After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association Game Day @ El Toro Public Library, April 26, 2014

I hosted the Strategic & Adventure Game Association Game at the El Toro Public Library on Saturday.   23 people attended the event and there were six games being played at any one time.

Between hosting duties and talking future planning, I was able to play three games.

The first game I played was Nippon Rails which is from the Empire Builder family of games.  For those that are unfamiliar with the Empire Builder games here is a brief description of how they are played.

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.

Nippon Rails takes place in Japan.  It is the game that introduced the tunnel rules that were added later the Eurorails.

In Nippon Rails the strategy I like to go with is with my first set of cards to start at one end of the board and get as far down the board lengthwise as I can before I turn around and take loads the other direction.  The idea behind this is the longer a distance that a load of cargo needs to go the more it pays out when delivered.  I will many times concentrate on building most of the track I will need for the entire game before I get my first upgrade, which I would almost never think of doing in any of the other Empire Builder games. 

The cards I started out the game with presented me with an opportunity to build half the track I needed for victory conditions so I opted to start in Hokkaido and build south to Toyko.  It was not until I replaced the third card from that set that I was able to figure out my next move which was to continue building the rest of the length of Japan since two of my three replacement cards were going to the same city in Kyushu building there would also give me access to a load for a card I already had for Hokkaido and give me the money I needed to upgrade my train completely.  After that the game consisted of me making a trip back to Hokkaido and them most of the way back down Honshu which gave me the victory in the game.

The second game I played was a new game for me called New Haven.  In New Haven the players are setting up towns in Colonial New England.  Each player has a player board where they will build their town.  The board is divided into a grid of five columns and six rows.  Each space in the grid is given a number 1 to six based on the row it is in.  This means all of the spaces in the first row are given a value of one, all of the spaces in the second row are given a value of two, and so on.  These values represent the cost in resources it takes to place a building in that space.  The building tiles all have a value of 1 to 6 of the same resource. 

During the game the player can only place building tiles that take the same resource next to each other.  It is important to try to place building tiles on spaces on the player board for scoring purposes. 

In order to get the resource s need to build a building the player needs to place resource tiles on the resource board.  Each resource tile has four resources on them when they are placed the player receives the resources on the tile plus any resources of the same type that connect orthogonally to the tile the player places.  The player then uses the resources to build building on the player tile until they have used what they can then the other players my use any leftover resources to build their own buildings until the resources are depleted.

The players score is based on the value of each row and column that they complete building at the end of the game.  If they are able to complete the row or column with buildings of the correct value in each position, they are able to double the value of that row or column.

During the game I focused on constructing buildings of the correct value in each space.  I figured it would be important to be able to double the score versus completing rows.  I would then complete other rows as necessary towards the end of the game.  I also concentrated on completing the cheaper rows earlier in the game.  Doing these things hurt my game over all.  I was note able to complete the more expensive building as the game progressed because of the resources were being used up by the other players on their turns doing the same thing.  The other problem I had was that doubling the score on completed rows and columns did not offset the score of plain completed rows and columns as much as I hoped.  These problems piled up on me and caused me to come in third out of three players.

The last game of the day was Ingenious.  Ingenious is a tile laying game where the player score points based on the number of like colored spaces that they can connect to the tile they place.  If they maximize the score of one of the six colors they get an extra turn.  It is important not to concentrate on a single color or group of colors too much because the player’s final score is based on their lowest score in a color.

I did not do well in this game.  I had the problem of not getting tiles in my lowest color and instead of replacing all of my tiles as soon as it happened, I held on to the tiles that I had for too long which hurt my game in the long run.  Even when I got the tiles I needed I could not recover my game and ended up in third out of four players.

My stats for the event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
Nippon Rails	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	1.00
New Haven	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	3.00
Ingenious	1	-	-	1	-	-	-			3.00
Totals	3	1	-	2	-	-	-		-	2.33