Scorecard Review – September 2014

In September I was able to get the number of games I played higher but I did not perform as well as I normally do.

September

In September I was able to play 25 games at 8 events for an average of 3.13 games per event.  I was able to achieve my goal of player an average of three games per event.  I was able to do this by playing more filler games in particular No Thanks.

After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association Game Day @ El Toro Public Library, June 14, 2014

I hosted the Strategic & Adventure Game Association game Day at the El Toro Public Library on Saturday.  There were 18 people in attendance and up to five games were being played at once.

I decided that starting with this month’s event that I would institute a score keeping protocol for the group where we would start keeping track of the results of the games that were being played at the event with the idea of providing prizes at the end of the year for the best players.  This used to be done as part of the Orange County Board Gamers group until the organizers did not have time for it so I decided to institute it on a smaller scale.  The plan is to do this across the So Cal Game Connection meetup group which I and another event organizer started.  Participation is voluntary so any information I get from it will most likely be incomplete but I still think the exercise will still be worthwhile.

After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Library, January 25, 2014

The Strategic and Adventure Game Association game day at the El Toro Library had the best attendance number it had had in a long time.  There were 26 people at the event and 7 games being played at any one time.  There were a number of new faces at the event and some people that had not been there in a while.  I hope this trend of higher attendance continues and we see as many people the next time.

I was able to play four games at the event.

The first was one of the Empire Builder games, British Rails.

To review, 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.

British takes place in England, Scotland and Wales and is played the same as other Empire Builder games.  There are no special rules in British Rails that set it apart from Empire Builder except that the players get 3 build turns at the beginning of the game in a standard game and 4 build turns in a fast game.

It had been six month since I had last played this game, but I knew that my best bet was to try to build from Manchester north into Scotland as early in the game as possible which fit my initial hand perfectly as I had two loads originating in one city that both went to the same city in Scotland.  After the initial trip I continued to get solid sets of cards and was able to win the game easily.

I followed British Rails with 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.

I do not generally do well in this game.  This time I tried something that I had not done in a while to see if it would change my fortune this time.  Instead of trying to build my east to west track as early as possible in the game I started the game build north up the east coast of Australia.  The theory being that there are a larger variety of resources in the cities along the east coast.   As a result, you should be able to offset any extra expense building this track by having more options open to you.  It did work but not for me.  One the other players was able to get a very lucrative set of cards that required him to use my track, but made him over half the money he needed to win the.  He ran away with the game and won leaving me in third place.

The third game was Iron Dragon.  The setting for Iron Dragon is a fantasy world filled with things like dwarves, elves, and orcs, which is great if you are playing Dungeons & Dragons, but not my preference for a rail game.  As usual I will not review the major differences in this game from the others in the series as I have done so in previous reports.

As usual with this game I had a solid start and was able to keep things going quite well for about two thirds of the game.  At that point the cards stopped working for me and as my momentum slowed the other players were able to catch up and beat me.  The scores were close.  I came in third place but there were only 3 points between me and the second place player.

The final game of the day was Organic Soup.  Organic Soup is a card game in which the players collect cards to create chemicals and chemical reactions.

The players start the game with a set of chemicals they can create, one simple, one complex, and one amino nucleic.  In addition there are basic chemicals available for creation on the table.  The players take turns either collecting carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen or oxygen atoms from 12 face up cards in the center of the table to create any chemical that is face up on the table or use atom from reaction is front of them to place a chemical in their hand down.  In addition when they are creating a new chemical they may steal unprotected atom from other players.  The game ends when there are no more atoms in the deck to place out or when a player creates the first amino nucleic acid.

As in my previous game I focused on the things that I would need to complete my amino nucleic and used them to finish a number of simple and complex reactions until I could get the last things I needed to complete my amino nucleic.  It took a while but I was able to finish my amino nucleic before the other players even though both of them were gunning for me because of my previous wins against them and won the game.

My stats for this event:

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Avg.
British Rails	1	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	1.00
Australian Rails	1	-	-	1	-	-	-			3.00
Iron Dragon	1	-	-	1	-	-	-	-	-	3.00
Organic Soup	1	1	-	-	-	-	-			1.00
Totals	4	2	-	2	-	-	-		-	2.00

If You Are Interested in These Games:

     

After Action Report – Strategic & Adventure Game Association @ El Toro Public Library, June 22, 2013

The Strategic & Adventure Game Association event at the El Toro Public Library had 15 people in attendance.  There were 4 different games being played at any given time.  It looks like now that summer has officially started we are starting to see summer attendance levels at the events. 

Summer attendance at the events in the area is on average about 20% lower than during the rest of the year.  We will see this lower attendance level until the middle of September.

I played four games at this event.  All four of the games were train themed.

The first game I played was 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.

There are generally two strong strategies for victory in Australian Rails.  The first is to start building your track and do deliveries up and down the east coast of Australia where the majority of cities are and then once you have enough cash build out to Perth on the west coast.  The second is to immediately build track connect Perth to the east.  Which one of these you do depends on your initial set of contracts.

In this game did neither of these.  My first set of contract had the best payouts for me by building up the west coast.  Doing this I ran the risk of not getting follow on contracts that I could do along my track and not have enough money to build out to the east coast to make deliveries with high payout.  It looked like this would be the case.  In order to make deliveries that would get me close to $100 million I needed get to Tasmania, but I only had enough cash to build a little over three quarters of the way there.

Fortunately, the other two players had built there east to west runs of track, so I build as much of the track that I could making sure I was connected to my destination.  The track I did not have enough money to build I rented from one of the other players.  By the time that I got my destination, I was down to $1 million, but was able to get the big payout which I used to build out the rest of my track.  With this success, I still only managed to take second, but I now have a strategy that does not seem to be as hopeless as I first thought.

The second game I played was British Rails another game in the Empire Builder family.  This game takes place in England, Scotland and Wales and is played the same as other Empire Builder games.

The best way to win this game is to build track going north to south connecting the four major cities on the board build very little off of your main north south line.  Unfortunately, my contracts did not lend themselves to this option.  Instead they had me going from the London area out towards Portsmouth and Penzance.  I did this hoping that it would pay off by me getting a number of clay loads.

Clay is resource that is only available in Portsmouth and gives high payouts if you get the card with it on them.  Unfortunately I only manage to get one clay card throughout the entire game while it seems every third card the other players were getting had clay on it.  The game ended badly for me with me coming in third.

Next up was Ticket to Ride: Europe.  This was the second game in the Ticket to Ride family of games and is my preferred game in that family.  We used the 1912 tickets in the game and did not use the warehousing option.

In the Ticket to Ride games, the players are given a number of tickets that have a start and finish destination and a point value.  The players then attempt to connect these cities using sets of cards of single card to link up cities between these their destination cities.  If you succeed in connecting up the destination cities on your ticket by the end of the game, you get a number of points equal to the value on the ticket.  If you do not connect the destination, you lose the number of points equal to the value on the ticket. 

The thing that makes the game a challenge is that there are a limited number of links between cities.   Once a player claims on no other player can use that link.  The reason that I like Ticket to Ride: Europe is that it has a game mechanism called stations that allows a player to use another player’s link as if it were his own for purpose of completing tickets which helps mitigate being cut off from your destination.

This, however, did not help my game.  I was able to get to all of the destinations on my tickets, but because I took tickets that were for shorter runs and as such were not worth as much,  I failed miserably and came in last in the game.

The final game that I played was Trans Europa.  Trans Europa is a game that is deceptively easy to learn but is very difficult to master.  In Trans Europa, the players are required to connect up five different cities in different regions of Europe.  The players start building track from their starting post.  If they connect up to another player’s track, they can build off of that player’s track as well as their own.  In this way players wind up helping each other out while trying to achieve their own goals.

As is usual for me in this game, I seemed to get cities that were the farther away from each other than any of the other cities on the map and suffered for it.  I came in third.

So ended a day that had started out fairly well with second place in a game using a new strategy for me only to have my hopes for a victory in any game dashed by the time the Ticket to Ride Europe game came to an end.  With that here are my standings for the day.

Game	No. of Plays	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	Avg.
Australian Rails	1	-	1	-	-	-	-		2.00
British Rails	1	-	-	1	-	-	-		3.00
Ticket to Ride Europe	1	-	-	-	-	1			5.00
TransEuropa	1	-	-	1	-	-	-		3.00
Totals	4	-	1	2	-	1	-	-	3.25