After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Public Library, February 8, 2014

This weekend is another weekend of gaming.  I started the weekend at the Strategic & Adventure Game Association event at the El Toro Public Library.  The day started out slow with the first games beginning 30 – 45 minutes into the day, which was a surprise but by around noon we had most of the 21 people that attended there and 5 games being played at any one time.

I was able to play two games during the day.  Both of them were from the Empire Builder family.

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.

The first one I played was Iron Dragon.  The setting for Iron Dragon is a fantasy world filled with things like dwarves, elves, and orcs, which is great if you are playing Dungeons & Dragons, but not my preference for a rail game.  As usual I will not review the major differences in this game from the others in the series as I have done so in previous reports.

This game is not my favorite of the series yet it is the one that I have managed to play the most since I started recording my plays last year.  In this game I did the most inadvisable thing that you can do in the game.  I started my game building from Wikkidde to Eaglehawk.  It is almost as classic a blunder as getting involved in land war in Asia.  You should never build to Eaglehawk in Iron Dragon if you want to win the game.

I ignored the classic advice because I had a good set of cards that I figured would be able to help me build the rest of the track I needed and of course the problems Eaglehawk presents could never affect me.  I turned out to be very wrong on that count.  The follow on cards were working from me well enough but the problem was that I kept getting hid by event cards during the run of the game which slowed me down so much that I ended the game in third place out of three people.

The other Empire Builder game I played was Martian Rails.  Martian Rails takes the science fiction and fantasy elements from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury and other authors and brings them to the game.  There are canals with water and forest and jungle terrain on the board, cities are called thing like Barsoom and Hinkston Creek, and you even have loads like Roddenberries and Thoats.

I had a pretty good start to the game.  I was able to get track built to in the area that I prefer to start the game between Burroughs Landing and Marsport and was able to generate the cash I needed in the early part of the game to get things really going.  The mid game started to get rough though.  I was not getting the cards I needed to get over the money hump and I was having trouble deciding which of the major cities I should connect to meet the city requirement for the game.  Fortunately the other players were having similar problems.  The game almost ended when of the other players and I both called the victory in the same turn but we both had the same exact amount of money.  Per the rules if there is a tie you extend the game so that the winner needs to bet $300 million.  I was able to complete that two turns later and won the game against three other players.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Iron Dragon	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	3.00
Martian Rails	1	1	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Totals	2	1	-	1	-	-	-		-	2.00

On Sunday I plan to attend The Duck Club event and I hope to be able to play three or four games there.