After Action Report – Thursday Night Gaming @ Paradise Perks, March 20, 2014

Thursday Night Gaming at Paradise Perks drew 25 people and 5 games were being played at any one time.

I was able to play three games at the event.

First up was Trans America.  Trans America is a game that is deceptively easy to learn but is very difficult to master.  In Trans America the players are required to connect up five different cities in different regions of the United States.  The players start building track from their starting post.  If they connect up to another player’s track, they can build off of that player’s track as well as their own.  In this way players wind up helping each other out while trying to achieve their own goals.

I had a great start to the game.  I was able to win the first round and was able to reduce the other players’ scores between three and five points each.  This gave me the feeling that I had a chance to actually win the game.  Unfortunately I took a two point hit in the second round which was not too bad but in the third round I really took it in the chin.  I managed to lose seven points during the round which dropped me from being in the lead to third place at the end of the game.

The second game was Empire Builder.  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.

It has been five months since I played Empire Builder and the last couple of times I did very poorly with a third and fifth place in the last two games I played.  I figured it was time to give it a try again.  I started the game with a run from Mexico with two coffee loads which when delivered gave me almost as much money as I had when I started the game.  I continued the game with a number cards that were marginal to complete, but kept me going.  I finally did have to discard my hand towards the end of the game and that game me the set of cards I needed to have a chance to win the game which I did three turns later.

The final game of the night was Family Business.  In Family Business each player takes in control of a gang of mobsters from the Prohibition era.  The goal of the game is to be the player with the last gangster living.  To do this players take a hand of five cards from the action deck.  The actions include different types of contracts that can be played against other players to put their gangsters on the firing line, cards that can be used to remove a gangster that are already on the firing line, interrupt cards that can be used to stop one of your gangsters from being put on the firing line and give you the next turn.  Once 6 gangsters are on the firing line a gang war starts and the gangsters on the firing line get eliminated from the game until there are no other gangsters on the firing line or peace is declared.

At the start of the game I got a Double Contract, Mob War, Ambush, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and Intrigue and was the first player.  Since I had no defensive cards, I decided to go on the offensive and hope that the other players would take up the cue and start to go after each other until I could get something to protect myself.  It worked out fairly well for me.  I was spreading the wealth between the two players and they were going after each other.  By the end of the first mob war, one of the players had lost seven of his nine mobsters and the other had taken a couple of casualties and I had not lost a man.  They started to notice this and began hitting me with contract.  I had yet to get a defensive card and still had the three cards that could start a mob war.  I took some loses and eventually used my Ambush card to take down two of the remaining three men that the third player had.  At this point I was down to two men and the other players were down to one each.  I was finally able to get both of their guys on the firing line and played the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre card that I had been holding since the beginning of the game and won the game with one man left.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Trans America	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	3.00
Empire Builder	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	1.00
Family Business	1	1	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Totals	3	2	-	1	-	-	-		-	1.67