Wednesday, August 10, 2011

WBC 2011 - Day 6

Saturday is a day at WBC that feels like it should be busy. A bunch of people can only come for the weekend so you'd think a lot of events would hold off until then to make sure they got those people. They do schedule a couple of the more mainstream events for Saturday but for the most part things have wound down by the weekend. Settlers of Catan is probably the widest known euro and it starts at 9am Saturday morning. At 5pm the Carcassonne event starts. There are a handful of heats for other games too but for the most part there's a bunch of semi-finals and finals plus Settlers and Carcassonne. I didn't make any semis or finals on Saturday and have no interest in playing Settlers or Carcassonne, so I slept in. I got like 12 hours sleep and then spent the next hour reading Game of Thrones in a warm bath.

Eventually Robb came back to the room having scrubbed out at Settlers and we headed to the open gaming room to play something with Dan and Pounder. We were hoping to find a copy of Lancaster but they didn't have one. Instead we settled on having Robb teach us Glen More. After playing for about half an hour we came to the realization that we weren't actually playing Glen More since we had the rules all wrong and gave up.

We went to eat, I think at Olive and Jasmine Asian Bistro, and then came back for party games. 7 oclock brought Wits & Wagers which we once again lost miserably. The normal Wits & Wagers guys weren't there so someone else filled in as GM but it wasn't the same. How much money did they just spend on pizza for us? The correct answer this year was $0.

Facts in Five was in the same room at 9 so we stuck around for that. We had 40 minutes to kill so we played most of a game of Innovation. Pretty sure we played most of a game before Wits & Wagers, too. At any rate Facts in Five was fun with some categories I simply had no chance at all of getting an answer. I did manage to prove that I am Canadian and got a clean sweep of the NHL team category.

Slapshot was up next but we decided we didn't really want to play it this year. Instead I went and got my D&D dice and we played a game of TOBOGGANS OF DOOOOOOOOOOOM! Robb didn't run into a snow man this year but I did manage to jump the SHARK ATTACK! and win so it was a good game.

Waffle House followed. I had a waffle and a side order of hash browns. Rocked out with the juke-box again, too. On the way back from Waffle House Pounder's car started acting weird. It was raining but the wipers were going very slowly. The lights on the panels were all flickering and the headlights were dim. We made it back to the hotel but halfway up the big hill into the driveway the car just turned off and wouldn't start. Robb and I got out and tried to push but we're weaklings and the car was on a steep hill.

Robb went into the hotel and came back shortly with a small army of people. And by people I mean teenagers who are weaker than I am. And one tall dude. Fortunately it turns out that when you get 7 weak people to push a car up a hill it actually works! We were trying to figure out a way to get the car into a parking spot when a random older man came out to put a board game in the back seat of his car. We asked him to move his car (he was beside an open spot so we'd get 2 spots to work with) and he obliged. Then we pushed/coasted the car down into the spots.

Robb dismissed his army (thanks guys!) and Pounder went in to call AAA. When the AAA guy came he paged us to the front desk and there was no question who he was when we walked up as there was a guy in a florescent yellow shirt standing there. He used a jump box thing to start the car and after hitting things with his crowbar a bunch declared it was probably the alternator that was dead and not the battery. He told us about a nearby garage that was open on Sunday and pointed out we'd probably be leaving for Canada on Monday. When Pounder and I have to work. Bah.

Pounder then checked with the hotel to see if we could extend the room a night but it turns out all of the 2 beds + balcony + no smoking rooms were somehow sold out for the next day. We went back to the room to look stuff up on the internet but the internet wasn't working. Annoying when I just wanted to play Galaxy Legion but pretty terrible when we're trying to find a way to get a car fixed so we can leave on the right day. We ended up using the phone book to call the recommended place to find out their hours and Pounder set the alarm to get up in time to call them when they opened to see what they could do.

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