WBC 2008 -> Day 1

Prelude
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap

Events started at 6pm, so our goal was to get to Lancaster around 4:30-5 so we'd have time to check into the hotel before games started. It's an 8 hour trip, and we like to eat so factor in an hour for lunch and you're looking at needing to leave (or at least wake up) around 7am. It's the worst part of the week, I assure you. At any rate, I get roused to run into the first snag of the week... My deodorant remained in Toronto. So we got to take a detour via the 24 hr Sobeys (everything else was closed since they're run by sane people) on the way out.

I brought my laptop with me, and had downloaded a spreadsheet from the WBC website with the schedule so I could make plans I wouldn't follow on the ride down. Pounder had printed out directions from either Google Maps or MapQuest and I was in charge of keeping us from getting lost. (A sketchy proposition at best, but without a license it's not like I could do anything else!) We hadn't even reached the border when we were forced to deviate from the plan as a gas tanker had fallen over or something on the highway and they closed it down. Pounder has a map of southern Ontario in his car and we decided to try to find another route instead of waiting for the highway to reopen.

I came up with a crazy plan that involved driving through sidestreets in a residential area, but it ended up working and we eventually got to the border much faster than if we'd waited on the highway listlessly. I'd like to see a GPS do that! (Machines will never replace me! MWAHAHA!)

Anyway, we stopped at Arby's for lunch on the other side of the border and then continued on for an uneventful rest of the trip. We arrived at the hotel with plenty of time to spare before events started and tried to get in touch with Robb to no avail. Pounder and I both have the cheapest cell phones we could find, and they just don't work in the US it seems. Pounder managed to get his to send text messages, but we couldn't receive them back, so while we told Robb we were around we didn't get his message back about where he was. Stupid technology.

I said earlier that events started at 6pm, but that's not entirely accurate. You see, there is a type of event called a demo which is an hour long period of time where the GM (game master?) teaches the rules for a game. Frequently these take place immediately before a round for the game, so you can go to the demo and then play a game. Demos can be a great way to learn a game and get a chance to try something new, but not all events have them.

Events are run with one of three classifications. 'A' events are for experienced players, they don't run a demo and they expect everyone who shows up to know the rules. Very few events are run as 'A' events in my experience, it seems to mostly be used for the 6+ hour wargames. 'B' events allow beginners. These events have to run a demo and the players expect newbies to exist in some of their opening round games. 'C' events are coached, these are events where they're willing to teach the game during the round itself. These events tend to be for games with simpler rulesets, things like Liar's Dice and Can't Stop. It's trivial to get into a game in a 'C' event and there's always a demo at some point for the 'B' events, so all events which are 'B' or 'C' are free to be learned at the event if you're into playing new games.

At any rate, 5 games had demos at 5pm but we had no interest in attending any of them. (I own 2 of the games and the other 3 were wargames.) 6pm brought 8 more demos and 23 actual events with a pretty good mix of war games and euros. Now, on the ride down I'd identified that I really wanted to play something at 10pm, so I couldn't try to get into a long game at 6 or I'd miss it. Both Robb and Pounder wanted to play El Grande and I find the game interesting so I went along.

El Grande - 6pm - This is an interesting game where you want to control territory on specific scoring rounds, and you bid for turn order within each round with benefits for going early or late in a round. It also has a ton of player interaction, with one player a round basically getting to choose someone to screw over. My notes for this game simply say that I was winning until I was 'randomly spited' but I'll be damned if I remember what that means. I expect it hurt the person who did it since it wouldn't have been random otherwise!

The round took 2 hours, which brought us to 8pm. There were 2 demos at 8 (both of which I've played) and 5 events (none of which I'd played) so I didn't really have a lot of options. One of the games was class 'C' and listed to only take an hour, so it seemed like something to do.

Medici - 8pm - This round left a really bad taste in my mouth. It's a class 'C' game, so I should be able to learn the game as we go. The GM imposed a strict time limit of an hour, though, and the game probably takes 50 minutes if everyone knows what they're doing. There were also 3 of us who didn't know how to play and they assigned all 3 of us to the same table. (And the 3 of us knew each other, and generally at WBC they try to split friends up so you play events with newer people.) The quick rules explanation also failed to explain the distribution of the deck so we didn't know what a certain card did when it came up.

At any rate, we obviously didn't finish in time (Robb + rules explanation + new game = long time) but we also pretended not to hear the end of the round and kept playing. Or rather, I wasn't sure what was going on and the guy who gave us our demo said to keep playing. In retrospect I'm pretty sure we cheated to do so. I ended up coming 2nd, and probably would have won if we'd ended on time. (Not by design, but because I'd finished the round and other players hadn't, so they got to score more points than they legitimately should have had if the round had had enough time.)

The game itself was actually reasonably interesting. It didn't have many rules, and it had some good decisions to be made. The problem is it's really not long enough to justify a 2 hour round, but it's too long for a 'C' 1 hour round. If it was an 'A' event, fine. A 'B' event with a demo before the first round probably would have worked too, but there's no way it should have been a 'C' event with such a harsh time limit as there's no way to realistically expect someone to get taught the game and play it in less than an hour. This coming year it will also use 1 hour rounds but it will be a class 'B' event which really is enough to make me content. Robb will still have to make an effort to play quickly, though. 8P

Because we cheated and went over time to score we couldn't get into anything at 9. Fortunately we wanted to play Vegas Showdown at 10 so that wasn't much of a problem!

Vegas Showdown - 10pm - I play games with some pretty good gamers at home and my record in this game against them was something like 24-1 going into WBC so I had high hopes about being able to win this event. They were running two preliminary heats but both of them conflicted with other things I wanted to do. I decided my plan was to play in one of the heats of Vegas and then one of the other game and just win both of them. Alas...

I was winning until the last turn of the game, when the random event awarded 3 points for every restaurant, giving one of my opponents a 9 point gain on me. He ended up barely winning, but he played a good game so I'm not too bitter. Due to my previous plan of only playing one round my dreams of becoming Vegas Showdown world champion looked to be dashed. Oh well!

After the round ended we decided to hit up the demo tables and try out a new game...

Ming Dynasty - After midnight - This is a game where you draft face-up cards which you will then play to move around a map with a bunch of movement restrictions and goals to achieve. Because you're drafting face-up you can plot out what your opponents are going to do. Because one of the rules prevents you from moving into a square occupied by an opponent you can block them. Because of the very weird movement it's quite possible to blow someone out if you manage to block them. As such, the feeling we came away from the game was that it would take too long to play once we knew what we were doing. You'd need to make sure you were drafting enough cards to come up with alternate routes in case someone else blocked you accidentally or on purpose. I didn't like it very much and I think even if people weren't trying to screw you eventually someone would which would make the game not great for casual gamers either.

Titan starts in the morning and Robb hadn't slept in a day and a half so we went to bed at the sane hour of 2. We had to be at Titan for 10 and wanted to eat/shower first, so I think we started waking up at 8:15... Ugh.