Sunday, August 10, 2014

After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association Game Day @ El Toro Public Library, August 9, 2014



I hosted the Strategic & Adventure Game Association Game Day at the El Toro Public Library on Saturday.  We had 22 people at the event with six to seven games being played at any one time.  The crowd was larger than I anticipated since the other events I have been attended recently.  Since the beginning of August all of those events have had lower than normal attendance so it was good to see so many people at this event.

GCMS Login ImageWe had a person that was heading out to the Ticket to Ride National Championships at Gen Con next week come to practice for that event as well.  We wish her good luck in her attempt at becoming the national champion and moving on to the world championship.


I played four games at the event.  Three of them were from the Empire Builder family of games.

TGA LogoOne of the reasons I have been playing so many of that type of game recently beyond liking them a lot is that over Labor Day Weekend two of our regular attendees go out to Railcon in Denver to participate in the tournaments there.  They like to take the opportunity to practice before they head to the convention.

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.

The first game I played was 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 game in England with loads that went into western and southern Germany after I delivered these loads I built my track down into the Balkans for two more loads that went to northern Germany and back to England.  At this point in the game, I had three cards that had deliveries into Spain and Portugal so I build through Switzerland through northern Italy from my existing track and into Spain.  At this point I had the track I needed for the game built so it only took me another run around the board to win the game.

The second game I played was Nippon Rails.  Nippon Rails takes place in Japan.  It is the game that introduced the tunnel rules that were added later the Eurorails.

In Nippon Rails I tried a start that I had not done before.  I build out of Osaka along the coast towards Tokyo and from there north towards Hokkaido.  This gave me a solid base of track to start the game.  Even though I would have to use the ferry to get over to Kyushu I knew that would happen because the other players had blocked the land routes in the initial building turns of the game.  The mistake that I make was waiting too long to long to upgrade my train.  I did not upgrade my train until I had all of the track I needed built which can work many in many games however this was not one of them.  I was moving back to Hokkaido from Kyushu with the deliveries that would have gotten me back into the game when the game ended and I was in third place out of three players.

The final game from the Empire Builder family that I played was India Rails.  India Rails is the version of the game that takes place in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.  The only added rule for this game is the ability for transporting pilgrims from one region to another for a minimal payment inside India.  I believe that this feature was added to help offset a couple of major disasters that can destroy a player’s game if they do not have the cash to build back track and they do not want to sacrifice their current hand.

My starting hand was rather bleak.  It did have a okay pair of cards going from Quetta in Pakistan and another city near Delhi which are not that close together going to central India.  The starting cities were not a close together as I would have liked but I figured it would give me a solid starting network of track I could grow on.  From there I started to expand my track to all of major cities but did not do much more than that.  This turned out to be a problem for me because I was struggling to get cards that would work with my limited rail network with limited success.  I ended the game in third place out of three players again.

We had about an hour left in the day which did not give us enough time to play another Empire Builder game so we played a game of Guillotine instead.  Guillotine is a card game where the players are collecting heads of nobles being killed with the guillotine during the French Revolution.

The game is played over three rounds during each round twelve nobles are placed in a line that leads up to the guillotine.  Each noble is worth a number of points ranging from -3 to 5.  During each turn the players may play an action card from their hand.  The action cards affect the placement of nobles in the line, add or remove nobles from the line, or affect the other players.  After the action card is played the player then takes the noble at the front of the line and places it in front of them and then takes a new action card to add to their hand.  When there are no more nobles left in line the round is over and a new line of nobles is set up in front of the guillotine in preparation for the next round.

The player with the most valuable set of heads at the end of the game wins the game.

I figured the strategy in the game was pretty clear.  The best way at having a chance to win the game was to focus on using my action cards to get the most valuable noble I could and not worry about messing with the other players.  The strategy seemed to work out for me by the end of each of the rounds I had managed to maintain a slight lead over the other two players in the game and ended up winning it.

My stats for the event:



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