After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ The El Toro Public Library, April 12, 2014

The Strategic & Adventure Game Association game day at the El Toro Public Library had a lower attendance than normal.  It could have had something to do with taxes being due next week and there being some procrastinators like me out there or the nice weather.  Regardless of the cause there were 13 people at the event with three games being played at any one time.

I was able to play three games at the event.

The first 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.

Empire Builder was one of the games I was trying to focus on playing in March so I wanted to play it again.  Given my less than stellar record with it over the last year, I should have known better.  The game started off well enough for me.  I had a few good cards that let me start to develop a good set of track.  Unfortunately about a third of the way through the game, I got stuck with a set of cards that did not work for me where I was on the board at the time.  I then discarded my had six times in order to try to get something that would work and even then I had to settle for a poor selection of cards.  This put me well behind the other players in terms of cash on track completion and I ended the game fourth out of four people.

I then played Australian Rails.  Australian Rails is one of the games in the Empire Builder family.  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.  In the case of Australian you need to connect 3 major cities plus the city of Perth on the opposite side of the continent from the other major cities.

As I have mentioned in previous after action reports, I usually do not do well in this game and this time was no exception.  I had a feeling that I was in trouble again when I was the only one to start out on the east coast as the other three players were building their western links to Perth.  For a while it looked like I was doing alright as I got my track built to the major cities and train upgrades early in the game.  I ran into the problem that I was not generating enough cash each turn to help me get ahead quickly enough.  I started to fall behind quickly.  I was just about to make a couple of deliveries that would have put me into contention for second place but the game ended and I wound up in fourth place again.

Hoping for some way to redeem the day, I tried to do it with Trans Europa.  Trans Europa is a game that is deceptively easy to learn but is very difficult to master.  In Trans Europa, the players are required to connect up five different cities in different regions of Europe.  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.  A round ends after the first player reaches their cities.  All of the other players reduce their scores, which start at 13 points, by the number of spaces they missed hitting their cities by.  The game ends when one of the players loses all 13 of their points.  The winner is the person who has the most points remaining.

Taking the lessons I learned on Thursday, during the game I focused my efforts on building north and south first and then connected to the other players to get my cities that were farther out.  The strategy seemed to work for me event with a rough first round where I lost two points. The game ended after four rounds with me in a shared victory with one of the other players.

My stats for the event were:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Empire Builder	1	-	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	4.00
Australian Rails	1	-	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	4.00
Trans Europa	1	1	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Totals	3	1	-	-	2	-	-		-	3.00