WBC 2011 - Day 3

The plan was to wake up for Race for the Galaxy at 9am, so I asked Robb to set the alarm for 8:30 so I could get up and shower. The other two planned on sleeping in. The next thing I remember is Pounder telling me it's 9:15. I didn't hear an alarm at all or recall being told to go shower. So I went back to sleep. Pounder eventually came back and woke me up at 11:30 so I could go to the Paydirt demo at 12. Paydirt is a football strategy game where the two players pick a play and then you roll dice and look up the result on massive tables. There's a guy who builds the tables every year with the stats from the previous season. The game seemed interesting enough so Pounder and I signed up to play in the heat at 1.

The first thing that happens is you auction off the teams. Each team has a power rating which is the minimum bid and when you play a game the lower bid of the two competing teams gets free points equal to the difference in the bids. So you can play a bad team but still get spotted a bunch of points are have a reasonable chance of winning the game. I ended up getting the Tennessee Titans for their minimum bid. I was matched up against a San Diego Chargers team which had been bid up so I was spotted something like 11 points to start the game.

My game featured lots of crazy plays. At one point I turned the ball over deep in the enemy zone and immediately got a safety. He had to kick off from his 20 yard line after the safety and I got a great result on the return table getting a 111 yard return for a touch down. (The Chargers were terrible on special teams last year and have a +77 result they can roll.) Later he fumbled the ball, I recovered and immediately threw an interception, and his next play was a very long touchdown pass. (I had a lead and screwed up by both throwing the pass in the first place and then by playing a defense card that had touchdown as one of the options.)

He ended up scoring the go ahead touchdown with a minute and 40 seconds to play. I proceeded to then throw another interception and he got a first down to run out the clock. A fun game, and I may try to play in the NFC heat so I can smash some faces with Suh and the Lions.

Next up, a demo for the other football game at WBC: Football Strategy. This game removes pretty much all of the randomness from the previous game. Defense picks a formation. Offense picks a play. Look up the deterministic result. Repeat. It's pretty much a very glorified game of rock paper scissors. The GM even said in the demo that people often fake punt on fourth down (the only drawback is you score half yardage on your play) and I took that to heart. I spent the early part of my game trying to get into a pattern and trying to get my opponent to follow along. It worked reasonably well as he took a 13-7 lead into half time. I punted once in the first half.

In the second half I switched to an offense better at passing and never punted again. I got into 4th down situations a fair bit but managed to out-guess/out-think my opponent for huge gains each time. 4th and 14 from my own 30? Fake punt! I ended up taking the lead by 8. My opponent scored a touch down as time expired so he got to go for 2 for the tie. (At this point Robb and Pounder were both waiting for me to finish so we could go eat so overtime would have been a big loss.) I managed to stuff the play and won by 2. My opponent was minorly verbally abusive to me over the course of the game (calling me a prick when I got an interception result even though it was out of the end zone and therefore incomplete instead, insulting me when I 'guessed' right over and over even though really I think I'd just figured him out, etc...) and was very slow so it wasn't much fun.

The event is single elimination/continuous so I was supposed to play again right away. I really wanted to eat having eaten a Dipps bar and 3 cookies all day. Also the steakhouse was donating 10% of our bill to WBC on Wednesday so it seemed good to go in. So I felt bad but dropped without volunteering to concede and let my opponent advance because he gave me a bad gaming experience.

54 ounces of steak later we came back and open gamed Innovation again. Fun game.

Then came Can't Stop where I played with Robb, Pounder, and the first person to sit down with us. The highlight of the game was definitely that a cute little 11 year old girl was watching us and was able to add up Pounder's dice much faster than he could. A couple times she even pointed out a play he missed. And one time he started at the bottom when he was actually half way up and she had to help move it up to where it should be. Robb ended up winning solely due to turn order, I assert, as he went before me and scored his 3rd while I had 2 and was high on others.

Robb had to keep playing Can't Stop so Pounder and I played 2 more games of Innovation. Then Pounder went to bed and I went to find Robb at werewolf since I wasn't tired at all. I ended up watching a bit and then played a couple 5 player games and a 22 player game. I'm really out of practice and hence bad at the game. But it was fun.