After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Games Association @ El Toro Public Library, March 22, 2014

I hosted the Strategic & Adventure Game Association Fourth Saturday Game Day at the El Toro Public Library on Saturday.  We had 17 people at the event and four games were being played at any one time.

I was able to play four games at the event.

The first game I played was Bazaar.  In Bazaar the players are gem traders trying to fulfill gem orders from demand cards in competition with the other players.  They do this by using two trading boards that represent the exchange rates for the market.  For example one red gem can be traded for two blue gems.  The players use the exchange to fulfill the demand cards as efficiently as possible to maximize their points.

I knew I was in trouble in this game almost from the start one of the other players manage to capture a one star card with no gems left which launched him into a significant lead early on.  As the game progressed a number of other cards were snatched up before I could get them so I was falling behind every one.  I finally started capturing cards and get some points in the game but I was not able to catch up and ended the game in third place out of four players.

I then played Empire Builder twice back to back.  It is a game of rail building and goods transportation in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.  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.

The unique feature of the Empire Builder family of games is the free form building of track that it allows.  The player uses special crayons that are included with the game to draw their track on the board.  Between games the marking from the previous game are erased from the game so that in the next play of the game the players start with a fresh board.

In the first game I tried something that I would not normally do to see how it would work.  I started on the west coast with loads out of San Francisco which is a normal thing for me to do, but instead of building a route south into Mexico, I built though the center of the country past Salt Lake City and between Cheyenne and Denver.  I generally do not take this route because there are very few pay outs for Salt Lake City and it is expensive to build, but I decided to try it out because it made sense with the cards that I had.  It was actually working out for me through most of the game.  I was able to keep up with the other players in the game and at the end of the game it was very close but I was not able to deliver the final load I needed for victory before one of the other players and without it I ended up in third place out of three players.

In the second game I built a set of track that was very similar to my normal track run except that I started on the east coast.  It looked to me like I was in trouble in the first half of the game as I was not able to upgrade my train at all until I had travelled across the country twice.  Bu this time all of the other players were upgrading to their super train.  However I did have an edge in track over them and I was able to use that to get myself into a decent position.  I did wind up being edged out because I needed to find a final load and delivery it at the end of the game.  I ended up in second out of four players in this game.

The final game of the day was No Thanks.  No Thanks is a simple quick play card game that is a great filler game.  It consists of a deck of cards that a numbered in sequence 3 to 35 and 55 red plastic chips.  At the start of the game each player is given 11 chips.  The deck of cards is shuffled and nine cards are removed from the deck face down.  The remaining cards are placed in the center of the playing area.  The players then turn over one card.  The first player decided whether to keep the card or pass it on to the next player.  If the player passes on the card they place one of their chips on it and play continued on to the next player. 

This continues until the card is taken by one of the players.  That player also takes all of the chips that are on top of the card.  Then the next card is revealed and the process begins again until the deck runs out of cards.  If a player ever runs out of chips then they must take the card that is face up.

The way the game is scored is that the player adds up the numbers on the cards.  If a player has a number of cards that are in a sequence then they only add the lowest number in the sequence to their score.  The player then subtracts one point per chip they have remaining from this score.  The player with the lowest score wins.  The game is usually played for three rounds in order to even out the scores.

We played a three round game which was moderately fortunate for me.  I ended the first round with a score of 43 even though I had 12 chips at the end of the round which put me in last place for that round.   The low score was 7 which meant I had a huge hole to dig myself out of.  I did not fair much better in the second round though I did manage to close the gap a little and ended up with 40 points but the other players did have higher score than the ended the first round with.  In the third round I could do no wrong.  I ended the round with 13 points which was lower than any of the other players and even better one of the other players managed to almost double their score from 77 to 153.  This got me to third place in the game out of four players.  Not great but I will take it.

My stats for the event were:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Bazaar	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	3.00
Empire Builder	2	-	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	2.50
No Thanks	1	-	-	1	-	-	-			3.00
Totals	4	-	1	3	-	-	-		-	2.75