2014 WBC: Day 5

Wednesday marks the first real full day at WBC. Robb was GMing Innovation at 9am and Pounder chose it as his team game so they were both going to be there. Having now beaten two of my old team at their team games I had to come on down and try to take Pounder out at his. It was held in a particularly cold room and made me very sad. I almost went back to the hotel room to get my warm blanket. I'm strongly considering tracking down a Snuggie for next year! It's like the Host took our complaints about no AC too far and went way overboard to screw us. Or just to screw me? Other people were complaining about the cold but it didn't seem like anyone was as bothered as I was. I miss being warm.

Anyway, Innovation at 9am. I was matched up with a nice young woman who is working on her phd. My Coke bottle for the morning told me to share it with Jess and my opponent's name was Jessica. Close enough? Maybe if it was later in the day, but at 9am off of not much sleep that Coke was mine and mine alone. Take your sharing advice elsewhere, bottle of Coke! The game itself featured me drawing Mathematics early on and running it over and over. I never flipped up another blue card until I was all the way up to the 10s. I was behind in score so I couldn't just drain the 10s, but I activated Satellites over and over until I pulled something that put out more 10s that happened to be Self Service or something that said I won. Jessica was stuck back in the 4s. I didn't see any of her cards as being capable of stealing my stuff so I'm not sure what outs she might have had. I don't play much Innovation but I have played a fair number of times online and I generally found that a full Math ramp was just game winning and it sure seemed to be this game.

Round 2 had been blanked out of my mind. I assume I lost the brain cells storing that information due to frostbite. I don't remember how we got to the end game situation but I know I ended up with both Software and Robotics in play and had to draw, meld, and activate another 10. If it was AI then I was going to lose the same way Sceadeau lost in the mulligan round. Fortunately it was The Internet instead which instantly won me the game instead of instantly losing me the game. Hurray!

I won round 3 as well, but really don't remember it. At some point Pounder got a bye (as he should since he was last year's winner) but for round 4 we were down to 5 people and now Robb wanted to switch to using an eliminator instead of using byes. Eliminators instead of byes is preferred, but you're supposed to use them the whole time if you use them at all. I voiced this concern but seemed to be the only one with a problem so off we went. I believe every eliminator used ended up losing so it was a lot like awarding byes anyway? Assuming no one got a second one? I ended up losing in the round of 5 against another competitor so it didn't much matter to me!

I am very frustrated about that loss because I was in such a dominating position and had a play to win but missed it. I got out to 5 early achievements but then my opponent's better board finally took over and he was able to start scoring a bunch of special achievements and was about to score the 6 and put things really out of reach. I had a chance to win by running coal and flipping up a card of any of 3 colours. (I had 30+ points but needed a top card that was a 6 to achieve the 6 and win. I had 3 piles with exactly 2 cards in them and the 5 pile was empty so if I pull one of those colours I win. I didn't. I then had to just draw a 6 and hope to move on somehow. The 6 was industrialization which let me start splaying my limited number of cards. I then set up to get monument by tucking 6 cards in a turn but my opponent using lighting twice the turn before I could do it. He was up to 5 achievements and was easily going to get the 8 on his turn (he had a 8 in hand) and win. I was 3 clocks from an achievement and decided to try a random 'meld a card' action in the hopes of getting them. What I should have done is activated industrialization to tuck 3 cards and hope the 3 cards I tucked had clocks on them. This at least had a chance to work out, because I'd seen a bunch of the 8s and knew some clocks were left. My blue wasn't splayed but I had metric system in play and could have easily splayed it as my second action if I'd hit both blue 8s. It turned out they were both on top of the 8 pile and it would have been the win if I'd tried it. But because I tried the other thing first it didn't work and I lost. *sigh*

I hate losing on my own mistakes so I went back to the room to cool down. I think I stayed there until 3 when I left for Agricola. I've been playing a few games online recently with Sceadeau letting me know how I'm terrible so I've been getting better but I'm certainly not good at the game. I ended up at a table with Bill Crenshaw and a couple of people I didn't recognize. I opened the draft with guildmaster, got a second pick basketmaker (which Sceadeau later told me I likely could have wheeled 6th since he's awful for anyone without a guildmaster) and then a third pick social climber. This gave me a course of action to take since as long as I set up to renovate early and build majors I'd get 6 free stone, 4 free wood, 4 free clay, and 6 free reed from 3 occupations. Felt good! Bill ended up building the basketmaker's workshop on me but I got the other two guild buildings and all the renos fairly early. I built a lot of early fences (I think I used sawhorse to get 15 out for 10 wood) and ended up with a ludicrous number of animals. Milking stool and cowherd combined to let me get 8 cows for 4 bonus points. I thought I'd done really well.

It turns out the two guys I didn't recognize were doing the opposite of well and Bill was reaping the rewards better than I was? Or maybe equivalently to me. He also ended up with lots of animals and a stone house and all the things. He won by 2 points, and I had a completely wasted action in the middle where I built the punner after Bill had used his 2-shot plow once and then conspired to block him from using it a second time. Action and a wood for no game effect makes me sad. What really makes me sad is righty had taken start player that round for no discernible reason that I could see which kept me from playing the punner as an add-on action, and prevented me from playing it before Bill plowed. In retrospect I probably should have just plowed myself? That forces Bill to wait at least a turn on plowing and gives me more time to pun it up. Oh well.

At 6pm I played a heat of Ra Dice because it was in the same room as Agricola and why not? I came tied for second at a table where the winner spent the whole game ragging on how I was going to win by pointing at my monuments and making up ludicrous numbers for how many points they were going to be worth. It left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, but whatever. It was short at least!

At 8pm I decided to give Galaxy Trucker a spin. Sceadeau and Duncan were both talking about how great the first heat had been so I went to give it a shot. I was put into a 3 player game with a copy of the game that included the first expansion. I was up against last year's 2nd place finisher all the way from Russia (Ashley) and someone I didn't recognize. We decided to play with all the things even though I'd never used some of them before and had to have them explained to me. On top of a normal game we all got a hand of 4 extra events to seed into the event deck one per round. Also before each round (but after seeding an event) we flipped up an extra card that modified the rules of the game. It sure made for extra craziness which is a good thing for Galaxy Trucker. Crazy ho!

The first round had the extra card 'if a laser or meteor doesn't do damage reroll it up to twice' which I took to mean I'd really need to defend my ship well. But it was round 1, so how much defending can you really do? There isn't really space for shields... No open connectors was my primary goal. The event I'd seeded caused two large meteors to attack each ship but instead of rolling they'd hit the two outside ends of your ship. So I knew I had to build lasers on my outside columns. I ended building a pretty mediocre ship since it had nothing battery powered at all (no shields or anything) but I'd included a bunch of batteries on the ship. Also no red cargo space. On the plus side I had lots of guns which worked out pretty well. The random guy at my table was down to 5 pieces on his ship when my event went off... It killed 3 of those! He was eventually lost in open space. Ashley hadn't built guns on the outside ends of her ship so my card blew two of her things up (including some cargo). Woo! My guns were still intact at that point so I escaped unscathed. I ended up scoring fewer points for the round than Ashley did since she had cargo space and I didn't but it was fairly close. The other guy had taken the lawyer card so he didn't lose very much. In retrospect the lawyer had died so I'm pretty sure he shouldn't have been able to use it and should have lost a lot of money.

The second round had the extra card 'you can build engines pointing forwards and backwards and after resolving open space you need to rotate your ship 180 degrees'. I seeded an event that caused people to lose 7 flight days or run a gauntlet of meteors. Before flipping a single tile both Ashley and I looked at 75% of the cards in the round to scout for open space. There was one such card... Which meant we would be flipping at least once and if the remaining 25% had an open space in it we'd die if we didn't build some forward pointing engines. This meant our ships ended up being really awkward looking since we had to have guns and engines pointing both ways. Super awkward for me since I'd seeded an event with a big meteor from the side so I wanted guns on the sides of my ship too. In retrospect I should have put a big priority on getting aliens for my ship since they provide +2 to guns or engines regardless of which way the ship is pointing. I ended up with no aliens at all but lots of guns pointing all sorts of ways. I'd included a bunch of ways to spend batteries this time (some shields and a lot of those guns were double guns) but only 4 or 5 batteries total on the ship. Lots of the cards were attack cards and my batteries were quickly drained holding them off. I kept exactly tying the enemies power and not spending the battery to kill them to conserve batteries but it was for naught. I ended up running out of batteries and then getting into trouble because I couldn't power my guns. On the plus side pushing the enemies down the line ended up hurting both other players too, so that was nice. Someone had seeded a card stealing money for aliens. Clearly they'd thought ahead more than I had! Safe due to no aliens! I think I ended up making the most points this round because I picked up a fair amount of cargo and didn't take too much damage. At one point an event resolved that let the person in the back shoot the person ahead of them and then the person in second shoot the leader. But you could name a bribe to not take the damage... I was in the middle and feel like I played it wrong since I ended up paying to keep bits that later got blown off while Ashley didn't pay my bribe for her bits that later got blown off.

The third round was going to be for all the marbles and had the extra card 'pay a dollar for each crew member at the end of the run' which didn't feel like it was going to hurt all that much but really made me want to put a priority on aliens and luxury cabins for crew instead of regular crew. My event was a battery testing thing where you had to pay a battery for every 2 pieces of your ship that could use batteries or have them blow off your ship. I knew that meant I wanted to limit my battery usage and went with just 2 shields and a shield booster along with a fair number of shields. Not having any way to make large amounts of weapon power or battery power (by skipping all the battery stuff) meant I really, really wanted aliens. I ended up with all 3 aliens and took the manager blue alien to make my other aliens better. I screwed up building my ship (we were using the Enterprise and my first placement made it so I couldn't make a circle for the saucer section) but my ship ended up being really, really good. Some cargo space, some batteries, all the aliens, all the shields, a few engines, and a TON of weapons. The round started off brutally for Ashley as the first couple cards were combat zones where she lost two categories and the other guy lost one. Ashley lost a bunch of bits from laser fire and spent a bunch of batteries. Then some pirates or something came that were going to steal cargo. I was able to exactly tie them so I was fine, but the other two couldn't fight them off and had no cargo to steal so they lost batteries. Then we did something that set me back a day to collect a reward which put Ashley back out in front. More pirates, these ones with guns, and weak enough that I killed them for bucks after they shot her up. She was flat out of batteries by now... Which meant it was prime time for my seeded card to come up. She couldn't pay for any of her things that used batteries since she had none left so all those bits exploded. Since we were using the Enterprise ship and since she'd lost a fair number of pieces already this meant a lot of the load bearing pieces left on her ship were battery related... She lost something like 7 battery related pieces and probably 5 others. Not too long after a meteor swarm took her out for good. And the other guy too, for that matter. I got to play the last 4 or 5 cards by myself.

Final scores were 81-2-(-3). The guy took lawyer twice and used him after he died so I have a feeling the scores probably should have been 81-(-3)-(-40). I don't know that I played super well, and I certainly don't think I played that much better than Ashley did, but she got pummeled early in age 3 and couldn't recover. She also built a ship that lost to my event... But maybe that's by design? If I'm aggressively taking batteries and spurning pieces that don't use batteries then it feels like the pieces left for the other players are likely to cost batteries to use without having extra batteries to go around? So maybe the disaster in the last round was a result of good play after all?

At any rate, I had fun in this game and decided I really wanted to play it again at WBC if I could. But since the semis were at the same time as my team game's semis that wasn't actually going to happen. Maybe next year will be different? I'd like to play more with all the crazy cards...

11pm was Can't Stop (Looking Fabulous) so I put on my watermelon getup (green shirt, pink tie, black pants) and went to roll dice. Andrew had been talking all week about how he was going to prove that Can't Stop is a heavy skill game by winning it. I lost in the first round. So did he. He got one turn. Someone at his table capped the 6s, 7s, and 8s all in one turn thanks to some goading from Andrew. Whatever high skill game. Whatever.

I don't think I'd eaten all day so Waffle House featured Papa Joe's pork chops, meat lovers size. It's a little surprising but Waffle House actually makes a pretty good pork chop. 3 pork chops and some hash browns is a pretty good meal.

2013 WBC Day 5

Wednesday is the first real meat and potatoes day of WBC. Tuesday has the auction and earlier days tend to have fewer events for the early arrivers. Things really kick off on Tuesday and keep on trucking all day Wednesday. Just looking at the schedule I made up beforehand I was looking to play two heats of Race for the Galaxy, a Vegas Showdown, an Empire Builder, a Ra Dice, and Egizia, attend a demo, and win Can't Stop. There was even a gap in the middle for eating or squeezing something else in. Especially when I ultimately skipped crayon rails to play two things instead. So I had lots of grand dreams of things I was going to do.

Instead I slept in until after 2. Then I got up and jumped in the tub for an hour and read a book. Then I went and watched Sceadeau play a heat of Goa. Went back to the room, wrote a blog post or played Rogue Legacy or something.

7 o clock brought something I could sort of do... I went to another seminar from the life as a game lady! This one was on nutrition and how conventional wisdom is tricking everyone into doing it wrong. There was a lot of lead-in and discussion about evolution and other mammals. A talk about how the 'bad' LDL cholestrol actually works and how it only actually causes heart disease when it gets oxidized, and that the stuff that oxidizes it only gets made when your muscles are stuck processing carbohydrates instead of fats. So while LDL is a thing made of fat and protein and it is the thing that does eventually cause heart disease it actually only gets bad when you cut down on fat and ramp up on carbs. She went on to talk about how the early studies that showed saturated fat was terrible have all been refuted and showed the results of a 2010 metastudy that showed that there is no link at all between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. Following from that was a pretty linear trend line showing how heart disease goes up as you eat a diet composed more and more of carbs. Certainly something worth looking into more for some people I would think. Personally I eat plenty of fat and protein and try to avoid carbs as if they will kill me!

She talked a bit about how hunger signals work, and basically said the body doesn't have a good way of telling you when you're short of something in particular. So if you're down on carbs or down on fat or down on vitamin C basically the only thing your body can tell you is to eat more. Maybe the next thing you eat will solve the problem! But for most people the next thing is going to be the same sort of thing as the last thing, which sucks. If you're eating too much fat before you're going to end up eating even more fat and still not enough vitamin C. Or if you need more fat and fewer carbs you're going to end up eating even more and more carbs until you get enough fat and that's going to result in way overeating. Then eventually when you go on a diet you end up starving yourself in the same proportion and your body goes into a crazy conservation mode and slows down your metabolism and making you really hungry which screws your goals and makes you miserable. But if you changed to following the right rules and actually got the right split of everything in the first place you'd end up eating substantially less overall, get a health metabolism, and end up at a reasonable weight. Made sense to me! I know when I started eating worse when I had to work a regular job I ended up putting on weight and now that I'm eating what seems like a better mix of food I'm losing weight at a pretty decent clip!

She then talked a bit about why plants may have evolved the way they did and why that may make them worse for humans to eat than animals. Basically if an animal wants to evolve in order to avoid getting eaten it will evolve stealth, or speed, or claws. Maybe it will become poisonous like a toad, but for the most part animals use methods to avoid getting caught and eaten at all because it's very bad for them evolutionarily if I eat them. Plants on the other hand are stuck in the ground. I can see them, and I can walk up to them, and I can eat them. They could also become poisonous like a toad, but the sneakier thing to do is instead to evolve to abuse the fact I'm going to eat them when I walk up to them. A smart plan would be to trick me into eating their seeds and then get me to go poop them out somewhere else. As long as I don't destroy the seeds in my digestive tract this is a winning scenario for the plant. Especially if the seeds taste good and the part of the plant without seeds tastes terrible. The idea she talked about is that this is why gluten exists. Not as seeds themselves or to taste good, but to disrupt the digestive process. Make it so my body gets a little sick and can't digest things as well to give the seeds the best chance of making it all the way out. Evil plant! I won't fall for your plan! I just won't eat you at all! Come here, cow! OM NOM NOM!

The end ended up talking about how she used to be a vegetarian but is now into the paleo diet and thinks it's awesome. I don't know details about it, but if it avoids glutens and eats meat it's probably pretty good in my books. I liked how she presented information this time around, showed some now disputed studies to give an idea of where the random anti-science rant came from last time, and gave some interesting info to think about. It didn't seem to come across as a recruitment drive for a paleo diet, though she did endorse it pretty strongly as having worked well for her. And one thing I definitely noticed is that she was rather slim compared to most people at WBC. Maybe she's just "lucky" with a "good metabolism" or maybe her plan of blending a stick of butter into her coffee every morning actually has something going for it.

After that I think I went to watch some Brass, or went to the room and surfed the internet for a while.

11pm actually brought Can't Stop. I was still feeling pretty badly but I figured I could probably roll some dice and actually play a game for 10 minutes without wishing I was dead. Can't Stop also has the advantage of letting you play against your friends if you want to, so I played in a game with Robb and a couple of the people I know through Sceadeau (Matt and Andrew I think). I rolled a lot of trips and fell often. I did manage to get the 2s done, which made me happy. Then I lost and got to leave.

I hadn't actually eaten all day (well, I had a lot of gluten free snacks I brought, so a granola bar type thing and some ginger snaps) so we went to Waffle House. It was pretty empty and I spelled out what I needed to the waitress who seemed to be able to hook me up. I did get an onion in my hash browns which implied some cross contamination was going on but it didn't make me sick so I guess the scrambled eggs, hashbrowns with ham, a random onion, and salt are all nicely gluten free.

2012 WBC Day 5 Summary

I went to bed relatively early with the hopes of waking up in time for Race For The Galaxy at 9am and I actually managed to barely get up in time. I had to skip showering and shaving but I figured I'd have plenty of time to do that afterwards. I got down to the room and for some reason someone had turned the heat on so the room was hotter than it was outside. I feel like we got pranked and I want to issue a permanent ban to the prankster. The game itself was played 4 player with no expansions. I was probably the worst starting world (the one that can make a blue good) and my first build was the building that knocks one off the cost of future buildings. I then proceeded to explore into the 6-cost building that knocks two off the cost of future buildings and scores big points for buildings. My next building let me draw a card after building a building. It's not hard to imagine how the rest of the game went for me but I pulled off a stupidly powerful combo near the end of the game. I had the card that lets you play military planets as normal planets. I had the card that lets you play normal non-alien planets for free if you sac it. So I got to play the 7 point for 7 military planet for free! Woo! I ended up winning the game pretty handily.

10am brought the next heat of Race For The Galaxy. I decided to skip Titan-2 this year after musing about being stuck playing against David this year. This time I got the best starting world (the one that starts with a brown good) and ended up building an early building that knocks 2 off the cost of future planets. I went into a settle-produce-sell cycle and finished off the last turn with a 2x ship for 8 points. This game was a little closer but I still won pretty handily. Woo!

11am was Vegas Showdown and I ended up at the same table as the GM Eric and another Eric. Both of them had been in my semi-final game last year and made quite a game of this one. GM Eric and I were both positioned to get the Theatre with a lot of money and a fancy lounge each. It unfortunately came out on bad tempo for me such that we'd both have the same amount of money and he'd get to bid first. I had to audible into the 5-star steak house which meant he got to wait another turn to buy the theatre and as a result had enough money to also get the space age sports book. The triangles from sticking them both together were enough to give him a 2 point victory. Boo!

I ate lunch in the hotel since both Robb and Pounder were still asleep. It was a pretty dry chicken breast on a bun. I threw the bun out and ate it with a knife, fork, and salt. 

2pm had Ingenious which I may have played years ago on BSW but never in person. I got Sceadeau to teach me the game beforehand and gave it a spin. The guy to my left ended up winning which probably means I didn't do a good enough job blocking him but I did finish a very close 2nd (it came down to 2nd number).

I took some time off to play some Theatrhythm, took in an Automobile demo, and almost fell asleep in the lobby. Eventually Robb showed up and we headed to the 5pm heat of Lost Cities which had a stupidly large turnout. I got matched up with a nice teenage girl who commented on my lack of a Canadian accent. Eh? The game itself was a massacre mostly because I drew all the big numbers each round so she frequently got stuck with a negative score after starting an early expedition.

6pm was Titan the Arena in the same room as Lost Cities. I was stuck playing with a set that didn't have the right number of pieces for most of the players. On the plus side I happened to have my Queen's Gambit game with me so instead of colours most of us played with miniatures. I was the Gungans! It got quite a number of comments from people passing by our table and I think it made the game more fun to be using weird pieces. I managed to pull out not-last which is a bit of a miracle for me. I don't know how much seating order matters but the same guy got to keep making kill decisions (a little girl was to his right) and he ended up winning. Apparently I had no chance of winning because I'd put my bets on good monsters and people wanted to kill off their special abilities before I could use them. Doh.

7pm was Ra Dice. My first couple rolls had multiple monuments so I dove head-first into a monument strategy. At one point I screwed up trying to get an extra monument (the age was about to end and there was a pharaoh in my roll for the 5 point tie) and I ended up rolling a complete blank and wasted two dice. I ended up losing by 1 point so those extra 5 points would have been clutch. I actually lost this game to the same Dominic from Quebec who beat me at real Ra the other day. Small world!

8pm brought Queen's Gambit. I ended up paired against Evan who beat me out of the round of 16 way back in 2007. He was a punk teenager then and now is a pretty built University age man. My opening hand had 3 Anakin cards and my wheel of fortune card so I decided to try for an Anakin rush plan. I got all the way to the end and cleared out all his starfighter cards but couldn't quite get the last space done. By the time I got to that point it didn't really matter since Darth Maul was free and all my guards were dead. He just had to kill one of Purple Queen, Red Queen, or Captain P for the win. He did run out of Maul cards with Red Queen at 1 and had to finish her off with a droid so if I'd gotten one luckier with Anakin I might have been able to win. At any rate the game was fun because we didn't take it seriously at all. I haven't won a game of Queen's Gambit since I won the event but I still show up to play it because it's a blast. (Unlike, say, Puerto Rico...)

11pm has Can't Stop. I was 3rd with 1st and 2nd chair playing a stopping early strategy. Implementing the same plan as the people who get more turns that you is a bad idea so I went a different way... Better lucky than good! I ended up falling one space from the top of the 6 on a 6-7-8 rush. Next turn I had a 6-7-10 rush and capped the 7. I was four off the 6 and considered going for it but decided to stop. Of course the 6 was gone by the time it got back to me. As were the 3, 8, 11, and 12. 6 numbers closed out and I only had 1 of them. The two guys on my right again went slow which again meant I had to risk it all. I came close going up 2-4-10 but fell just shy of the 4. The 12 year old kid on my left ended up winning.

Off to Waffle House for Papa Joe's pork chops. Then a lot of sleep.

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.

WBC 2010 Day 5 Summary

Woke up 'early', played Vegas Showdown at 11, came 3rd. Scores were 50-49-49 and a lot of things conspired against me to cause the loss, though a lot of things went well too.

Ate at Applebees.

Played the Factory Manager heat and got a pretty solid win in. May try to make the semifinals, but it conflicts with Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation so I'm not sure.

Played an Agricola heat. Won a game featuring David Platnick and a couple other people. Platnick ended the game with 7 stone rooms and a half-timbered house but he had a lot of negative points due to not having any fields, grain, vegetables, sheep, or cows. I ended up winning by 5, including a full 4 points for cows of my own. Unfortunately there were 17 games played in this heat alone and top 16 overall advance, so I need to find a way to play another round if I want to make the semis it would seem.

Played Facts in Five. Lost pretty badly but had fun. Managed to get points for randomly guessing that there has been a Pope Steve and a Pope Theodore.

Ate at Cracker Barrel, which ended up being rather amusing. They seated us and it took them 5 minutes to notice we didn't have a server. I think the girl who ended up serving us (Joy) wasn't supposed to and just took pity on us. We ordered and 15 minutes later she came back and told Pounder and I that they were out of our orders and we needed to pick something else. When the new stuff eventually arrived Robb was missing bacon and cheese and dumplings, Pounder was missing apples and coleslaw, and I had extra weird balls. Pounder's iced tea got refilled as water. It was a real comedy of errors. Joy ended up giving us free dessert to go to try to make up for all the issues but I think we were more amused than bothered and it definitely helped that she seemed to care that we were getting randomly screwed. Contrast to the day before at Waffle House where we were randomly screwed and no one noticed or cared.

Played Can't Stop. I got the 12 but got no further. I went last and 2nd player had good turns so I felt I couldn't win unless I went all out. I fell. The table beside mine decided to literally play Can't Stop, only stopping if they'd locked out a column. One guy took it to the very illogical extreme and kept rolling after he'd locked out a column. He had gone from nothing to full 6 and full 8 and was two rolls away from full 7. Probably close to 50 people were gathered around cheering him on. He fell. 8(

Open gamed a game of Beep Beep! and a game of Kingsburg.

WBC 2008 -> Day 2

Prelude
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap

Last year we stayed at the hotel across the street which came with 2 free breakfast buffets, which we made full use of. We decided to hit the breakfast buffet at the event site this year, even though it wasn't free. Despite it not being free it was actually much worse. The selection was smaller, the cereal was stale, and they didn't have an omelette guy. We were not impressed, and I for one didn't go back.

Titan 2-player - 10 am - Titan 2 player is run as a single elimination event with rounds scheduled haphazardly. The goal is to be done by the end, and you're supposed to arrange to play your next match with your next opponent as soon as is feasible without screwing your week. Unfortunately I didn't take this to heart, as we will see...

Anyway, they set things up with seeding such that all previous winners are spread apart on the single elimination bracket. I was matched up with a former winner. I don't remember much about the game but my notes say I won in 35 minutes during the first battle of the game. Short and sweet! What I should have done is looked at the schedule and found something else to do. What I actually did was wait around for the match containing my next opponent to finish. They didn't finish for over 7 hours...

Now I was really annoyed at this at the time, but the problem is really my own. I should have found something to do and let the guys playing know that I'd be back in a couple hours to check in on them. For no good reason I stuck around skipping events I wanted to play in so I could be available as soon as they finished.

The kicker here is they finished and the winner decided he'd rather play the next morning anyway as he'd played enough Titan. *sigh* At this point they were trying to put together some 4 player Titan games and were short some players. I always want to play at least one game of multiplayer Titan each year to boost their attendance numbers. (If you're trying to make the semi-finals you want to play 6 games ideally, less if you win a couple.) After sitting around for 7 hours to play Titan I figured I should get my 4 player Titan game in. The really frustrating part is the ended up with 7 people interested in playing multiplayer Titan and my 2-player Titan opponent stepped in to fill out the games. So, my opponent who didn't want to play more 2-player Titan put it off so he could play 4-player Titan. *sigh*

If I was a more assertive fellow I'd have pushed to play 2-player then and there but because I'm not I didn't.

In the middle of waiting I went to watch the Agricola demo. I should have then played in the Agricola round and I'd probably have been a lot happier with the day. Oh well.

Titan 4-player - 6 pm - I ended up in a game with Robb and there were things on the schedule I really wanted to do at 9 (Queen's Gambit), 10 (Vegas Showdown), and 11 (Can't Stop). I came second in Can't Stop last year and really wanted to improve on that so my plan was QG at 9 and CS at 11. So, of course, I end up in a fight for my life in Titan with Robb around 8. That one fight took 45 minutes. I managed to win the fight but ended up in a position where I was forced to attack a couple of turns later. I was eliminated and it was past 9. *sigh*

I could have aborted to Vegas Showdown but I really wanted to play Can't Stop. So I stuck around watching things until 11.

Can't Stop - 11pm - Last year I made it to the finals and the GM commented that he thought the game was incredibly random and he didn't expect to ever see the same people make it to the finals year after year. Now, I think Can't Stop has a lot of skill to it, and I think most people are very bad, so I really wanted to prove him wrong and make it back to the finals. I started off by winning the first round, but that incredible random part bit me in the butt for the second round. The guy who ended up winning stopped literally every 5 rolls. That gives your opponents so many turns to win its ridiculous. I, on the other hand, kept getting really terrible rolls, things like trips and quads only a couple of rolls in. I'm convinced my opponent's plan actually only gave him a really small chance to win as he needed both me and the third guy to consistently fail with good odds to succeed. Oh well! I'll be back next year!

Nefertiti - 12pmish - Robb also lost in round 2 and I don't think Pounder played at all. We headed back to Cafe Jay and looked for a new demo to play. We ended up playing Nefertiti which is an odd little auction/collection game. I set out to collect the rare stuff worth the most and got almost all of them. It was an interesting game, the costs of the auctions changed as time went on so it had a bit more variance than something like Ra and I'd consider playing it again.

Quo Vadis - later - We headed back to the room but for some insane reason decided to play Quo Vadis instead of going to bed. We ended up losing a piece but found it under the bed 3 days later. (Doesn't say much for the cleaning staff!)

WBC 'report', Part 1

This all happened five months ago and the only notes I have are little pencil marks in my guide book indicating what events I thought I wanted to go to so this won't be an incredibly detailed report. It should, however, serve to demonstrate just how much gaming there is to be had at WBC.

We drove down to Lancaster on Tuesday morning, stopping to pick Robb and Lin up in Cambridge and then at a diner in some small town in rural PA, but beyond that it was straight through. It took something like 8 hours all told, and we ended up in Lancaster around 4-5pm. Our hotel ended up directly across the street from the convention center which was convenient. However, it is a major highway so crossing it was exciting to say the least. We didn't bother to pack any games so we didn't have to cart anything across the street ever, just cut and run when the coast looked clear.

Once we'd finally crossed the street we had to go register. Robb and Pounder had been to WBC a couple years earlier so they didn't have to have their pictures taken, but Lin and I had to so we got to wait around for a bit while that happened.
(I look like a farmer in mine!)

5pm is the start of demos, but 6pm is the start of actual events. 22 different games had rounds start at 6pm, many of which I wanted to play but I didn't really know my way around and didn't particularly want to try something new for my first event. Robb and Pounder were going to play El Grande and I don't detest that game so I followed along and gave it a spin. I almost won my game, finishing a close second, but I believe both Robb and Pounder won their games. Robb ended up winning the entire event!

They only had 2 hour rounds for El Grande which is a little tight, and we ended up missing the 8pm start time for other events. 9pm didn't have any games we wanted to play but did have the Titan demo so we wandered over to that. We'd met quite a few of the main Titan players a couple years ago when we stormed US Nationals down in Maryland, which Robb also won. Every night at 11pm they have a less serious game which tends to have a large turnout due to nothing else going on, and these games often lend themselves to drinking. The 11pm game on Tuesday was Win, Place & Show which was a horse racing game that didn't sound very interesting so we played the 10pm Ra round instead. Now, Ra is a pretty fun game but I'm abysmally bad at it. I have this real problem with wanting to play "Can't Stop", getting all the other players out so I can pull tiles against the sun clock. I've had games where I didn't purchase a lot in the first 2 rounds! I think I scored positive at WBC but I could be wrong, I certainly know I came last in my game. It was fun though!

We'd gotten up pretty early to drive down (I think Pounder and I got up at 7am) and at the time I worked the graveyard shift so I was _really_ tired. So we went to the demo lounge and taught ourselves to play the Caylus spin-off they had set up. Yeah, we're smart guys alright...


Wednesday started off with a bang as the single elimination 2-player Titan event kicked off at 9am. With our 4 person hotel room we got 2 free breakfasts, and all three of Robb, Pounder, and myself were up in time to eat so we ended up having to buy an extra breakfast. This was the last day that would happen as people started sleeping in longer... Or staying up later? At any rate, off to the wargaming room which is where Titan was set up in the back. Most of a ginormous room was filled with wargames, many of which stayed set up overnight. One of the games had a 60 hour round! Two of the five games actually finished last year which I gather is a larger than normal number. (The game simulates WW2 on both the European and Pacific fronts.)

At any rate, TITAN! I honestly don't remember my 2 player game very well at all. I lost, and I remember being unsatisfied, but I don't know why. Oh well. With so many people having just lost 2 player Titan games they had a main Titan round kicking off an hour later. Titan-2 was single elimination but Titan-N is a Multiple Entry Swiss Elimination variant which basically means you can play as many rounds as you want but only your first 6 count for points or something. (I may be mixing up the rules from Titan nationals and WBC.) For scheduling they basically let you start a game whenever you have 4 people who want to play, with 'expected' starting times 3 times a day.

My game featured a young boy who was pretty new to the game but clearly having a blast and a couple of seasoned veterans. Eventually the kid got into a completely unwinnable position and was quite bored so he withdrew from the game rather than wait for elimination. Hopefully he doesn't get discouraged and keeps on gaming. I followed soon thereafter, though I went down kicking and screaming. I have a philosophical issue with withdrawing from a game of Titan when you're about to die. I think the person who hunted you should get the points for killing you!

At any rate, I hadn't really played Titan much in the previous year and was more interested in playing other games than more Titan. I added to the attendance figures for Titan (to try to ensure it stays an event) and had fun, but it was time to move on. 1pm was approaching, and I again had multiple choices. I could go play Empire Builder (a game I'd like to think I'm pretty good at), or I could play Power Grid (a game I'd like to think I can pronounce the German name for), or I could go to a demo for a 4 hour game I'd never heard of. There wasn't anything I really wanted to do for the next 5 hours, and I like to learn new games, so demo time!

Manifest Destiny is a Civ style game centered on North America dealing with the period of time from the colonization of the US until modern time. It has tech trees you research with money ala Advanced Civ, it has wonders you can try to build by rolling dice, it has city building on the map, attacking other players, cards you can play to make special events and payouts happen... Tons of cool, complicated things that all work together. The hour long demo restarted a couple times as stragglers showed up so really there was about 25 minutes of rules explanation and then we took off to the wargaming room to play. I didn't really know what was going on but I wanted to try and they didn't seem to mind that I didn't know what was going on, so away we went!

I ended up getting demolished (unsurprisingly) and lost by a very large margin. I picked up some strategies by watching the other players take their turns and decided it was at least an ok game. I basically butchered my position on the first turn when I didn't build enough settlers to do anything, so my income was about 60% of everyone else's for the entire game. I didn't really have a chance to win but I played to maximize my own score, which made for some sketchy plays later in the game in order to secure a wonder for bonus points. One of the other players seemed a little annoyed that I'd made that play but it was the only way I saw to score points from my position and it worked, woo!

The other players at my table were pretty fast, and I ended up playing quickly by virtue of having no money, so my game ended before the 4 hours were up giving me enough time to make it to a 6pm event if I wanted. Titan:The Arena was the only game I knew the rules to at 6pm but Robb convinced me I could learn how to play Queen's Gambit in the 10 minutes before the round started, so I signed up for that and borrowed a rule book to start reading. I gathered this was a pretty popular game amongst the Titan players in previous years and they said the Jedi battle was the only thing that mattered...

So, knowing kinda how the pieces moved and the ultimate goal of the game, it was time to play. Queen's Gambit is a game that simulates the final battle of Star Wars Episode One, and takes place on four fronts. You have Anakin flying through space trying to blow up the mother ship, you have the gungans getting killed en masse by droids, you have Amadala storming the palace, and you have Darth Maul fighting Obiwan and Quigon. The Naboo win if Anakin blows up the mother ship and you get a majority in the throne room at the top of the palace. Evil wins by killing all but 2 Naboo people in the palace.

With the strategy of 'play Jedi cards' I set out to play my first game. I was the Naboo, and my opponent told me a rule that it turns out doesn't exist that at the time really seemed like it screwed me. (You can jump up floors in the palace with the Naboo people on some cards, he said one droid on the middle floor could block jumping up to the top.) This prevented me from running guys to the top floor which was something I wanted to do. After all, I have cards that let me do it, so I should, right? Wrong! Having played the game a few times now I don't think you should go up to the top without a good reason to do so, and I really didn't when I tried to. Luckily, my opponent took actions with 'prevented' me from doing so, which were pretty much wastes of time. If I don't want to do something, and you take turns to stop me from doing it... I profit!

At any rate, by focusing on playing Jedi cards, and cards that dug me to more Jedi cards, I ended up winning the Jedi battle. From there I ended up winning the game, having learned to play not 10 minutes before the game. My opponent didn't seem too unhappy though. We did have fun, which is the main thing.

There wasn't anything we wanted to play for a couple hours which made it the perfect time to go get food. Next door to the convention center was an Amish diner that had pretty good food. The four of us went out and ate, with plans to come back for 9pm and another round of El Grande.

I wasn't really feeling up for El Grande, but there was another game being played in the same room at the same time, Ticket to Ride. Pounder convinced me over supper that it was easy to learn and promised to explain it to me before the round. He gave me a rough overview, and said the winning strategy was to ignore making your routes and just buy long stretches of track, but didn't explain specifics of the game.

I signed up, got assigned to a table, and during setup asked if I could read the rules. Ticket to Ride if a 'C' level event, so you don't need to know the game or attend a demo to play. (Supposedly they were supposed to teach me how to play during sign-ups but there were a TON of people and the GM was swamped.) So, I again asked to see the rules as the game was being set up. It turns out the game is really simple. You have two types of cards, routes and cars. A route lists two cities and at game end if you own track between those cities you get bonus points. If you don't you get negative bonus points. The further apart the cities are the more points you get or lose. The second type of card is train cars, which all have a colour.

You start the game with a few route cards and some cars. The board is set up with a bunch of cities (we played in the US) and track between cities. The tracks all have distinct colours and number of cars. (New York to Boston might have 2 pink cars, for example, and Los Angeles to Denver might have 6 black ones.) On your turn you either draw more route cards, or draw 2 cars, or build a section of track. To build track you play the number of cards that are on the segment from your hand, so I'd have to play 2 pink to build New York to Boston. Once I build it I put my cars on top of it and then no one else can build it.

Scoring is done with routes at end game, some bonus points for longest track and most routes done, and then points for building track. You get points via the triangle method, so a 1-length piece of track is worth 1 point, 2 is worth 3, 3 is worth 6 and so on. Note, it takes a full turn to build track if it's size 1 or size 6. Also, you only get 1 or 2 cards a turn. (When you draw cars there's a pool of face-up cards. You can draw a face-up, or from the deck. If you draw a wild-card face-up you only get the one card, otherwise you get two.) So at worst you could be turning 2 turns into 1 point (draw a wild and play it for a length 1 track) and at best you couls turn 4 turns into 21 points (draw 6 of a kind over 3 turns and build a size 6 track). It doesn't take a math degree to figure out that 5.25 points a turn is better than .5 points a turn... And yet many people were drawing wilds to build short pieces of track.

Now, depending on the routes you have this might seem like a good idea. I had one route that was worth 20 points, so the difference between building it or not is a 40 point swing. That's worth a couple mediocre building turns to pull off, to be sure. The trick, though, is that there's actually lots of ways to get from New York to Los Angeles. Someone might build the 2 pink from New York to Boston, but there's still a 2 orange from New York to Boston... Or I could go via Philadelphia or Portland instead of Boston...

In all it seemed like a pretty good game, you have to balance taking turns to score points with taking turns to secure your routes, and you have to know when you need to build the short routes that other people want. Ultimately though it seemed like the optimal strategy was to just draw 2 cards every turn building up a huge hand to give yourself the most options, only building when it looked like someone else wanted something. (Or when you could score 21 points with 6 of a kind.) It was actually pretty easy, having never played the game before, to work out what other people wanted. The other people in my game were picking up cards to build specific routes, sometimes from both ends, and building the tracks as soon as they could. So if someone build up to both ends of a given piece of track... They probably want the middle one and I should take it first if I wanted it. This is what I did, eventually connecting things up with smaller, less desired tracks to get my 20 point bonus at game end. I ended up with over 150 points with the next closest person being just under 100... Not bad for not knowing how to play before I sat down! (Ticket to Ride was the most attended game at WBC last year, it attracts a lot of people who aren't gamers.)

The 11pm silly game for Wednesday was... Can't Stop! WOO! This is a game you can play on Brettspielwelt and believe me, I have! Dave Nicholson and I used to play several times a day one month when he was trying to win a medal. All told I've played it 156 times on BSW, and I suspect I had the most experience in the game of anyone at WBC. That said, it is still a dice game and you do need to not get unlucky in order to win! I ended up finishing second overall, losing in the finals to someone who took a gamble and it paid off for him. I had closed out 2 numbers, and he had closed out 1. Chances are reasonable good if I get another turn I win, so when he completed a number he didn't stop. He had to go up a couple more on the other number with no leeway... And pulled it off. It was fun, but I did have one gripe... The GM said during the finals that the game is all luck and that he'd be surprised to ever see repeat winners in the event if he ran it for many years. That's hogwash I think! There's a fair amount of skill to the game and while it's certainly hard for someone to win a 100+ person event multiple times it won't be because there's no skill involved! If I have a single goal for this coming year it's to at least make the finals again to try to show him wrong! (Setting out to win Can't Stop of all games seems a little silly, but I'm going to do it!)

The finals didn't end until around 1-2ish, but Pounder and Robb were still around so we did the only thing you should do after playing games for 17 straight hours... We went to the open gaming area and taught ourselves to play Vikings! (A game which sadly didn't involve raping or pillaging. There were diplomat vikings, and canoerowing vikings... All in all, a pretty disappointing theme for such a great title. It was an ok game though.)


More to follow at a later date...

Handlebar Gaming

Speaking of New Year's resolutions I have one more that stems from the frustration of trying to eat a bowl of soul or a bag of chips with hair in one's mouth. Get your mind out of the gutter, I am refering to my moustache. It started back in April during the NHL playoffs when I didn't shave while the Wings were still around. By the time they got knocked out I decided to keep the 'stache around and get rid of the beard, with the plan of growing a handlebar. I had no clue how to do that at the time, of course, but it seemed like the thing to do.

It turns out it's not as easy as it sounds. Gravity makes it so hair just doesn't grow like that naturally, so you tend to need some sort of method to force it into place. Moustache wax is the typical way to do it, but it's not like there's a moustache wax store downtown. I've made a couple purchases online, one from a company in California and one from a fireman and his wife in Mississippi but neither really did the trick for me. The first one wouldn't even hold for 45 minutes before it started drooping into my mouth. The second one fared a bit better, keeping the moustache out of my mouth for 4-5 hours, but it failed to keep it in a nice handlebar shape for more than a couple hours. Great for a first impression (I think I almost killed Josh yesterday when he saw it) but gets rather unsightly after a bit.

So, the options become to continue the search for a better wax, or resign myself to rewaxxing every few hours, or give up and shave. Maybe not so much give up as end an experiment... How many people can say they've grown a handlebar moustache? My gnome warrior can! Ultimately I've decided that my hair is just too spindly, it doesn't look like a moustache so much as a bunch of random hairs when it isn't nicely waxxed, and I keep chewing on them accidentally and ripping them out by the root. So, I resolve to not have facial hair this year, woo?


To get things back on topic yesterday a bunch of my old University friends got together at Aidan's place for a New Year's Eve's Eve party, Comfy style. By which I mean there were chips, and drinks, and many board games. Sadly we didn't start until the evening and some of us (like myself) had to work at 8am this morning so there wasn't nearly enough games playing, but I'll recant a bit about what there was.

We started with a variant of Cranium, with everyone who was willing to play involved. We started out with Snuggles and Justyna against Adam, Tom, and Dee against Jer, Lindsay, and myself. My brain doesn't quite work the same as most people's (handlebar?) so I'm not terribly good at this game. We had 3 more people show up and join the game in progress, with Sara joining the first team, a second Dee joining the second team, and Andrew joining my team. Unfortunately for us Andrew is the only person in the world worse than I am at Cranium so we ended up not moving after he joined us. Ultimately the team of two Dee's ended up winning despite Mr. Hurd's best efforts to sabotage them from the inside. It was fun times, though certainly not what I would call a good game.

As this was going on I think a game of Ra had broken out in the basement. Rather than go check that out I stayed upstairs to play Can't Stop. (A game in which I came 2nd at the World Boardgaming Championships which I will be writing more about soon.) Anyway, aparently Andrew is convinced the game title isn't merely a suggestion but a requirement as he decided to keep rolling after he'd finished a row off. It might have been the 'right' choice since he didn't get another turn after that, but he still fell off which is sweet justice as far as I'm concerned. This game isn;t as fun in person as it is online, I think mainly because you don't get an awesome scream when you fall off the mountain. (I try to fill in, but my scream isn't good enough.)

With Can't Stop over and done a game of Apples to Apples broke out. This is another game that is fun enough, but is not a good game. Party games are good and all, but I prefer real games, so I stepped aside and went downstairs to kibitz the second Ra game. I didn't catch the whole game but Adam managed to bamboozle the table somehow, ending up with a dozen rivers along with a ton of other tiles and ended up with a huge lead. Jer and Josh combined barely caught third place which was Tmiv. Tom P was a solid second, but no one was anywhere near Adam.

People were starting to want to leave, but Apples to Apples wasn't done, so we busted out San Juan for a quick four-man. I could say I had a grand strategy for the game but I really didn't. I ended up drawing a Zumfthall and going the tried and true method of Poor House, Smithy, money building, 8 production buildings. Everyone else was doing fancy things with chapels and councilor huts and whatnot but they just couldn't generate enough points to compete with 5 point silver smelters for 3 cards. It's really not fair. Tmiv drew the second Guild Hall, and had a Palace, but had built a bunch of normal buildings to start the game off, which sadly for him wasn't good enough. It's one of the two real problems I have with San Juan, the Guild Hall is too powerful when you draw it early enough to craft a strategy around it. (The other is that the stupid Gold Mine is so swingy, but that's another story...)


At any rate, it was then midnight so we all took off in various directions for sleep. I ended up only getting like 4 hours of sleep which made for a bit of a painful day at work, but playing games with good people is worth some exhaustion any day.

Heck, playing games with bad people is sometimes worth exhaustion, as I am about to proove to myself by starting a game of DotA.

Coming up soon... An attempt to recruit people for WBC!

(Oh, as an aside, I couldn't find my post on Gleemax so who knows what the deal with that is. I may dig into that site in more detail later, but for now I'm just going to use this place.)