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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