I attended the Games Gathering at Brookhurst Hobbies on
Saturday. There were 18 people at the
event with four games being played at any one time.
I was able to play two games at the event. Both of them were from 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.
The first game I played was Empire Builder. Empire Builder 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 set of cards that I started the game with were not all
that great but they gave me some good track in the northeast from Kansas City
to New York City by way of Toronto. I
them expanded my track to the southwest to Los Angeles and down into Mexico for
my next run. This was followed next by a
trip back to the east with a drop off of one load and picking up two loads for
delivery into Mexico. This got me my
fifth and sixth major cities, but I still needed a lot of cash.
I spent the next few turns trying to accumulate the cash I
would need. I was on my way to deliver
loads that would have gotten me most of what I needed, but I was still two
turns out from my best deliveries when the game ended with me in third place
out of four players.
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.
This time I tried the east coast strategy again. The idea behind it being that you run your
track north and south on the eastern cost of Australia where the majority of
the cities and cargos are and make enough money make deliveries along the line
that you can build out to Perth later in the game and still win.
Overall the strategy was working very well for me. I was able to get build to three major cities
in the east early in the game and accumulated lots of cash by delivering bauxite
loads from the north to the south. I was
getting so many opportunities that I decided to dead head from Tasmania to the
north in order to get more bauxite that needed to be delivered in the
south. This may have been a mistake, but
I had plenty of cash coming in so I built out to Perth and had over 200 million
in cash when the game ended. This gave
me a solid second place out of two players.
My stats for the event:
No comments :
Post a Comment