to get two engineers and not be able to expand into a second rail line early enough in the game for it to make a difference.  I ended the game in third place.

The last game of the day was Wildcatters.  The theme of Wildcatters is the players are oil barons setting up their oil empires throughout the world.  This ranges from drilling wells and making them produce, to transporting the oil to the refineries to be refined for use.

The players start the game by seeding the board with 3 drilling rigs, 2 trains, an oil tanker and a refinery based on 8 region cards that they are dealt.  They also star the game with 20 shares of stock and $10 Once this is done, the players then start taking their turns.  They start the turn by receiving $10 in cash.  During their turn, the player may purchase and place additional infrastructure items, open a well, transport oil and transport oil to the refineries.  The player can only do these actions in a single oil producing region or any non producing region.  The location is determined by taking one of eight region cards that are face up during their turn.  Other players my piggyback on some of these actions by giving the player that initiated the action some shares in their company.  If a refinery is full at the end of a player’s turn, the oil is placed in that region’s market. 

Points are scored in the game by having the most shares in each of the companies, and providing the most oil in a region during the first scoring round.  During the final scoring round the players get points for the same thing they got them for in the first round plus having the most money and bonus points for controlling wildcatter wells, and three or more refineries.

I was hoping to redeem myself in this game and try new strategy centered around building as many refineries as possible in some of the poorly served regions in order to entice the other players to use them and get as many shares in a variety of companies as possible.  I was able to get all of my refineries built by the fourth round and was able to get a decent score going into the end of the game.  I only lost the game on the end of game points for the wildcatter bonus.  I ended the game in second place.  This leads me to believe that this may be a viable strategy but I need to get over my reluctance to taking a loan in the game to really make it work.

The results for this event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Yunnan	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-		3.00
Russian Railroads	1	-	-	1	-	-	-			3.00
Wildcatters	1	-	1	-	-	-	-			2.00
Totals	3	-	1	2	-	-	-		-	2.67

Now I will have to see how well I do at Sunday’s event.

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