I hosted So Cal Game Connection’s first exclusive event at a
new game store called The Guild House in Bellflower. I did not know what to expect going into the event
as far attendance was concern. So Cal
Game Connection is a new and at this point relatively small Meetup group
created by a friend of mine and me with the goal of having events for all
tabletop gaming not just board games like many other Meetups in our area
do. We also wanted to have more of a
voice for event hosts over what happens in the Meetup unlike most of the other
Meetups in the area.
The Guild House is a nice sized space with a game area with
eight tables set up for gaming including three that are specifically designed
for miniatures play. The owners of the
store were good hosts and very friendly.
We had 12 people at the event with three games being played
at any one time including one table of role playing games.
I played four games at the event. One of the games I played twice.
The first game I played was Iron Dragon. Iron Dragon is one of the games in the Empire
Builder family. The setting for Iron
Dragon is a fantasy world filled with things like dwarves, elves, and orcs,
which is great if you are playing Dungeons & Dragons, but not my preference
for a rail game. As usual I will not review
the major differences in this game from the others in the series as I have done
so in previous reports.
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.
This is the game I played two sessions of back to back.
In the first session I had a Old World centric start with
all tree cards I kept having their demand coming from the Old World and one of
the being dropped off before I picked up the other two. I figured that these loads were generally
some of the more valuable ones and that starting their and moving to the center
of the map would be beneficial. After a
good start to the game I fell onto hard times and in order to try to pull out
the game I rented the other players track into the Underground in order to get
a good pay out to get me back on track.
Unfortunately this ended up being too little too late and I ended up
losing to him but by only a turn.
The second session did not go much better. I decided to try a start that took me across
the northern end of the continent. It
seemed to work out for me as I was able to get a bunch of operating money
fairly quickly. I then did an boat run
down the coast with Wikkide from there I built track from the south to connect
to my track in the north. After a few
more deliveries I did another boat run to the Old World which slowed my down a
bit because I was taking a boat in both directions. This put me behind and I ended up in a
distant third where I needed two turns before I would have even been close to
winning.
The next game I played was another game from the Empire Builder
family called Eurorails. 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.
I started my track in southern Europe I had two loads of
cheese that needed to be delivered to the Balkans and the closest place to get
it was Switzerland. I then grew my track
to England in the north building my track through the Chunnel. I figured it was early in the game I would be
able to make up the expense later in the game.
Unfortunately my card luck for the rest of the game was dreadful and one
of the other player’s card luck was spectacular. I had just managed to complete building out
to all of my major cities and start accumulating cash for the end game when he
ended the game with a score that was double that of the second place player. I
was in third place.
At this point it was time to move on from Empire Builder
games so I played Thurn and Taxis. Thurn
and Taxis was the winner of 2006 Spiel des Jahres, an award given to the best
family game each year in Germany. Some
of the games that win this award can be real stinkers as far as I am concerned,
but many like Turn and Taxis are actually quite good.
The theme for Thurn and Taxis is the players are trying to
set up postal routes in Germany in the 15th century. The rules are simple. The play chooses a city card from a tableau
of six cards on the board and adds one to their set of cards in front of them
that connects to the city on the previous card.
There are special abilities that a player can use once a turn. They may choose two cards from the tableau,
add two cards to their set, replace all of the cards in the tableau, and extend
their route by two.
To earn points in the game, the players must build route
that are progressively longer starting with three card and going to seven
cards. When a route is scored, the
player put post offices on selected cities on the route to show the
establishment of their post office in that city. They may be placed all placed in one region
or one in each region the route goes through.
The player gets bonus points for having established post offices in all
the cities of a region, having post offices in all of the regions, and length
of the route when completed.
It had been over a year since the last time I had played
Thurn and Taxis, but one thing I remember was successful for me was to build
long routes before scoring. This way I
could get long route bonuses and get good numbers of houses out on the board.
This strategy did not work well for me in this game. Other than the long route bonuses I was not
able to get much in the way of other bonuses in the game. I also only completed four of the five routes
needed in the game. This put me in third
place out of three players.
The last game I played at the event 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 did as well in this game as I had in the rest of the games
I played at the event. The game went for
four rounds. When the first round ended
I knew I was in trouble as I lost five points because I was nowhere near my
fifth city. The second round did not go
much better with me losing another three points. The third round was a little better when I
lost two points. During the last round I
decided to try to change my tactics for placing my starting post. Until that point I had been placing as close
to the center of my cities as I could.
This did not appear to be doing me any good as I can attest from my
performance during the first three rounds of the game. During the last round I chose the three
cities that were closest together and place my post between them hoping I could
get the other two cities by using other people’s track. This ended up working for me as well as my starts
did for me during the other round and I ended up tied for third place.
My stats for the event:
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