So you've just stayed up extra late learning a new game and there's nothing good at 9am the next morning... What do you do? If you answered sleep in then you are a wiser man than I, for I chose to get up early and play in the Risk event. Risk is not what I would call a terribly good game. It's also not very fun if you're playing with the wrong kind of person, but that's something I forgot. Plus, Risk is the 'most normal' game at WBC and I kinda wanted to be able to name a game people recognized if they asked me what I'd done. My grandmother knows how to play Risk, she's almost certainly never heard of anything else at WBC.
At any rate, it was a 6 player game and I went first. The way people placed on the board I ended up the only person with a force in South America. There were 2 people in Australia, 2 in Europe, 1 in North America, and 1 in Africa. Having not played the game in years I'd forgotten how brutal the turn-in scheme was, going first I think I probably should have taken a turn off so as not to be forced to turn in for 4...
Personal strategical failures aside, the game was 'interesting' to say the least. The two people in Australia refused to fight. They both had all their armies down there, and they just didn't move. One of the guys in Europe chose to ran away, and attacked Africa. The other guy in Europe just took Europe and no one made any effort to stop him. Finally I used my turn-in to go the long way through Alaska to back door it to stop the carnage but it was a bad plan. Other people cashed in for 10+ armies and took me out before I got to go again. Oh well, on the plus side I was finished (barely) in under 2 hours which gave me time to head for an 11am game.
Pounder was up to play Tigris and Euphrates and I decided to play too. Unfortunately it was an 'A' level event which meant no demo and they expected everyone to know the rules. I'd played a couple times before, but it was 4 years ago... I figured I could pick it back up again, especially if I could glance at the nifty rules placards everyone gets.
Turns out my table was using a German board, so the rules placard was conveniently written in a language I couldn't read. I got a brief run-down of turn order during game setup, and away we went! I had fun but I misremembered one rule about how internal conflicts worked which ended up giving one of my opponents a huge lead. One of the other people in the game then made the same mistake I did a couple turns later, the same guy capitalized on it, and that was pretty much the game.
1pm, and the third Queen's Gambit heat was starting. I'd had a lot of fun the night before playing it, and there wasn't anything I was dying to play scheduled opposite it, so I signed up. I got to play the other side in this game, drawing Darth Maul. It was during this game that I learned how blocking a window didn't actually stop you from jumping from floor to roof. Once my opponent clarified that rule for me I stopped worrying about blocking her. A much better use of my droid cards was just to shoot people. I ended up winning the Jedi battle, but Darth Maul only had 1 health left. I took advantage of a rule that allowed him to run out, kill people, and then run out of line of site which let me kill a large number of her guys without fear of Maul dying. I believe I then drew a healing card for Darth Maul and he went the distance for me. Go evil!
5pm had Acquire on the schedule which Pounder and I wanted to play. Pounder had also played Queen's Gambit and his round went to time, so we couldn't get into a 3pm game if we'd wanted to. We decided an hour and a half break was a good time to go eat, so we went to the Amish diner. We weren't really in the mood for a big meal so we had a slice of pie and a milkshake each. The pie was only ok (lemon merangue but no where near as good as my mother's) but the milkshake was insane. We'd each ordered a strawberry milkshake so they made a bunch in a blender and gave us the 'leavings' in a jug along with our two large glasses. When I say strawberry I actually mean strawberry, and not just pink. There were huge hunks of real strawberries in the milkshake. We finished up our glasses and went to divvy up the rest. Turns out there was enough to fill up both of our glasses with plenty left over! When it was all said and done there was about five and a half full milkshakes in the jug, which made for a really awesome deal. (Of course, a meal of 3 milkshakes in an hour might not be the sanest thing, but it sure was tasty and filling.)
5pm was Acquire, a game of building hotels, buying stock, merging hotels, and selling stock. I got into a 4 player game with a guy who really knew the game, an older lady who kinda knew the rules, and a 13ish year old who also kinda knew the rules. This is a game where having your hotels get merged off the board is very good for you, and having your hotels get merged into large hotels is very good for you... The first merger was the kid joining two hotels he had no part of, which pretty much just gave myself and the other guy a huge lead. The kid realized what he'd done by his next turn, but it was too late to recover. (A feeling I knew all too well from Manifest Destiny the day before!) Ultimately the guy who's game it was pulled out a close victory over me with the other two nowhere near us.
7pm saw the first Puerto Rico round on the schedule. Unfortunately for me, I was completely exhausted. I didn't particularly want to play a thinking game in that state, so I wimped out and went back to the hotel to sleep early. I didn't actually end up playing PR at all over the course of the event. Robb ended up making the semifinals and Pounder lost in the quarterfinals to an annoying ruling. Someone forgot to restock the boat after a mayor phase, so instead of there being 9 on the board when Pounder was to call mayor the next turn there were only 4. They could clearly retrace everything that had happened after that mayor phase but the GM decided the ruling was 1 per player... Oddly enough that game was mentioned in the recap because it was won (barely) by the #2 indigo player who scored 69 points. I watched chunks of the game and I'm pretty sure she benefited pretty hugely from that boat miscue, but what are you going to do?
So I got to sleep by 8pm, which is something I used to do on occasion on a normal day when I work at 3am. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that I ended up waking up around 3am on Friday morning. This time also coincided with everyone else arriving back to the room. I tried to get back to sleep for a few minutes but gave up and decided to just go play DS at the conventional hall.
I wandered around for a bit first, but 4am is a shockingly quiet time. A rowdy werewolf game had just wound down and there didn't seem to be anything going on in any rooms. I went to the wargaming room where there were actually a few people looking in on 'A World at War', which is the 60+ hour long game. They were looking at games and commenting on the positions and such. They sounded knowledgeable, which is pretty crazy... You'd have to put in a lot of time playing a 60 hour game to get good enough at it to comment on board positions. (Not that I'm one to talk, having put who knows how much time into playing Titan for example!)
10am on Friday had the Queen's Gambit single elimination finals scheduled, and with two wins I was in ok position to make the top 16 but sadly wasn't a lock. It turns out the #1 tiebreaker is actually owning a copy of the game! (They need 8 copies to show up in order to actually run the round, and it's been out of print for a long time.) I managed to squeak in at position #15, one of a few people without a game who qualified. I ended up liking the game enough that I bought a copy on eBay for way more money than it originally sold so I won't be in that position next year!
I drew evil in my quarterfinal match, and the single elimination rounds played by a different rule... If no one has won after 2 hours, evil wins. This was to make sure the game actually progresses and they could play all 4 rounds in time. (Also, a pretty solid Naboo strategy is to ignore Anakin I think, assuming that if you get a stable palace position you will eventually win.) This actually came close to coming up in my game, as the game ended with 3 Naboo characters alive and like 1 minute on the clock when Anakin finally blew up the mother ship. I quite possibly lost because of not knowing a rule, I thought a deck of cards reshuffled when it didn't. Oh well, live and learn! The one thing that bothered me was a spectator who knew my opponent accused me of cheating by intentionally playing slowly to try to time the game out. Having only played twice before it did take me time to read some of the cards, but I was going as fast as I could. Perhaps more importantly my opponent actually played very slowly for the first hour or so. We were playing beside another friend of his, and they were chatting a fair bit and not playing quickly. If winning was more of a priority for me I guarantee I would have won that game, either by killing 1 more guy by taking my time planning out turns or by timing him out. That's not how I am though, and I'm rather cheezed that I was accused of cheating. At any rate, I was out in the quarterfinals by the slimmest of margins. Frowns.
I've lost track of time, and I don't know what I did until 5pm. I might have played a game of Titan, but I don't think I did. I browsed the vendor area I think, and possibly attended some demos. At 5pm was a Lost Cities draw. I hadn't played that game in at least a year, and only ever on BSW. I used to play a fair bit with Tom Gannon on there, I think. Anyway, it seemed like a fun thing to do. I sat down with my opponent, had her give me a brief rules refresher, and then off we went. Lost Cities is a card game where you play 3 hands, summing the scores over all 3 hands. After our 3 hands... We were tied! Apparently this doesn't come up very often, from the GM report it sounds like it's happened 4 times in 3 years. The tiebreaker is to play a 4th hand... In that single hand I ended up outscoring the total from the previous three... (I had a triple bonus tiled excavation with enough cards to get the 8 card bonus.) This was the 3rd heat of 4 and I seem to recall they used a weird scoring system so because I started in round 3 it was unlikely I'd make the cut to the finals... So I didn't even think about it!
7pm was the start of the single elimination Battle Line tournament. Battle Line is another card game, this one a game where you play 3 card poker on many different fronts. The way they ran this tournament was to put people into pods of 4, and have you play round robin in your pod. Overall winner of the pod advances to the next round. I was actually mentioned in the GM breakdown despite not winning my first pod, but he misspelled my name! It seems so easy, what with only having 8 letters and all, but he stuck an i into Page. Grr! I believe I finished 2-1 in my pod, but someone went 3-0 so he advanced and I didn't. (I might have been 1-2, I don't remember. Not that it matters!) It was pretty fun, and the round robin format is a pretty fair one I think. It makes sure you get 3 games in at least for signing up, which is good since it can be a pretty fast game.
Friday night has a lot of finals on it, which I wasn't a part of, so I didn't have much to do until later in the evening. I don't remember what exactly I did but I know I skipped playing the 10pm Acquire game for fear it wouldn't end by 11pm. Why does 11pm matter? Because at 11pm the single most important tournament at the convention was held. I am, of course, refering to crowning the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! Liar's Dice had 195 people show up, and they claim to have been the most attended event. Ticket to Ride made that same claim, and had 191 distinct people show up, but they had multiple rounds so maybe they're both right. At any rate, that's a lot of people! They had enough copies of the game to get everyone seated at once, and they made sure no one started until everyone was ready... Then in one fell swoop 975 dice were rolled and slammed onto tables in unison. That, my friends, is a lot of dice.
Now, I'd told people before I left that I was going to be the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! so I had my work cut out for me. Remember, I'd woken up at 3am that morning, so I was up for over 20 hours at this point. Regardless, my first round was a cake walk, I was clearly the most skilled player at my table and I'm sure I won handily despite not remembering how many dice I had left. I do remember I won pretty fast as I had what seemed like a looooong wait before the next round.
The semi-finals made me rue the creation of the exacta rule. You see, if someone calls a bluff and the bid makes exactly not just the caller loses... Everyone at the table loses a die. Three straight times around the table went bid from the girl on my right (my Queen's Gambit opponent from my second game) huge raise by me, raise by 1 by the girl to my left, call... Exacta! Everyone lose a die. After the third one of these the girl on my left (who was 14 years old and playing with a Pirates of the Carribean cup) had 5 dice left and everyone else had 1 or 2. I've blocked the rest of the game out of my mind but suffice it to say she didn't find a way to Bung up that position and won handily. And thus, my dreams of being the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! were crushed.
A word of warning to all... Next year I will back, and next year I will fulfill my destiny. I will prevail. I will be victorious. I will be the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!
Pounder, Robb, and Lin had gone out to a nearby 24/7 breakfast diner and had picked me up some bacon to eat after my disappointing loss. At this point I'd been up almost 24 hours... So we sat down and played one of the demo games set up in the hall. I believe this time we played a coffee plantation game where Pounder shipped a ton of white coffee on a ton of white boats with a ton of white slaves for big bucks. I remember not particularly liking the game but that may just be because we didn't know what we were doing. I know Robb and I tried to collude at one point by selling brown coffee together but colluding with someone else just seemed worse than playing for yourself as Pounder crushed us.
The Settlers of Catan tournament started at 9am Saturday morning. Robb had won this event in 2005 but I don't think he had any interest in playing in it. I know I sure didn't! It turns out they expect Settlers to be a big draw (132 people played) and most of the other games on Saturday are finals from other events. I didn't want to play Settlers and was exhausted... So I just didn't get up. Around noon I finally got up, and headed over to the site. 11am had a Puerto Rico round that I would have played in if I'd been up, but oh well. 12pm had nothing to do.
1pm saw the start of the Carcassone single elimination event along with another Risk round, a Saint Petersburgh round and a Titan:The Arena round. I kinda wanted to play both of the last two games and decided to go with the Titan spinoff. It doesn't actually have anything to do with Titan other than it uses some of the characters from that game on the cards. I ended up in an ok position, but was forced to reveal my hidden bet at a bad time in order to not lose. That put a bullseye on my head which everyone but one guy took aim at. I had to work with that guy to keep from losing, but it turned out he also had a hidden bet on the same monster and had better overall position so I ended up just helping him win... Or so I thought. Our opponents finally pulled off a coup, killing our dragon, and thus we were both screwed. Oh well, still a pretty fun card game and I really wasn't expecting to win.
3pm had either another round of Lost Cities, or another round of Manifest Destiny, or a round of Monsters Ravage which is a game where you control a monster and a branch of the military and you try to use your tanks to kill other monsters or something. I wanted to play it, but I'd missed the demos and didn't really feel like trying to pick it up on the fly. (Also, as a B event, they don't really let that happen. Attend the demo!) Lost Cities lasts an hour, Manifest Destiny lasts four, and I had nothing I wanted to do for five hours so I went with Manifest Destiny. I was kinda bitter at myself for getting blown out of my previous game and I wanted to vindicate myself.
I think the GM was happy to see me come back. (He's also the game designer.) Having someone come back for more means good things for your game, I would think! I don't remember much about this game other than that it was a lot closer than the last one and I ended up cheating to my disadvantage by not knowing the rules. (You reshuffle decks of cards, but you're supposed to leave some out. I got one of those cards which was useless at that point in the game, but didn't know I wasn't supposed to get it. Oh well!)
At both 7pm and 10pm there was a 'Wits & Wagers' game show being held. It's a party game where the host names a category and everyone writes down a numerical guess. The guesses are given odds and then you bet chips on which answer you think is closest without going over. You win chips for giving the right answer and chips for betting correctly. We wanted to play at the same time and both Robb and Pounder had a Puerto Rico semi-final at 7 so we decided to try for the 10pm session. A grand total of one event started at 8 or 9pm for me to play in (I ate leading up to 7pm so missed that start time) and it was Ticket to Ride and 8pm. Ticket to Ride was fun the first time and being the only option helped, so away I went! I played a different variant than the first time but the end result was the same. Just building long routes preferentially gave me a pretty large victory. I think the game is probably a pretty good strategy game when everyone is on the same page but man are the early rounds ever soft.
10pm and both Robb and Pounder were ready for Wits & Wagers. They had a TON of people show up, so they had everyone play on large teams if possible. Robb, Pounder, Lin and myself picked up Rick Atwater (the Titan GM) and someone else Lin met during the week and formed team Canadian Bacon. The way the game works is they ask questions that have an exact numerical answer and everyone guesses what the right answer is. For example, one of the questions asked for what year the Queen first sent an email. Another asked how many pounds the world's largest lobster was. On the lobster question in particular we thought differently than the rest of the room. Our answer was laughed at for being so small compared to everyone else's, and Robb made a joke about how we're from Canada and don't know what a pound is. Of course, it turned out we were way closer than anyone else and had bet all our chips on the 'long-shot' that it was, giving us a massive chip lead. On the final round the question asked what percentage of the US population had voted in the last election, which supposedly had a big turnout. Being mostly Canadians we had no clue, but Rich had a pretty good idea. Of course, our answer depended on if the question counted people who lived in the US but couldn't vote for citizenship/age reasons. The GM said it was complete population so us, along with everyone else in the room but one team, were way wrong with our bets. We answered the question asked, but not the question they wanted an answer to it turns out. Oh well, it was a silly event with no real prize, not even a plaque, so it didn't really matter. We still think we won though!
Unfortunately this event went beyond 11pm so we missed the silly game for the night which was Slapshot. I don't know much about the game but from listening to people talk about it it sounds a LOT like Bloodbowl on ice. I know you build teams and play people and your goons could permanently injure the other team, which sounds like the Bloodbowl I knew and loved! (Ken Rootsevear going to crush your head!) We ended up learning a really complex game in the foyer that eventually was abandoned due to Lin not liking the game and everyone being hungry. We went out to the breakfast diner which I gather is the only thing open at that hour and had a decent meal. We came back, Lin went to bed, and Robb, Pounder and I met up with a guy they'd met earlier to play a game of Notre Dame.
I don't remember his name, sadly, but he was a really nice guy. He was on his way to bed when we came back from food but all it took was the question 'game?' and he aborted sleep to play Notre Dame. He even went up to his room to get it! (Mental note: staying at the center itself means you can store games there without needing to cross a highway and spend 20 minutes getting them!) Notre Dame is a pretty fun game with a draft component to it, where you draft roles and then perform the actions you drafted. It's a euro-game so you're trying to score victory points while managing the resources that will let you score more victory points later. A unique aspect of the game is that there is a 'rat count' in your segment of town and if you let it get too high you get plagued. You can draft cards that let you reduce the rat count... But then you're not making moneys or scoring points! It's a delicate balance, as all good euro-games are, and was a lot of fun.
After that Pounder went to be claiming something about having to drive home the next day. Robb and I had slept in that morning and as such had NO interest is sleeping. There was a werewolf game in progress that we watched and then tagged into. Apparently this group had been playing every night all week and the game was getting a little inbred as it seemed like the same people were yelling at each other the whole time. I've played the game a few times in online forums but never in person before. I must say it's kinda fun but I'm really horrible at it. I'm much better at keeping cool under fire and debating online than in person. Oh well, it was still fun and there really wasn't any other options at that hour of the day. Eventually the game broke up so Robb and I went and had breakfast at the hotel (yay still being up at 7am?) and then passed out. There were only 5 non-final games being run on Sunday and while I've played 3 of them before I didn't feel like not-sleeping to play them. (They were Diplomacy, Ticket to Ride, and Transamerica.) At 11am was the Ticket to Ride final which I was qualified for I'm sure due to winning the first two rounds but Pounder wasn't terribly interested in staying until 3pm while I won that event and I didn't really want to play in it either. I'd had to solo pack the hotel room on not much sleep before checkout time since Robb and Pounder were playing in finals and Lin just talked on the phone and watched as I packed everything. *frowns* At any rate... No gaming on Sunday but still fun times.
As far as things I know I did but forgot when they happened...
I attended multiple demos for games I wasn't interested in playing after seeing them in action. I watched demos for 3 stock-car racing games... 2 of which were designed so you couldn't get too far behind which ultimately meant the first N-1 turns of the game were irrelevant and the third of which was basically just a math game in a formula-1 disguise. I kinda wanted to play that one, liking math as much as I do, but it conflicted with something else I think.
I also attended the GANGSTERS! demo, which was a game I'd read about beforehand and was trying to convince Robb and Pounder to play. The demo convinced us that there's no way we wanted to play it in an event though. I kinda still wanted to play it for fun with just people I know though. For some reason I'm think Dave would have a lot of fun with that game.
There were two different fishing games in the demo area and I know I played both of them with Robb, Pounder, and random people who were passing by as I read the rules. None of them were very good.
I saw some people playing World of Warcraft: The Board Game! I think one team had both warrior and druid on it and hence was completely dominant.
Rich Atwater taught us to play a weird trick taking game at some point. Basically you deal out the cards and then there's a round of bidding. When you bid you play cards from your hand face up on the table, going in a circle having to pass or beat the previous bid. Eventually everyone but one person passes and they are declarer. They have to call a trump suit from the cards they played as their bid. They name either colour or rank as trump. (So all the 4s could be trump!) Then the person who was #2 in bidding names one of their bid cards as second trump. Second trump beats normal cards, Main trump beats second trump. Then declarer picks someone (not the second bidder) to be their partner. Those two play against everyone else, with the goal being to take the most 'points' worth of cards very similar to TICHU and 200. It was fun but we only got to play a couple hands.
Speaking of Tichu, I also played a few hands of that with some Titan players while waiting for a Titan game to start at some point. Fun game. Must play more of it on BSW!
Lin, Robb, Pounder and I also played an archaelogy game where you move around the board spending time researching to become 'good' at digging, and then go to dig sites. Once there you can spend turns 'digging', which means reach into the bag for that site and pull out X items. The items are either points, stat boosts, or nothing. After you finish digging keep all the stuff, put the nothing back in the bag, and pass the turn. So there's a delicate balance in trying to get a lot of pulls from the bag but also making sure you get there before someone takes all the treasure. It was an interesting mechanic though Robb was pretty bitter at how much rubble he kept pulling out. He'd focused on a couple different colour ruins and Lin and I cleaned them out before he got there I think. Meanwhile Pounder just hung around in Europe giving lectures about things while the rest of us actually did dirty work digging... I enjoyed the game but didn't think it was terribly good. I would play it again though!
Summary to follow tomorrow...
