After Action Report – Games Gathering @ Brookhurst Hobbies, February 1, 2014

On Saturday I went to the Games Gathering at Brookhurst Hobbies.  There were around 25 people at the event and 6 games being played at any one time.  I was going to see if I could get some redemption for my poor performance last month, but unfortunately it was not in the cards.

I was able to play two games at the event and was not at my best in either of them.

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.

I tried my refinery strategy again and was able to discover an issue with it.  As I had mentioned in my review of Wildcatters earlier this week, I had a concern that the strategy would not work if two people were pursuing it.  In this game there were two of us that decided to start the game building refineries so we started to split the markets.  The thing that added to the problem was that the other players were not producing enough oil use the refineries to their maximum capacity.  This hurt the game for both me and the other player.  In hindsight the only way I could have pulled out a victory was to invest the oil refinery proceeds into stock from the other players instead of trying to pay off the loan in my stock that I had taken by the end of the games because I would have been able to get closer to majorities in those stocks and gotten more than enough points to compensate for what I would have lost for not paying the loans.  As the game stood I did not do that and suffered a fourth place loss for my trouble.

The other game that I played was Eurorails from the Empire Builder family of games. 

To review, in the Empire Builder family of games 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.  In order to win the game, the player must be the first to have track connecting a number of major cities on the board and have at least $250 million dollars.

Eurorails is set in Europe from Kaliningrad in the east to the western shores including the United Kingdom and Ireland.  The goal in Eurorails is to collect $250 and for the player to have connected six of the seven major cities in the game.  In the current version of the game the option of building the Chunnel between France and England is now available.  The cost is prohibitive and I would not recommend it unless there are four or more players in the game and a player is spending most of their time moving to and from England.

I started the game with reasonable track that was able to get me to my first three deliveries.  I ran into trouble after I drew a new card that gave me a good delivery that would require me to build track to get the load and more track to the drop off but I had enough money so I decided to do it.  After I built to the pickup point and was getting ready to get my load I decided to be clever and upgrade my train so I could carry and extra load and used all of my cash completely forgetting that I had to build to my second destination and would not have enough cash to do it from what I would make from the delivery to the first destination.  I was able to get a card that was able to get me the money I needed after my next delivery, but the delay had already done its damage and I came in second.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Wildcatters	1	-	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	4.00
Eurorails	1	-	1	-	-	-	-			2.00
Totals	2	-	1	-	1	-	-		-	3.00