Tuesday is the most important day of the week for many people at WBC. They hold a 7 hour long board game auction that fills to the brim every year. There's also an auction store you can wander through at the same time. WBC gets a piece of the action and I believe it's via the auction that they keep entry fees as low as they do.
I am not one of those people. I have never really even considered going to the auction or selling an item in auction. Someone told me today that Rail Baron went for $70 so maybe I'll try selling that next year? Probably I'll just be lazy. At any rate they don't schedule any events during the auction which makes Tuesday a day of opening gaming for many people. Personally I get to do one of my favourite things... Sleep!
Robb ended up waking me up at 3pm so I could go have steak for breakfast. WBC has a deal with the nearby Texas Roadhouse where any money spent by WBC members on Tuesday from 3pm to 10:30pm has 10% get funneled to support the WBC open library. We like steak at the worst of times so giving us an extra incentive to turn our meat eating into board games? We're all over that! I ended up eating an 18oz steak for breakfast and I don't regret a thing!
Actual events start at 6pm and I had an hour to kill so I wrote about A Few Acres of Snow. I had a few options for games to play at 6: El Grande, Robo Rally, or St Petersburgh. I don't really know how to play any of those games well and maybe should have just gone to Robo Rally but I decided to give St Petersburgh a spin. Pretty much all I really know about the game is the mistress of ceremonies card is broken on the first turn. In my game I got her on the first turn. I then proceeded to bumble my way through the rest of the turns (making several key mistakes) and ended up barely winning the game 84-82-81-75. At one point I built the upgrade that gives you one dollar off your aristocrats and then failed to use the discount for my next 4 aristocrats. Doing so meant I didn't have enough money to properly play out my admiral card on top of my duplicate aristocrat and rather than wait a turn I put it over a unique one on the assumption that I'd get another copy of it. I didn't (though I did have a 50% chance of doing so with my observatory) so I compounded my first mistake with another. I was at the table with the GM and he didn't offer to give me the missing money once I'd noticed I'd been anti-cheating. I wonder if he would have if I'd been at another table and called him over? Or if I had boobs and a cute face? I'm a little annoyed that no one else pointed out that I'd been anti-cheating but mostly I'm bitter at myself. I blame playing the game exclusively online.
9pm brought the first heat of my team game: Le Havre. This game featured two very new players (both sitting to my left) and one relatively experienced player to my right. I ended up going for a 'make all the coal here' strategy by acquiring the marketplace, colliery, cokery, iron min and coal seam, and smelter. I thought I was in a good way when suddenly it appeared like I wasn't going to get a steel ship at all due to wharf tempo. It looked like they were going to split 3-1-0-0 with me getting none at all! Then the guy to my right decided to get a 3rd steel to make a luxury liner instead of buying a third steel ship and the guy across from me decided to spend his steel on the bank. Only two of us even bothered to use the shipping line and one guy ended with a loan. I'd picked up 6 loans but paid them all off in one big shipping phase. (Well, I saved off a turn to use the local court as one of my last actions but I could have paid them off if I wanted to.) Ultimately getting the steel ship and using the shipping line twice let me pull a fair bit ahead. I won pretty comfortably with the scores something like 210-159-154-106.
After Le Havre came Waffle House where I ate 3 scrambled eggs and some hash browns with no onions. Specifically declaring no onions seems to be working as my hashbrowns have been relatively onion free all week thus far!
Then despite waking up at 3pm I went to bed right after Waffle House. I wanted to try to get up for Race For The Galaxy at 9am.
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