After Action Report – Thursday Night Gaming @ Paradise Perks, January 2, 2014

Thursday Night Gaming at Paradise Perks was my first event for 2014.  Since it was so close to the holidays I was not sure how the attendance was going to be.  Fortunately there were plenty of players there.  There were 20 – 25 people in attendance with 4 games being played at any one time.

I had an opportunity to play Wildcatters again so I took it.

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.

It had been almost a month since the last time I played Wildcatters so I was having a hard time remembering what I had learned about the game from my first play so I could build a reasonable strategy.  During set up I tried to place my resources where other people were placing theirs so I could capitalize on what they were doing. 

I started running into trouble early by running low on shares in my own company so I focused on getting my refineries filled with oil so I could get more shares.  This allowed me to surge ahead during the first scoring round. 

As the game progressed, I started building up my presence in South America during the middle of the game but I could not get the money to open the oil fields so I settled on building a couple of additional refineries and got the oil field open during the last turn.  Unfortunately I had to convert too many shares into cash during that round so I was not able to get much in the way of end of game points.  As a result I came in fourth out of four players.

I hope this is not an indication of how the year is going to go.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Wildcatters	1	-	-	-	1	-			4.00
Totals	1	-	-	-	1	-	-	-	4.00