Sunday, September 14, 2014

After Action Report – Game Day @ El Toro Public Library, September 13, 2014



I hosted the Game Day at the El Toro Public Library on Saturday.  The turnout was high.  There were 26 people at the event and seven games were being played at any one time.

I played three games at the event.

The first 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.

In this play of the game I tried something that I had not tried before.  I started the game building track from Paris.  I had demands for items from France and Switzerland going into Scotland and I decided that Paris would be the best starting position.  After I built the track and delivered the products to Aberdeen I started to expand my track into Spain and eventually to Milano.  As the game progressed I got two cork cards that were to pay out $60 million each which launch my score forward and allowed me to build out to the rest of the cities I needed.  It was not enough to get me a win.  Instead I ended up in third place.

The second game I played was China Rails.  Set in China, the goal is China Rails is to connect the four major cities on the board and have a ferry connection to Taiwan.  All four major cities are on the eastern half of the board, but if a player wants the highest possible chance for victory they need to build to the western part of the board to be able to get to the commodities with the highest pay out.

I did what can be considered a classic start to China Rails.  I built from Hong Kong in the south to Beijing in the north.  From there I expanded my track to accommodate more deliveries in the east but I knew I would eventually need to expand to the west if I was to have any real chance of winning the game.  I was just waiting for the cards I needed to make the build worth it.  The cards finally came about half way through the game and they allowed me to catch up and pass two other players but the game ended before I could get the win.  I ended up in second place out of four players.

The final game of the day for me was 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.

My plan at the beginning of the game was what it normally is.  I try to build five, six, and seven length routes as much as I can and in doing so try to add post offices to all of the cities in Bavaria in order to secure the bonuses for that.  Unfortunately some of the Bavarian city cards were impossible for me to get so the second part of my strategy got discarded and I focused on long routes.  I was able to get a number of long routes but not without a struggle.  As I got to the end of the game I thought I was far behind the other players and was surprised when I found out I came in second.

My stats for the event:



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