After Action Report – Games Gathering @ Brookhurst Hobbies, September 6, 2014

I attended the North Orange County Board Gamers Games Gathering at Brookhurst Hobbies on Saturday.  There were about 20 people at the event with five games being played at any one time.

I managed to have a poor performance at the event even though I did enjoy myself.

I played two games at the event.

The first game that I played was Lunar Rails from the Empire Builder family.  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.

Lunar Rails takes place on the moon in the future when there are sprawling cities that need a way to get cargos from point to point so the players come in to help them with that.

Lunar Rails is the most unforgiving of the Empire Builder games.  You have to be careful to keep enough money on had because there are disasters that can knock out a chunk of your track between you and where your next delivery.  Add to that building track in Lunar Rails is much more expensive in Lunar Rails than in any of the other games because there is so much mountainous terrain.  It makes it a lot easier to crash and burn in this game than any of the other Empire Builder games.

I was excited to play the game since I do not get much of an opportunity to play it.  My lack of plays of the game really showed in the game.  I started the game with a set of cards that had three loads of the same item going to cities that were fairly close to each other.  Unfortunately the pay outs for each of the loads were not very large but I decided to go with the set of cards anyway.

It turned out to be a mistake because my follow on cards did not have very high payouts either but I kept them because they were giving me good options to extend my track.  The lack of income really started putting me behind in the economic build up that you need to be successful in the game.  By the time the game ended I was so far behind the economic curve that I was just starting to accumulate the end game cash I would need.  I ended the game in third out of three players.

The other game I played was Santa Fe Rails.  .  Santa Fe Rails is a network development game that was design by Alan R. Moon a few years before he created Ticket to Ride.

In Santa Fe Rails, the players are trying to influence the routes that five major railroads take across the western United States by trying to maneuver the track that is placed for the railroads to go through certain cities.  The cities that each player cares about are determined by which ones they draw from the deck during the game.

During the game players gain points for connecting new cities in a rail network and at the end of the game they will get points for each different railroad that connects  to the cities that they have played in front of them.

Game play is simple.  The players draw their hands up to four cards.  They can choose from the city deck or the special cards to the side of the deck.  The special cards allow the players to place branches in the rail lines, build extra track or improve some of the cities.  Once the player has filled their hands the chose a card to play and turn them over at the same time.  The players then place track in turn order twice.  The turn order them shifts to the left and the next round begins.

The game ends when all the tracks the five railroads have are used up or there is no legal placement for the track from those railroads.

It had been almost a year since I had played this game so I could not remember how to play it very well.  I ended up fumbling around most of the game setting up other players to get the points for being the first into cities and not getting very many city cards out on the table to try and make up for the points I was not getting in the building phases.  I ended up in fourth place out of four players.

I also found out how well the players who went to Railcon did.  One of the players took second place in the Empire Builder tournament and the other player was 21^st in the Puffing Billy Tournament.  They did not do as well as I had hope but they still did a good job.

My stats for the event: