After Action Report – Game Day @ The Duck Club, February 9, 2014

I attended Game Day at the Duck Club on Sunday.  The Duck Club is the largest gaming event in Orange County and happens every second Sunday.  There were around 50 people at the event and 12 games being played at any time.

I played two games at the event.

The first 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.

After the problems I had the last time I played the refinery strategy, I decided to go with a hybrid of it.  The idea was to not only build refineries to service 5 markets so that people would use them to  gain share in those markets and enable me to gain majorities in the stocks of all the companies, but I also planned to ensure that I controlled one oil field so that I could pump my own oil.  I figured that this would give me a shot at gain shares in markets if the other players’ oil was not flowing freely into my refineries.  I also decided to not take only my shares in the early game hoping that I could get majorities in stock for the first scoring round instead of waiting for the second scoring round to make my big move.

The strategy worked out fairly well.  I was able to open the oil field in southwest Asia on my own and get two wildcatter chips for my trouble.  I did have to take a stock loan a little earlier than I had expected so that slowed me down a bit on accumulating shares of other companies, so instead of get all first places in the first scoring round I had one first place and 2 seconds.

Even when I did get back on track my momentum was off so I was not able to get oil from my oil field more than two times in the game.  If I had been able to get pump oil a third time I would have been able to win the game.  Instead I was able to come in second place.

The other game I played was Robinson Crusoe:  Adventure on the Cursed Island.  Robinson Crusoe is a cooperative game where the players take the roles of the Carpenter, Cook, Explorer, and Soldier of an expedition that has been shipwrecked on the Cursed Island.  Their goal is to survive on the island and achieve a goal from one of the scenario cards form the game.

Each player gets two actions during each turn.  They can use the actions to complete a special task from an event card, build, forage, explore, or rest.  In addition to doing the player actions during the turn there are a number of other things that happen.  First and event card is drawn which will have an immediate effect and special task which will help mitigate the effects of the event.  There are weather effects as the game progresses as well as a chance for starvation if the players do not collect enough food.  The goal of the game is for the players to survive long enough to complete the goal of the scenario.  If they do they win the game.  If they do not they lose.

We played the Cursed Island scenario in this game.  Our goal was to build 5 crosses by the end of the tenth turn.  There were three players in the game.  I played the carpenter.  The other two players played the cook and the soldier.  In my mind the best plan was for the carpenter to focus his efforts on building the items we needed to survive at first and then build the crosses as the game progressed and the other players would alternate on foraging for food and exploring the island to keep us alive.  Once the game started my ideas to stay one step ahead of starvation were dashed.  Two of us were not able to complete our goals on the first turn so that put us constantly behind on getting the things we needed to do to survive done.  It also did not help that the soldier was doing things other than foraging or exploring which left the cook to do both things which hurt our food gathering ability. 

We plodded forward fearing our doom would happen on the next turn and focused completely on getting the crosses built.  We were barely able to complete the five crosses with all of use on the edge of death.  We would have not survived another round if we had not completed the game when we did.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Wildcatters	1	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	2.00
Robinson Crusoe	1	1	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Totals	2	1	1	-	-	-	-		-	1.50