WBC 2008 -> Day 3

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

Titan 2-player - 9 am - I spent a fair amount of time yesterday watching my opponent play in his 8 hour game. The reason it took so long is both players were timid about attacking and always fought when there was a fight instead of fleeing. I knew I could put those two facts to my advantage since I could likely score up big points by making many attacks as he was likely to fight them all.

As it turns out, I ended up killing every single unit he recruited in the game. My Titan stack had 3 warlocks and 2 angels in it, and just went around murdering everything. Woo!

My game took a little less than 3 hours and I went to ask about my next opponent. They were still playing and he said he had an event to play at 1 but would be ready to play me after that. I looked at the schedule and noticed there was a demo for his event starting very shortly and figured I'd go give it a go.

Race for the Galaxy demo - 12pm - I feel the GM did an excellent job with this demo. It turns out the game is very similar to San Juan so I didn't need as detailed a demo as he gave but it seemed to me like he had planned out what he wanted to say in advance and had really worked out a good order to introduce rules to make sure everyone knew what was going on.

Race for the Galaxy - 1pm - Hey, I really like San Juan so a redesign of the game was worth playing in my books. I misunderstood a rule to start the game and ended up building the wrong card entirely which probably sunk my game. It turns out we had a three way tie for first place and after tie breakers I ended up second. It was quite fun and I'm looking forward to really doing better next year now that I have some experience with the game.

Titan 2-player - 2:10pm - I opened this game by rolling a 5 in a tower that only gets one recruit on a 5. I mulliganed it and rolled another 5. My opponent rolled very well for his recruitment early (and I did not) so I made a very questionable attack. Questionable in the sense that it was likely to cause me to lose but I felt I already had lost and needed to do something risky to turn the game around. Certainly if the fight had worked out in my favour I was in a much better way than if I hadn't attacked. (I also didn't know if I was hitting his Titan stack or his Angel stack. If it was his Titan stack then it was a way to win immediately.) Turns out it was his Angel stack (expected, since it did move above me in the tundra) but it was still a good attack. I rolled below average on an attack and didn't kill a unit I needed to kill and thusly lost the game.

After the game my opponent said he thought my attack was too risky and I actually had better odds of winning the game if I'd just run away. I'm not convinced, my only way to win there is to hope I can reverse the massive recruiting disadvantage I was in which means I need to both roll better recruiting numbers than he did and I needed to do so in positions that wouldn't involve me getting attacked and killed by his better stacks. I needed to get a fight in with an angel summon ASAP and especially in a 2 player game if I take out one of his lords when I do that's great for me. It also has the upside that if it fails I lose immediately so I can go do something else!

This game was quite short (it also ended on the first fight, like my first round) so I went and joined a Ra game.

Ra - 3pm – I get assigned to a table with a fairly attractive young lady setting up a board. She mentions in passing to the guy sitting beside her that she’s looking forward to starting high school soon. Yikes! That would make her less than half my age which pretty much means I have no idea how old people are or I’m turning into a dirty old man. Note that that or is not exclusive.

Anyway, the actual game went as Ra normally does. I lost, horribly. I swear I have no idea how to play this game in the slightest.

Monsters Ravage America demo - 5pm - This is a game where you control a monster and a branch of the military and spend most of the game just gearing up your monster to try to win the final battle. I thought this game sounded awesome in the write-ups online so I really wanted to give it a try. This demo was pretty much the polar opposite of the Race demo. The GM didn't even know the rules for the game at this demo, which was a little sad. (Hasbro reprinted the game with an easier rule set. The GM knew the older rules but not exactly what had changed in the easier game.) I left the demo with a rough idea of how things would work but was sure I would screw up the game itself. But whatever, you get to be a giant monster and destroy cities in the US, so I went for it anyway.

Monsters Ravage America - 6pm - I managed to get into a game of the easier version (yay!) and my game had two women in it. The girl setting up the game was rather pretty, and it turns out she’s 17. Double yikes! The other girl was 23 and I’d swear she was the younger of the two, which pretty much just confirms that the previously mentioned or is not exclusive.

It turns out the game has a lot of spiteful strategy that can be employed with your military. (I was the air force, and could just surround monsters with planes preventing them from getting somewhere good to power up. This made my opponents very bitter, as I gather most people just try to defend the best squares instead of preventing you from getting to any squares.) Anyway, there are a couple of different ways to power up and one of the ways is one-shot attacks. You get tokens to burn for extra dice and when you use them they're gone. I ended up being the guy who ended the game which meant I had to kill all my opponents sequentially to win. I chose the girl with the most one-shot items to attack first (probably a mistake) and she ended up blowing her stack to kill me. (Unsurprisingly!) I believe she ended up winning the game.

MRA was definitely a fun game and I'd be willing to play again but it didn't really excite me as much as I was hoping. I think part of the problem is it felt mean to make optimal use of my military. Oh well.

Twilight Struggle demo - 8pm - Twilight Struggle is a 2 player card driven war-game simulating the Cold War which I'd seen played once and was intrigued by. I decided to go to the demo and see what it was actually about. This was the third demo I attended this day and I wasn't a big fan of the format of this one. My main issue was one of the people at the demo kept interrupting the demoer to go into more detail on specific rules. Now it could be that the GM was doing a terrible job or it could be that he had a plan to reveal more information later on in the demo but we never got a chance to find out because of the constant interruptions. I actually got up and left partway into the demo because of how annoying I found the interruptions to be. I explain new games to people around here a fair bit (because I like to buy and play new games) and I always get annoyed when other people 'help' teach. I 'help' as well, its human nature, but since this demo I've started to try to restrain myself until the end and point out oversights then. It's better than jumbling up someone's explanation that just isn't in the same order yours might have been!

Queen's Gambit - 9pm - This is a game I learned last year at WBC by reading the rules 5 minutes before the round started. It's actually a Star Wars miniature war-game simulating the end of Episode 1. I liked it so much I bought a copy on eBay despite it being rather pricy (it's been out of print for some time and is pretty rare). The WBC events actually uses 'owns the game' as the primary tiebreaker so I was happy to have brought my copy down. I was given a 'owns the game' index card to write my name on and set up my board while waiting for an opponent. (The game has more than a hundred miniatures that go into preset locations, so it takes some time to set up.)

The game itself was long and hard fought. I played the 'good' guys and eventually won with only 1 Gungan alive on the battlefield. I think my opponent probably focused too much on killing Gungans and not enough time actually winning the game and might have won if he'd focused entirely on Darth Maul. (Though to be fair, my Anakin had a lot of trouble and that was at least partially caused by his focus on the battlefield, so maybe I'm just way off base here.)

Vegas Showdown - semi-finals - 11pm - It turned out none of Pounder, Robb, or I won our Vegas Showdown games and none of us made the semi-finals. One guy didn't show up though, so they were letting one alternate advance. The alternate rankings? Pounder, then Robb, then myself. Pounder was off playing something else (Agricola maybe?) so Robb advanced. They were short a copy of the game so I went off to get mine. Robb suggested he'd bow out so I could advance since I'd brought a copy and had been talking about wanting to win that event but I wouldn't have any of that. If I deserved to make it to the semis than I would have and that's that!

I didn't have anything else to do so I played the part of the banker in Robb's game. Robb ended up with his income numbers in the wrong spot for a couple of turns (CHEATER!) and called the GM on himself. They decided to ding him the money he likely shouldn't have earned and no other penalty which made sense. I think the game _might_ have gone differently if his opponents had had an accurate count on his money for the couple turns this happened during but I suspect not. At any rate Robb ended up winning by a good margin anyway.

Race for the Galaxy - later - We likely went out to the Waffle House and then came back to play a game at some ungodly hour. Pounder wanted something reasonable short and I saw that the open gaming library had a copy of Race for the Galaxy, a game I'd played for the first time in an event earlier that day and wanted to play again. As we were setting up a random nice lady asked if she could join in and not being completely antisocial we said yes. Robb and I ended up tying for first, Pounder and Cally tied for 3rd. Pounder was a little sceptical heading in since he likes San Juan so much and thought this was just going to be a more random version of that. I think he's probably right, but it's still a lot of fun. So much so that Pounder and I both bought the game and the expansion, as did our friend Duncan. It's cheap, short, relatively easy to learn, and lots of fun. (Relatively easy for gamers to learn anyway...)