boardgaming in photos: Russian Railroads, Patchwork, Star Realms, scorekeeper app

6 Nov 2020. Allen, Han and I played Russian Railroads on boardgamearena.com. This is the main board. This is a worker placement game where you are going to develop your own player board to try to score as many points as possible. Scoring is done every round, so you want to build a strong scoring engine quickly, and keep improving it. In our game, two actions became almost automatic - claiming $2 and claiming 2 temporary (blue) workers. These action spaces are at the top right of the screenshot. Money can be used as workers, but workers cannot be used as money. Some action spaces specifically require money. Using a worker to claim $2 is almost a no-brainer because you are converting 1 worker to 2 flexible workers. Similarly it is almost always a good idea to convert 1 worker to 2 blue workers. The only time you don't want to do these first is when there is some other space which happens to be critical to you at that moment.

I wasn't very comfortable with the emergence of such automatic actions, because they felt scripted. It was almost like the game dictating what I should do, and not me making the decisions. "Don't tell me what to do!" Being the rebel, I avoided such prescribed actions. And the result was I simply lost out on these advantages. This was basic maths and my hipster mentality made me ignore it, which was a stupid thing to do. Allen and Han had no such inhibitions. The same thing happened when we played The Voyages of Marco Polo. They always grabbed the black dice, but I wanted to be different and picked something else, to my own detriment. Why do I do this to myself? 

This was my player board. I decided early to focus on industrialisation, i.e. the purple track at the bottom. The track was broken and I had to build factories to link up the segments, to allow my purple industrialisation token to progress. I had one factory tile now. 

The BoardGameArena interface allowed us to easily see everyone's progress. Player boards are divided into four parts, three railroad routes and one industrialisation path. On the railroad routes, the circles in the player colours indicate how far their trains can travel, while the thick black / grey / brown / etc lines indicate how far the tracks of these qualities have been laid. On the industrialisation paths, players' progress is indicated by the thick purple lines. 

I had now built five factories, thus fully connecting my industrialisation path. My industrialisation marker had now reached the end of the path, giving me the maximum possible points per round. Among the three train routes, I only worked on the first, and completely neglected the other two. On the first train route, my black tracks had reached the end, triggering the ability to build white tracks. White tracks are the highest grade tracks. Industrialisation was my main focus, and scoring points from tracks was my second. I had been working towards building white tracks. Along the top I had five x2 markers, which doubled the points I received from my tracks. 

I just realised one thing. I had neglected to improve my trains, and that stopped me from scoring more points from my tracks. On the first train route my total train level was 4, which meant I could only score up to position 4. My tracks from position 5 onwards scored nothing. I had forgotten about that and I had assumed tracks would score points regardless of train level. Scoring was done by the computer and we didn't have to manually count. I didn't realise my oversight throughout the game! 

This was Han's player board. One thing which Han and Allen did differently from me was they recruited engineers - those tiles at the top right. Game setup for Russian Railroads is mostly fixed, and engineers are one of the few variables. While on the main board, they provide additional worker placement spots. Every round, one of them is available to be recruited. If you recruit him (or her), you get a private worker placement spot. Usually the engineer spots give a better-than-average benefit. You also score points for having more engineers than others. I never won any engineer because I was always short on cash. You need cold hard cash to grab engineers. 

On his first train route, Han's trains were of levels 8 and 7, so he could now reach the end of the route, position 15. Some benefits to be picked up along the train routes require not only the tracks reaching them but also the trains being able to reach them. 

This was Allen's player board. His first focus was the third train route, followed by the second. On the third train route, he built his grey-grade tracks to the fifth spot as quickly as he could, and that gave him 30 points per round! In Russian Railroads, scoring is done every round. If you can build a strong scoring engine early, it will help tremendously. 

By the end of the game Allen beat us 445 to 269 and 263! An absolute slaughter. I notice one problem with how I play. I tend to like to make plans, and then I am obsessed with sticking to them. It is good to have a plan and to make sure your actions are aligned. It does make your game more focused and efficient. However sometimes being too fixated on executing the plan is bad. In this particular game, I set out to work on industrialisation and track building in the first train route. Near game end, I realised two things. Firstly, I could do most of what I had planned to do with some actions and some time to spare, and secondly, what I had planned was not quite sufficient to win. I became a little lost because I didn't really have a plan B. I was inflexible and did not adapt well. It was a little too late by the time I realised it. I should have been more watchful and I should have adjusted my strategy earlier. I was playing this too much in a multiplayer solitaire manner. 

22 Nov 2020. I booted up Patchwork on my iPad. I played against the strongest AI, and lost spectacularly. That's good. A challenge keeps you coming back. You can see on the right side that the AI had won four of the 1x1 cloth pieces. On my side, I had only won one of them. 

26 Nov 2020. I skipped to the most recent challenges in Star Realms, because I wanted to play with the new cards and new game mechanisms. These challenges have some weird rules too, e.g. in some cases I can only buy cards on the left, while the AI can only buy cards on the right. Sometimes I only get to buy cards of specific factions. That helps in creating focus and triggering more ally abilities, which is fun. In this screenshot above, those two bases on the right can only be purchased by me and not by the AI. 

One thing that surprised me a little was these newer challenges seem quite easy to beat. I completed many of them on the first try, unlike the earlier challenges. It was fun to play with the new cards, but the challenge was not quite there. In this screenshot, my health (technically "Authority") was still at 50 while the AI's had been reduced to 3, and now I had built up an attack value of 42, ready to put the AI out of its misery. 

I played Mystery Rummy: Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld with Michelle, and didn't want to use pen and paper to keep score. I searched the Appstore for a scorekeeping app, and found this one called Games Keeper. The colour choice is questionable, but I find it easy to use. It's free.