After Action Report – Thursday Night Gaming @ Paradise Perks, January 16, 2014

Thursday Night Gaming had a lower attendance this week than it has over the last few weeks.  My guess is that either people are basking in the afterglow of a full weekend of gaming last weekend or they have gotten to play the games that got as presents during the holidays and are spending time doing other things for a while.  There were 20 people at the event and 4 games were being played at any given time.

I got to play two games at the event.

The first game I played 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.

We were playing with four players this time so I took the opportunity to try the refinery strategy gain in this game.  I wanted to see if it worked out better with four players than it did with three players.  The strategy is to spend the first four turns of the game building all five of your refineries focusing your efforts in the areas that do not have any oil fields.  The hope is that this will get players to use your refineries so you can collect majorities of stock in most of the companies.  If the other players do not use them you can always use your own refineries to gain region majorities in those areas.  This time it worked very well. By the end of the game I was able to get stock majorities in three of the four companies, I had the most money, and I was able to get the region majority in one region and come in second in another.  I only had one wildcatter chip but even then I was able to get my victory.

The other game I played was 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.

We tried this game with five players for the first time.  I used the same strategy as in the last game of trying to get all of my workers build and out on the board as quickly as possible.  Unfortunately it did not work out as well with five players as it did in the last game.  I focused on keeping too much of my money in the middle of the game when the other players were converting some of their income into victory points.  By the time that the game ended I was behind the other players and even though I was getting a healthy income I was not able to make up the deficit in my score and ended the game in fourth place out of five players.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Wildcatters	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	1.00
Yunnan	1	-	-	-	1	-	-			4.00
Totals	2	1	-	-	1	-	-		-	2.50