Saturday was my first time at any sort of gamer event outside of games with friends. I had decided to start off with a day long gaming event at Silver Springs Hobby Shop.
After looking around for a bit, a few guys showed up and they started looking through the demo games while I read up on another game I hoped to play later. Pretty quickly, they found one they wanted to try, Station Master.
They broke the shrink wrap and opened the game while some of us shuffled cards and others quickly scrolled through the rules. Before long, we had the game laid out and ready to go.
The Station Masters in competition were Steve and Bill who are brothers, Nate, and myself.
Things started out slowly as we were all trying to figure out how the game worked and often consulting the rules.
However, once we were a few turns in, the gamer really started to pick up steam. After a nice, happy first train, things went bad for a couple of turns as some crappy trains left the station.
Things started to slowly improve. As time ran low with few trains left to roll out, we did a score check. At the time, the score was as follows: Stanley - 140, Steve - 130, Nate - 69, and Bill - 67.
Nate and Bill had both gotten burned pretty badly by our run of negative trains early in the game and Steve and I had both taken advantage of the big trains that followed. With only two trains left, I decided on a specific strategy as the cards began to show it to me.
He had two tokens on one train and one on the other. So, I decided to try to sabotage the first train, quickly adding two negative cards to it and then uncoupling a positive card. This was followed by transferring both of her tokens now on the second train to the first, thus pooling all of his chips onto one train.
My strategy seemed sound, as I assumed that the other players who were behind would want to hurt him as well and since I didn't have any chips on the board, they couldn't hurt me.
However, Bill played a positive card on train one and Nate had to play a worthless card due to our run of positive only cards. I could only reduce it by a small amount and Steve emptied his hand of large positives onto it.
So, when the last train left the station, Steve ended up scoring 110 on that one train alone and took his place on the platform as the STATION MASTER.
Final Scores:
Steve (STATION MASTER) - 240
Stanley - 170
Nate - 139
Bill - 117
Final Thoughts: A couple of rounds in, I would not have protested if someone had wanted to stop and try a different game, however, by round 5, we were all hooked. It seems that learning the basics without haveing anyone with experience in it was a tough start, however, the fun of the game won out in the end.
This would be a great game to teach a small gaming group to play as a short game to start, end, or be filler in an evening of gaming.
I thought that my end game strategy was solid and would almost assure me of winning the game, however, the way that Steve turned my intended negative to his major positive was a thing to behold and made the game well worth it.
I had allot of fun with this one and it helped me to settle into the day with many more games to come.
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