After Action Report - Board Game Night @ Comic Quest, August 21, 2014

I attended Board Game Night at Comic Quest on Thursday.  There were 25 people at the event with six games being played at any one time.

I played two games at the event.

The first game I played was Ticket to Ride.  The theme of the game is that the players are owners of train companies that are building rail lines in the United States.   The goal is to establish routes between the cities on the tickets that the players receive.  If the players connect the cities on a ticket they will receive bonus points at the end of the game based on the value on the ticket.  If they do not connect the cities on one of their tickets the player loses the number of points on the ticket.  Points are also scored for placing trains between two cities on the board more trains needed the more points are scored.

Game play is simple.  The players start out the game with three tickets that have destinations that they can connect of which they must keep at least two.  They will also receive four train cards. An additional five train cards are placed face up by the side of the board along with draw decks of train cards and tickets

The train cards are the core of the game.  They come in eight different colors and there is a ninth card type which is a wild card and can be used as any color.  These train cards are what are used to make the connections between the cities.  Each connection is represented by a number of spaces that are a single color.  If a player wished to claim a connection between two cities they must turn in the number of cards of that color.  They then place trains from their reserve on that connection.  After a connection is claimed no other player may use that connection.

The players choose one of three actions to take during their turn.  The first is that they may take train cards from the five cards that are face up or from the draw deck.  The second option is that they may claim a connection between two cities.  The third option is that they may take additional tickets.

We played the base game.  In the base game the players start with three tickets and must keep two.  The two tickets I started with both ended in Chicago.  Remembering the difficulty I had in the last game getting to Chicago, I immediately built a line out of Chicago so I would not have that problem in this game.

 I was able to complete the first two tickets I got fairly quickly and got two more which worked well with the track I had already built.  I again had no trouble building to the additional cities so I took another set of tickets. 

Two of the ticket had cities that were close to each other but the area that they were in was hotly contested so I only took one of them.  I was vindicated in doing then when the player right after me took the last line into the city I would have needed on the card I discarded on his next turn. 

After a bit of a challenge in getting to the next ticket completed.  I decided to draw three more tickets.  I ran into trouble when all of the tickets included cities I could no longer get to.  I took the one that was worth the fewest points and decided to change to building the longest lengths of track available to run out the game.

I was able to get a few more points doing this but it ended up not being enough and I ended the game in a distant second place out of five players.

The other game I played was Eurorails.  Eurorails is a Empire Builder game 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.

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.

I started the game with the option I always hope for two runs into Spain.  I know that if I can get deliveries into the area early in the game I have a better than even chance that I will do well in the game.

This turned out to be the case in the session as well.  I was able to get premium routes into a couple of the major cities in the game before my opponent because of the extra infusion of cash I got early in the game.  With my train fully upgraded shortly after that I was able to gain an early victory in the game.

My stats for the event: