2013 WBC Day 8

Saturday at WBC is a day mostly for semifinals and finals, or for more compact events. They run continuous tournaments for some of the more popular games for the people who can only make it for the weekend. Things like Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride. I'm not a big fan of those games anymore, so I rarely have much to do on Saturday. Sometimes I randomly play one of the few heats left running, which is how I got 2nd in Tigris & Euphrates a few years ago. Randomly show up, accidentally win a heat, keep playing because I have nothing better to do. But with being sick and having gotten up early on Friday for the Le Havre final none of that was on the docket this time around. I wasn't planning on playing anything, and just slept in quite late. And when I got up, I played Rogue Legacy.

6pm did bring the last seminar in the winning at life series so I went down to that. A lot of it was a rehash of the first seminar with talking about brain chemicals and how games work to make you feel good. She went into more detail about some things I'd heard before, about "free won't" and how working to say no to things wears down your ability to say no to other things. So avoiding getting into situations where you need to say no is a reasonable idea to keep in mind. Also a bit about how human multitasking is a myth and it's pretty expensive to keep swapping between tasks so if you want to be really productive it helps to limit distractions and just focus on the one thing at a time.

Unfortunately the room was booked at 7pm for Wits & Wagers and there was quite the crowd for that event so we got kicked out right on time, which unfortunately was a little before she was done. I like hearing about this sort of thing, and it makes me miss being a student.

I didn't stick around for Wits & Wagers. Instead I went and watched the end of the Agricola finals.

9pm brought Facts in Five, an interesting trivia game. 5 categories, 5 letters, name things that start with those letters in those categories. There are 5 rounds that get progressively harder. I was off to a good start with 15 points in the first round (thank you, Simon & Garfunkel) but things went steadily downhill from there. The worst was when a category came up for Dancing With The Stars which is my favourite television show and I didn't get a single one. I just couldn't remember any last names at all. Oh well! Some of the categories seemed familiar from previous years, like justices of the supreme court and islands in the Caribbean, but since they can change the letters I guess that makes sense. There's a lot of US centric categories which I guess makes sense since most of the people there are from the US but it sure puts me in a hole. I don't know US geography or justices or history. Except that we burned down their white house when they got uppity!

Pounder and Robb went out to eat while I was playing Facts in Five, but they brought me back a burger from Red Robin which didn't make me sick. Woo! Eating the same thing every time I go somewhere makes it feasible for people to order for me.

I met up with Sceadeau and Andrew after Slapshot which they may have played. I didn't. We wandered around a bit and finally gave in to learn a game from Jason Levine called Coup. You get dealt two cards which tell you which actions you're allowed to take. Except you can take all the action in the game as long as you're willing to pretend you have the card. After you declare an action anyone can jump in and accuse you of lying, with the losing side of that challenge having to discard a card. Last person with cards left wins. It seemed pretty terrible, since bluffing was a bad idea because it was so costly to get caught. We played a few times, though I didn't like it much, until Randy showed up with his proxied Hanabi deck. I didn't think 5 people could lean in well enough to play with it so I stepped out and watched. For about 5 hours. I played the role of coach even though I couldn't see two hands without moving, and I wasn't able to move. Then off to bed.