WBC 2011 - Day 5

I had finals at both 9am and 11pm on Friday so I tried to go to bed 'early'. I ended up lying in the dark not sleeping for a couple hours and kept waking up to check my watch since I was afraid the alarm wouldn't be set properly again. Sleeping through Race for the Galaxy was unfortunate but not disastrous. Sleeping through the finals of my team game would have been just about the worst thing that could happen at a board game tournament. (So not actually that bad in the grand scheme of things but I still didn't want it to happen.) I ended up sleeping for around 6 hours, getting up and showering in plenty of time, and was able to grab a blueberry muffin and a can of Coke for breakfast.

I ended up getting 3rd seat in the 4 player Le Havre final. Dan was first and grabbed 2 wood. I don't even remember what I got but I did buy the 4 cost building firm and got into the loan business. Dan built the marketplace and I got into it first and set up the tavern as the card to drop. I later left and Dan went in himself and made noise about denying the card on top. (He didn't have any grain so it seemed likely he'd want to bury it.) I ended up going back to the marketplace and flipping them back again before it dropped and I believe I then used the tavern to turn wood and grain into a boat, then again for the shipping line, a colliery, and a steel mill. (One of those may have been from shipping.)

I ended up in a bad tempo position when it came to getting the steel boats. I didn't have the steel on the start of turn 15 when I was going first and by the time I did have my steel together players 1 and 2 built their steel ships the moment they hit the board. I've never really looked into the timing of these before and I think I definitely will need to borrow a set from someone and really look into things like this. If the summary card I found online is correct it looks like there are 4 steel ships and the first people to get cracks at them are the people in seats 1, then 3, then 1 again, then 2.

Not getting a steel ship meant I ended up needing to eat some food on the last few turns and wasn't able to ship as many things as I normally would.

I also badly misplayed one action. I set up to build the dock (I needed to get a second brick) by going to the hardware store. (I also needed a 3rd iron so I could make steel for a luxury liner.) Then the town immediately built it on me with nothing weird going on in between. I just totally missed that it was going to get built. Typically we'd been pointing out what was going to get built soon and move it a little ahead of the rest of the buildings but it didn't happen with the dock. It's no excuse since I should have been paying attention to it myself but unfortunate that I let myself get lulled into a false sense of security. If I'd not gone to the hardware store I could have gone to the iron building instead which would have both gotten me more steel to ship for points and would have blocked the building from Dan who went there right afterwards.

The game ended up being both very close and not close at all. Dan won by 40 points but the other 3 of us were within 6 of each other. Something like 191-151-148-145. I was the 148 and surely would have had 2nd place if I hadn't messed up the one turn with the dock. I did manage to win my 4 player heat but the bottom line is I'm just not good enough at 4 player games in general to beat Dan. At least I can take some satisfaction from winning our 3 player semi and will need to study up on the 4 player game for next year.



At 12 I had nothing really to do so I wandered by the Samarkand demo which had just started. It seems like a simple and fast game with some strategy involved so I'd like to give it a try at some point.


The third heat of Agricola was at 1 but Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation was at 2. I skipped LotR for Agricola last year so I figured I should do the opposite this year. Especially since last year 1 win wasn't even enough to advance to the semis. They changed the format this year with a new GM and switched to 5 player games meaning both that there were fewer winners in each heat and more spots (25 vs 16) in the semis. I hung out around the sign up booth anyway since I knew some people who were going to play and tried to help organize a picket line. A bunch of people had 1 win, see, and there were currently 18 unique winners thus far. If you get 7 or fewer tables in the 3rd heat they all advance for sure to the semis. More tables and (assuming unique new winners) you get some old winners getting knocked out. So if you had a win you could either play and hope to not lose or you could sit out and create fewer tables. (At first the GM said a first and a last was better than just a first so Sceadeau wanted to sign up and then not really play and just accumulate negative points with scripted actions so the GM made first and last the same as first.) The picket line ended up falling through and everyone standing around played anyway.

I wandered off to the vendor booth, bought a copy of Innovation, and went to the room. The internet was down again so I read some Game of Thrones and then went to Lord of the Rings.


The format for Lord of the Rings was 4 rounds of swiss with a cut to top 8. We had 30ish people so 3-1 was almost certainly going to advance. The way each round worked was you played 2 games against the same person. Once as evil, once as good. If the same person wins both games they win the round. If you split then the tiebreaker is number of characters you had alive when you won. If you're still tied then you draw the round. This is an interesting format but it seemed to often turn the second game of a match into a race to slaughter people if you won the first game. It also added some silly situations like attacking with Frodo and playing noble sacrifice guaranteeing that you lose the game but possibly killing one extra unit!

One thing I noticed is how young the room was. Most of the players were teenagers and many were girls. I don't think I was the oldest one there but I was definitely way up there. (A similar thing happens in Queen's Gambit too, but mostly it's teenage boys there.)

My first round was against a teenage boy who didn't really seem to have a grasp on strategy. I lost a couple coin flips (possibly by out-thinking myself) and ended up winning as dark with only 2 units left. This meant I had to either win as light side or kill 8 of his dudes in a loss. It ended up really not mattering since he threw out his big numbers willy-nilly and lost his orcs early. Gandalf was then able to obliterate pretty much all of his units. I got to a point where I had a guaranteed win against anyone I play against and almost went into auto-pilot but then I realized he didn't have to have the warg back in Mordor. It might have been the witch king who could attack sideways which would have ended me. I played it slowly and it turned out the warg was way out in the middle of nowhere and I would have lost with my reckless play.

Round two was against another teenage boy who liked to talk about how bad he was and how I was going to beat him for sure. Complimenting my plays and such. Not sure if he was just nervous or if I'm somehow intimidating or if he was playing mindgames with me. He certainly thought I was playing mindgames with him. Whenever he'd reveal a piece I'd say hello to it (because I'm weird, it's just what I do) "Hi Pippin!" and it seemed to bother him somehow. At one point I had a coin flip (eye for his noble sacrifice vs bigger number) in a fight of 'the Gimster' vs Shelob and I wanted to make sure he knew I knew it was a coinflip so I made a comment asking if the Gimster was ready to blow himself up. It caused him to go into this weird double-think feedback loop as he tried to figure out why I said that. We both ended up playing numbers. He then decided that letting me talk before he made a play was a bad idea because clearly I was in his head so he started just playing a card immediately as soon as the pieces were revealed.

At one point we both played our magic cards and I had eye of sauron in my used pile. I said I was magicking for eye to counter his magic and he said that didn't work. I found in the rules where it said evil picks first and he said that just meant my card was worse and that he gets to pick a number after I choose eye. This is totally not how we play it and I said I was pretty sure it worked my way but we could ask the GM if he wanted. He decided not to press the issue and let me counter his magic. I ended up winning this match.

Round 3 I was playing against an older guy. (It seemed like the undefeated people tended to be the older ones.) I started as the good side and lost a couple coin-flips. I kept assuming he was going to try to eye my noble sacrifice so I kept playing numbers and losing. It became pretty clear that I wasn't going to win so I switched to murder mode with the intention of just killing as many of his guys as I could. I used all my guys and then attacked with Frodo with the intention of noble sacrificing him. I again thought he'd eye it though, so I played a number and so did he. In retrospect he probably didn't even think I would do that (maybe I should have made a comment!) and was just guaranteeing the win by killing Frodo with a big number. I ended up running Saruman down one side killing off both Merry and Legolas which pretty much meant I was going to win with more dudes than he did if I won at all. I managed to kill Gandalf with the orcs after losing only 1 dude (several retreats to set it up though) and the rest was smooth sailing.

Round 4 I was up against Rob Flowers and the games weren't even close. He won as the good guys with a pretty robust number (5 maybe?) so I knew I had my work cut out for me. I made a couple risky plays trying to kill units without losing any (not using Boromir up front, playing a 5 in the pippin vs shelob fight, etc...) and they all backfired. He ended up winning with a 7 in the second game.

It turned out they had 2 people at 4-0 and 7 at 3-1. The tiebreaker was strength of schedule and I was a little worried since every single one of my opponents lost all of their games after they played me. On the plus side I did start 3-0 so I had played one of the 4-0s. I ended up 5th overall and was matched against another teenage boy. He seemed to have a decent grasp of strategy but had already conceded victory in the event. I guess Nick Henning is a god among elves, at least according to my opponent, and he was just hoping to lose to him in the finals. (Other Nick brought a hand-made game with him, Lord of the Rings: Shotfrontation, where all the pieces are shot glasses and you drink when you kill a unit.)

At any rate, the actual game. I started as evil and got into a guaranteed win situation. I had Frodo contained and had set up my discard to have my 6 and my eye. I still had my magic card so I was guaranteed to win any given fight and I had one with Frodo coming up. I made the attack, we both played magic, and he said I couldn't eye his magic. This time he did appeal to the GM and somehow the GM ruled in his favour. I had to pick my card first but if I picked eye he could just pick a number and beat me. (I looked up the FAQ on BGG today and they agree with the way we play, for the record. I wonder if I should find the GM's email address and ask about it again?) I shrugged and picked my 6 instead. I still had Frodo contained and would win without losing any other pieces. Unless he picked noble sacrifice here, which he should have, to get the extra tiebreaker point. He took retreat and died a few moves later.

Coming back the other way I ended up in trade-off mode and got down to 2 pieces left on my side: Frodo and Legolas. They were both one space out of the mountains. My opponent had 4 pieces left but most were on my side of the river. If I could get Frodo through I would probably win. But he still had the flying nazgul so it was going to be a guess. I decided I probably couldn't come up with a right solution and maybe he could read me so I did it completely random. He guessed right and jumped Frodo.

So we were tied. In the swiss that would have just been a draw. In the finals we would have played another two games. In the quarters? Coin-flip to advance. He called heads and heads it was.

I tried to get the internet to work for a while, failed, and went to find Robb and/or Pounder. Robb had just lost in the Agricola semis and Pounder was in the process of losing in the Race semis. We went for food (Red Robin I think) and then had an hour to burn before I had to play in the Vegas Showdown finals. We went to Jay's Cafe to try out Lancaster which I had read the rules for the night before.

Lancaster was an interesting and short game. Guaranteed to play over exactly 5 turns and with a few different paths to score points. We cheated in two major ways so what we played wasn't really the actual game but all 3 of us had different plans and came within a couple points of each other so maybe it is a good game. We meant to play it again later but they packed it up before we got around to it.

The Vegas Showdown was a 5 player game with Rob Flowers and some other guys I didn't really recognize. One of them commented at the start about how he didn't really know how to play and didn't know how he possibly beat Randy Buehler (last year's champion) in his semi-final match. He seemed more concerned about not getting to play the colour red than actually playing the game. He kept trying to give red points each time he scored. At one point he put a big bid on a high roller's room and someone pointed out to him that he couldn't place it without a table games. He then undid the bid, but two turns later got into a huge bidding war with Rob Flowers that ended with the other guy paying a lot for a building he couldn't place. He tried to place it and had to be reminded again that he needed a table games.

As far as how my game went I saw that early on both restaurant cards had come out and decided to not build any of them. I started with a slot machine and then a fancy lounge for 21. A few turns later I got a second fancy lounge for 12. I built a normal lounge and then the next turn publicity was banned so I renovated to put my fancy lounges in play. At this point I was up to 3 slot machines (1 from a slot surplus) and had to figure out how I was going to put them on the board. I ended up going to 3 slots along the wall in yellow, lounge from blue door, fancy lounge from lounge, fancy lounge from fancy lounge. I bought a second lounge to fill some yellow space and come closer to connecting. And then I got a 3rd fancy lounge for 18. This let me connect, get 5 triangle points, come a sportsbook/theatre from filling yellow, and have low competition for the theatre. Unfortunately the other fancy lounge was owned by righty so I was going to have to position myself to outbid him. I didn't spend a single dollar for the rest of the game to make sure that would happen. He actually had the lead in cash for a while but kept trying to buy other things. (On one frustrating turn he actually bid 15 on a lounge only to have the 'not-red' guy bust in with 18. I think it connected him so it wasn't actually bad but it was frustrating for my theatre plan.)

Meanwhile the guy across from me was set up to buy the 5-star steakhouse. Instead he did some math and bought a nightclub for 33. (I was actually going to use that and a renovate as a backup plan to fill my yellow but the 33 was out of nowhere.) Then everyone else spent money and he was able to get the steakhouse for like 21. And the dragon room for 25.

Tile after tile was flipped and still no theatre. Not-red guy got to pull strings once and picked pretty much at a random. He didn't pick big but also didn't pick the lowest pile either. I got to pull strings once and got a big one with no theatre. We were down to no flats, no smalls, and 2 biggies. People bought exactly 2 buildings so we were possibly going to get another turn...

First card? Score diamonds and add a biggy. Diamonds were split 5-4-0-0-0. The tile was the space age sportsbook. Next card? Slot builders on strike and game end.

Lounges did pay out points near the end of the game (I got 10 points) but never paid cash. I went through the draw pile afterwards and 5 of the 8 cards were biggies. So I had a 5/14 chance to build the theatre on the last turn. Doing so would have been worth 12 for the theatre itself, 5 for filling yellow, and 2 more triangle points. I'd lose 5 points worth of money for a net gain of 14. The guy with all the good stuff wouldn't have had a good play and I think would have had to publicity for 1 point. We both would have earned a point in money from an extra turn of income, I think. End result? He beat me by 12. So getting an extra turn would have probably been the win. Having the theatre actually come out early certainly would have been.

Sometimes the tiles just conspire against you I guess. Having the lounges eventually pay off points was good enough for second place though.

It looked like I'd missed Werewolf Prom while playing the finals. Pounder and Robb were already asleep when I got back to the room (Settlers in the morning!) so even if I thought sneaking in late was a good idea I couldn't have really found my suit in the dark anyway. Oh well, maybe next year there'll actually be a solid date listed for it so I can plan ahead.