Friday, August 15, 2014

After Action Report – Board Game Night @ Comic Quest, August 14, 2014



I attended the Board Game Night at Comic Quest on Thursday.  There was a good sized crowd of 22 people there and six game being played at any one time.  There was only time enough for me to play one game at the event.

The game I played was Eurorails.  Eurorails is part of 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.

Eurorails is set in Europe from Kaliningrad in the east to the western shores including the United Kingdom and Ireland.  The goal in Eurorails is to collect $250 and for the player to have connected six of the seven major cities in the game.  In the current edition of the game the option of building the Chunnel between France and England is now available.  The cost is prohibitive and I would not recommend it unless there are four or more players in the game and a player is spending most of their time moving to and from England.

The game ran longer than normal because we had a player that was new to the game.  When we have a new player in the game it usually takes and extra 30 to 40 minutes to play the game.

The cards I had at the start were not ones I normally get when playing Eurorails.  They had me taking products from Poland into Torino in northern Italy.  I was skeptical as to how they would work out for me but I decided to give them a try any way.  It turned out that using the initial deliveries I was able to grow my track quite quickly up into Germany and eventually out to Spain.  Late in the game I was started to run into trouble but was able to finally draw a new set of cards that got me to the point where I was able to declare victory.  Unfortunately I was the first player so the rest of the players got to have one last turn and one of the other players ended up with two more Euros than I had so I ended up in second place out of four players.

My stats for the event:



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