Wichita Boardgamers

Session Report for Saturday, 02/18/2006

6 Players, 4 Games

Cartegena (Chad, Kevin K., Kevin L.)

San Juan (Drew, Cristy, Marshall)

MarshallPhilips -

We had split up into two groups of three to play a shorter game in case anybody showed up late. While the other group was playing Cartegena Drew, Cristy, and I inaugurated San Juan.

San Juan is Puerto Rico’s little sibling; it’s shorter, simpler, and exclusively uses cards but the core mechanic of role selection and the harvesting and trading of goods make it unmistakably part of the Puerto Rico family. In San Juan cards serve as both money and buildings, if you want to build a building (represented on a card) then you have to pay other cards out of your hand in order to do it. As you can imagine the game is all about accumulating cards and making decisions about which ones to build and which to spend. Once somebody builds their twelfth building the game ends and points are tallied.

Much like Puerto Rico players choose a role on their turn which allows all the other players to take some action but the choosing player gets a certain bonus. There are five roles available.

• Builder – Exactly as in Puerto Rico the builder lets players build a building. Bonus: discount of one on any building.
• Prospector – The only role that has no action for the players only a bonus ability. Bonus: draw one card
• Councilor: Draw two cards and keep one. Bonus: draw an additional three cards and choose one from those five.
• Producer – Produce one good. Bonus: produce an additional good
• Trader – Trade one good. Bonus: trade an additional good.

There are many different buildings in the game, more than in Puerto Rico. Generally the buildings give you some ability during one of the above phases. For example, the Black Market lets you trade two goods even when you didn’t choose the Trader and the Aqueduct lets you produce two goods even if you didn’t choose the Producer. There are also some 6 point buildings equivalent to the big buildings in Puerto Rico. These score bonus points at the end of the game for such things as how many buildings you have and so on.

Overall the game is much simpler and less brain burning than Puerto Rico, the choices on which role to take aren’t quite so critical. I personally don’t think it’ll ever be a better game than Puerto Rico but then if you don’t have an hour and a half to set up an play that one then San Juan can give you a taste in under a half hour.

DrewWoodworth -

First, let me just say that I love Puerto Rico. Probably one of my favorite games of all time. What I love about Puerto Rico is how open it is. You can pick a variety of different strategies and still be successful. I'm not sure it that is true of San Juan since I have only played it once. It definitely is Puerto Rico lite, but I'm just not sure if that's a good thing. However, I am comparing it to Puerto Rico which probably isn't a fair comparison. They are, obviously, two distinct games. I definitely would like to give it another try, and as Marshall said, one of the main advantages is how quick the game plays.

Railroad Tycoon (Drew, Chad, Kevin K., Kevin L., Cristy, Marshall)

MarshallPhilips -

After our warm up games we were still 6 so we decided to get in a big game that could include all of us. Railroad Tycoon was suggested but I didn’t have my copy thinking there was no way to fit the massive board on the tables at PDC. Luckily Chad had his copy with him and we pushed two tables together so that we had just enough space for the board and a little around the margins for our money and trains. Still, this is a game that you almost can’t play sitting down, you need to stand to reach the middle of the board or to see what’s happening on the other side. To get an idea of how big the board is take a look at this picture comparing the Railroad Tycoon board to the Ticket to Ride board (which is already pretty big). http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/106624

The goal of the game is to get the most points mainly by delivering goods to cities. Goods of various colors (blue, black, purple, yellow, and red) are randomly seeded on the board before the game begins. During the game players build a network of rail connecting cities and then use their network to deliver goods. Red goods go to Red cities, Yellow to Yellow, etc… The longer the delivery the more points it is worth. There are a lot of other options in the game and ways to score but that’s the core of it. During a player’s turn he can choose from one of 6 actions:

• Build track – pretty self explanatory, cost varies depending on the terrain
• Deliver goods – Use your track to deliver one good from a city to a destination city of a color that matches the good, receive your points
• Take action card – During the course of the game several action cards become available.
• Urbanize – For $10,000 you can convert a town into a city, it will now be a valid destination for goods and will produce two more goods of its own for delivery
• Upgrade Engine Level – Your engine level limits how far you may deliver goods. Since long deliveries are worth more than short you want to get your engine upgraded to allow for bigger profits
• Build Western Link – Can be built in Des Moines or Kansas City, represents a connection to the rest of the country. Four Red goods are immediately added to the western link city and each time one of these goods is delivered to Chicago it generates two new random goods there.

There’s some more chrome but that’s the core of it. From these simple options a very rich game emerges. This is a wide open, rough and ready game where you make your own fortune. You’re not constrained in where you can build or what actions you can take. There is much more freedom of choice in this game than in most Eurogames. Another neat mechanic is that you are not given any money at the start of the game. If you want money you have to issue shares which you can never buy back. You can issue as many shares as you want at any time but outstanding shares count against you at the end of the game, minus one point per share. Also, once every three rounds income is earned by the players depending on how many deliveries they’ve made. But out of this income dividends must be paid: $1,000 for each outstanding share. If you don’t earn enough money to cover your dividends then you have to issue even more shares!

This was mainly a learning game but still I thought it was very exciting. Cristy built her network in the North East and got off to a quick lead but faded somewhat as her deliveries dried up and she wasn’t able to expand to new territory. I started my Network in the Midwest but got cut off twice by Kevin K. so I ultimately abandoned that rail and started over just west of the Appalachians in Pittsburg and built north and west into Toronto and Chicago. Drew started in the South East and was very successful down there. He connected Richmond to Atlanta for an 8 point bonus. Chad started in the Mid Atlantic (between Cristy and Drew). It took him awhile to get his network up and running but once he did he surged to the lead, helped along by bonuses for the first 3 link delivery and the first to upgrade to engine level 4. Kevin K. started in the Midwest where he quickly out built me setting up a network running from Chicago south. Ultimately his deliveries dried up about a turn before the game ended and he fell off the lead but he was the only player to make his Railroad Tycoon end of game bonus (for having the most money). Finally we come to Kevin L. who built in the far west and ultimately connected Minneapolis to New Orleans for a cool 10 points bonus. Kevin L. was a great track builder but not such a great financier issuing somewhere around 17 shares during the game and often not being able to cover his dividends. He kept his points competitive the whole time but the weight of those share crushed him at the end of the game. In one of the biggest pieces of gaming irony I’ve ever seen Kevin L.’s Tycoon bonus was triggered by issuing the fewest shares. Needless to say he didn’t get it.

Railroad Tycoon has quickly become a favorite game of mine. At first I was afraid it might be too long of a game but we played with six players in an hour and a half, that’s a whole lot of gaming goodness right there!

After all of the praise for Railroad Tycoon I can’t get away without mentioning some of the problems. The problems are all with the components not with the game play or the balance or anything like that. Basically there are three problems with the game, in order of increasing severity they are: 1) the scoring track is very narrow and the trains used as scoring markers are too big for the spaces and are easy to knock over. You can ask Kevin L. if being the score keeper during this game is an easy task. 2) The purple cities look almost exactly the same color as the blue cubes, obviously this is a problem. You have to be very aware of this during the game so that you don’t make plans based on delivering a purple good to a blue city. 3) And the worst problem is the board warp. Luckily Chad’s copy didn’t seem to be warped but if you follow BGG this is a problem with most copies including mine. Basically due to manufacturing problems in China the ends of the board tend to curl up. I bend them backwards before a game starts and clip them together to minimize the problem but it is a hassle.

The second printing should fix all of these component problems, in the meantime the great gameplay is worth the hassle to me.

DrewWoodworth -

This is the first time I had played Railroad Tycoon, and I left with a very positive impression. There's definitely a lot of different choices to make without any clear runaway choices at any given time. I definitely would like to try this game again. I was somewhat isolated for the first half of the game and think this strategy worked out well for me. However, about halfway through the game Chad began to encroach on me and ruin some of my best laid plans. Also, I think my major error was in bidding to go first in a later round to get a free track laying card. I had plenty of money to build the road without the card, but after bidding to go first I felt compelled to take the card. Well, actions are very precious towards the end of the game, so I basically wasted two action to build my track for free (one action to take the card, one action to play the card). I could have just as easily paid the building cost and saved an action. So,any game that makes me analyze my acitons days later must have something going for it.

MarshallPhilips -

Yeah Drew, that free track card is mostly useful at the beginning I think when saving money can save you a couple of shares. There's also the Perfect Engineering card (I took one and I think you did too) which lets you build 5 track instead of 4 on a turn and you can use it repeatedly throughout the game. If you only use it once you just break even: one action to take the card and one action to build 5 track vs. 2 actions to build 4 track + 1 track. It's only if you use it more than once that it pays off by saving you actions. I used it twice in our game saving me one action which I was able to use to make a big delivery in the last round.

The most powerful card in the game didn't show up though. It's called Railroad Executive and if you choose it you immediately get to take two actions. You can imagine how powerful that is and usually the auction is huge when that card is out. A lot of people think if that card is in the initial deal it should be shuffled back into the deck because it is so powerful in the beginning. There's no rule that requires it though, I probably would have resuffled it in the beginning of our game just because it messes up understanding of the game with new players.

The Railroad Executive and the free Urbanization are probably the most powerful cards and drive the auction pretty high but we only saw one Urbanization our entire game so the auctions were tamer.

Tower of Babel (Cristy, Marshall, Drew, Kevin K. Kevin L.)

After Railroad Tycoon Chad had to run so we decided to finish up with a relatively quick five player game. Tower of Babel has already been played several times at the sessions and I’ve gone over the rules before so I’ll talk a little bit about strategy which I’m finally getting a feel for after four games.

Basically there are three ways to score. You can get workers onto the Wonders to score bonus points when they are completed. You can collect building disks which are scored at the end of the game. Or you can get points for having your offers rejected. I think the tendency with new players, at least it’s been my tendency and I think it was evident this game, is to go for building disks because it is easier to see exactly how much they are going to be worth and once you get them nobody can take them away from you. When people are going after building disks you tend to see the Trader a lot in offers and that was certainly seen this game. But the thing I’m thinking now is that you want to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. So that if everyone is going for building disks you want to be going for workers, which means you should be accepting those Trader offers. There aren’t enough building disks to go around so that you can easily out score them with workers. Conversely if everybody was going for workers I think you could do some real damage by collecting disks.

The scoring trade off for rejected offers is a little bit different. The knee jerk reaction is to offer as many cards from your hand as you can so that when your offer is rejected you get more points. That’s nice, but risky, because if your offer were to be accepted you’d lose a lot of cards. I’ve come to the conclusion that you never want to run low on cards, you want to have as many options on each turn as possible. Therefore, I usually don’t offer every last one of my cards if I can help it. I like to hold one or two back so that I still have some cards of that type for future offers. It sucks too much to make a null offer.

In this game most people went for building disks but we saw both strategies pay off. Kevin L. only collected two disks and didn’t score any points for them because they didn’t match but he tied for first because he scored repeatedly off of his workers. Cristy collected six disks and scored 30 points at game end which put her into a tie with Kevin L. She had been far behind until the endgame scoring because she hadn’t been getting in on the workers. For myself I wish I had just given up on disks altogether but I kept trying to collect camel caravans (ultimately unsuccessfully).

I think the reason I like this game is mainly due to the density of decisions. Every turn for every player provides you with a decision point, consequently there’s practically no down time. Plus I also like the fact that players are working together, you can’t do anything without helping somebody else so the goal is to figure out how to help yourself the most.

Here’s a pic of a game in progress (not ours however).

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/79132

-- MarshallPhilips - 20 Feb 2006
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