2014 WBC: Day 8

There are people who can spend an entire week playing tournament games with strangers and then still wake up at 9 in the morning to play Diplomacy. I am not one of those people. By the end of the week I tend to be pretty out of it. All I want to do is sleep, and avoid people. Eventually I will wake up and get bored of surfing the internet and head out to play games but I'm way less eager to do it than I am earlier in the week. This time I was also prompted to leave the room by the fact the room was either frigid or smelled funky. (Not because of the people in the room but likely because of mold in the hotel room. Moving to a ski resort is almost certainly going to be a good thing for me!)

The first game I ended up playing was Concordia at 5pm. This was Duncan's team game so I wasn't going to be allowed to play against him regardless of what happened so I volunteered to be the 'owner' of a library copy of the game which forced me to sit at a different table. I ended up at a table with Matt, Steve K, and a 4th guy I didn't recognize. I've only played this game twice. Steve said he's also played twice, and the other people had never played before. One if my plays was in opening gaming earlier in the week with Robb and Sceadeau and Pounder where I had to correct at least one rule that Sceadeau's group was playing wrong. I found out in the heat that we'd played that open gaming game with a different rule wrong! (We all started with 8 coins where the last player is supposed to start with 8 and each subsequent player starts with one fewer coin.) I'd found in the open gaming game that buying one of the Minerva cards for a resource you aren't going to aggressively go after was a bad plan so I decided to avoid doing so in this game. Unfortunately no one told this to the guy on my right who aggressively bought the Minerva cards for resources I was going after and he wasn't. He kept playing them too, for a production of one resource. This feels really bad to me since you should be able to use a normal production action to get more than one resource if you have any cities on the board. I think he just got trapped into thinking he should use all his cards if he could without thinking about if he should use them.

I made some pretty good card buys early on I think though I did feel like I messed up by never building a 3rd colonist. It slowed me down a lot, but I did get to buy some points by not saving those resources? Maybe that was ok. I haven't played enough to know! Ultimately I feel like I got a little screwed by tying my wagon to Matt's and he diverged on me. We start off by building in the same two zones as each other while the other two players went and built two cities in a single zone each. This was fine as long as a given cycle of production included both of our zones but Matt ended up splitting off and never producing for me again after the first turn. This may have been a good move on his part since I did produce for him a couple times after that? On the other hand I think we finished 2nd and 4th so it probably hurt us too much to ignore producing for each other. Steve ended up in a fantastic way as he got the cloth Minerva card and built in all the cloth cities pretty quickly. I feel like that card alone was the difference since it was worth 20 points and it let him take several really good production actions in the mid game which he used to transition into card buys and more cities. The game ended with score around 130-110-103-102. I was the 110, but too far behind Steve. This event was single elimination (a very odd format for a multiplayer Euro) so I was now out.

We went out to eat at Red Robin after this round. We were a group of 7ish, but we were in a bit of a hurry and some of us left without waiting around to see how many we were for sure. Sara, Andrew, Pounder and I walked over and the restaurant was packed. We asked if they had a table for 7 and they looked at the 4 of us and looked a little confused and indicated that they didn't so we just took a table for 4 and left the other people to fend for themselves when they arrived. It was the first time Andrew had been to Red Robin and he decided to make a bit of a mockery of the place by ordering a cheeseburger and having the waitress list all the possible cheese options. Then he got them all. Red Robin burgers are pretty greasy to start with (AND SO GOOD) so bumping the cheese up to 5 times as much as normal made a real mess of things. He had to eat it with a knife and fork since the bun sure wasn't built to absorb that much grease.

9pm was Facts in Five, a trivia game of sorts with a GM who goes all in on making it entertaining. I'm never going to win this event, but it's an hour and a half of good times. I'd complained last year about how too many of the categories were US centric so this time around they dedicated an entire round to countries of the world. Canada was a correct answer three times! Hurray! And thankfully more than half of our little Canadian contingent knew Canada had a female head of government at one point... Shame on those who didn't! SHAME!

11pm was Slapshot, but I headed off to play TOBOGGANS OF DOOM instead of Slapshot. There aren't many games that are objectively worse than TOBOGGANS OF DOOM but Slapshot is definitely one of them. We decided to play teams this time since we had 5 people. Robb and Pounder ended up scoring the most points but since Sara, Duncan, and I successfully jumped the SHARK ATTACK I think we were the real winners.

Robb and Pounder then had a El Grande good players only game scheduled so I went back to Andrew's hotel with him and Sara and Duncan to play games over there. We played Fast Flowing Forest Fellers but the other three pretty much fell asleep on the board as we were playing. I smoked them, probably due to actually being awake and alert. So no more games after that as they went to bed. I wasn't tired so I went and got my book (The Heist by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg) and read in the lobby for an hour or two. This let me say goodbye to a few people who wandered through the lobby but also meant I got to read in peace (and not-frigidness) for a bit too.

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.

2012 WBC Day 8 Summary

When I was building my schedule for the week I'd penciled myself in to play Diplomacy at 9am Saturday morning. Come Friday night I had no intention whatsoever of waking up early to play Diplomacy. There were some short games I could play if I woke up somewhat early but my primary goal was to get up by 3pm for Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation. I ended up getting up a little before 1 and decided I didn't really want to play more heats of Titan the Arena or Ra Dice so I just screwed around on the internet and watched Olympics.

3pm brought Lord of the Rings which unfortunately was held in the sweatshop that was the wargame room. Apparently the air conditioning was broken in a lightning/hail storm and they couldn't get it fixed for us. I honestly considered not playing at all and just going back to the room but the air conditioning in our room wasn't very good either. There also weren't any other games I wanted to play all day. Maybe I should have tried to run some open gaming? Probably I should have gone back to the room to change shirts at least since my Saturday shirt didn't breathe at all and got completely coated in sweat from playing in the room. Ew.

Anyway, Lord of the Rings. The format for the event was two games against the same person in a round. Win both games and win the round. Split the games and the winner is whoever had more units alive at the end of the round. (The game is an asymmetrical Stratego+rock/paper/scissors style game.) My first round I was matched up against a kid who had just learned the game. I beat him both games. As soon as my game was over I took off out of the room in search of air conditioning. I ran into Sceadeau who was standing under the AC just outside the door. He was also hiding from the heat while waiting for round 2 to start. Pounder went and got the GM to agree to send a runner out for us before starting the next round so we could avoid the heat/humidity/funk. Yay Pounder!

Round 2 I played against a guy who had camped out a table right in front of a gigantic fan. I believe he said something about liking the air on his boys. I for one didn't care what his boys were doing under the table, I had a ring to throw into Mount Doom. I don't remember details about the match except my opponent didn't have a firm grasp on the tiebreaker so when we both won as the good guys he thought it was a draw but I'd killed more of his guys in his win so I actually won the match.

Round 3 was against Sceadeau. Unfortunately for him the tournament uses a creative interpretation of a key rule which drastically changes the power level of the two magic cards. Under any sane reading of the rules and according to everyone I've ever talked to outside of WBC the dark side magic wins. (Both magics let you play a card out of the discard pile. Dark side has a counterspell for event cards so you should be able to magic up the counterspell to negate the light side magic. The WBC ruling is light side gets to choose which card to magic and if they pick a number your counterspell fizzles.) I complained about this in last year's summary when it came up a couple times. Sceadeau apparently should have read that recap since he didn't know about the way the GM was going to rule. We both played for the unbeatable magic card. Mine was actually unbeatable which let me get a trade in a fight I didn't deserve to win. We ended up splitting the games with each winning as dark side but I killed more dudes so I won the tiebreaker.

Round 4 was against someone I didn't recognize. I remember nothing about the match except we split the games with the same number of guys alive for a full draw. Oddly enough Pounder was also 3-0 in this round against Alex Henning and they also got a full draw. Nick Henning got a draw in round 1 and both him and his opponent at the time won out so we ended up with 6 people at 3-0-1. Alex dropped to play in another semifinal which meant they didn't have to flip a coin between some of the 3-1s who were tied on opponent's record. Which mean Sceadeau made it to the top 8 at 3-1. He got to face Pounder in the quarters while I got to play my round 2 opponent again.

In the quarters I started with a dark side win with 4 guys alive. I figured I could probably pull off a loss with only 3 guys alive so I wasn't even trying to win. I was going for the long loss with tons of trading. The real trick to pulling this off is to keep Sauruman from going on a rampage. If you always have cards getting played you can recycle your deck and then threaten a noble sacrifice of Frodo. It didn't get that far as I knocked him down to 3 dudes without losing Frodo. I think he scooped? I don't remember.

The semis matched me up against Nick Henning. He's the only winner the event has ever had and I remember people talking last year as though he was unbeatable. In a game that has mind-games in it like this one I can see people who think that way actually having no chance of winning. I wanted to play him last year because I thought I could take him down. I didn't get that far (losing on a coin flip in the quarters) but I still thought I could beat him. This year there were the same grumblings from kids in the crowd about how he was unbeatable. I would have preferred to face him in the finals but I can beat him anywhere! Other Nick actually had another semifinal starting around the same time and asked if we could go play in that room instead. We probably had time for our match regardless but he'd need to play two at the same time if he made the finals. He asked the other semifinal about it and they said ok. I made myself be a little miffed that he was assuming he'd beat me. Gotta get mental bulletin board material somewhere, right? At any rate the other room had air conditioning so I might well have paid good money to be allowed to play in that room instead of the wargame room.

I'd noticed Nick watching some of my games (I played a fun game with Sceadeau using the real rules after our match) and commented that he'd been scouting out my plays. Of course in that game both Sceadeau and I did some weird things and the first fight was actually warg V Frodo. I played the semi in a straightforward manner as both sides instead of trying something crazy. I don't remember specifics but it seemed like I guessed right at every turn and won all the 'coinflips' in the game. Eyeing the sacrifice, picking the cave troll as the first enemy Gandalf fought, and so on. I won with both sides so the tiebreaker never came into effect. Woo! I do recall winning the light side game thanks to the bad magic ruling and we both grumbled about it when it happened.

Meanwhile Pounder had beaten Sceaudeau in the quarters but lost in the semis to my 4th round opponent. It was time for a rematch of my draw! For any elimination round but the finals the tournament rule is a draw results in a coinflip to see who advances. In the final the rule is you play another full match and repeat until someone actually wins. Neither my opponent nor I wanted to play a marathon series of games in the sauna. The GM said if we came up with another way of working it out we could go with that. My opponent wanted to play just one game after a draw. He wanted that one game to happen on any split regardless of the stated tiebreaker with the 'winner' of the old tiebreaker getting to pick sides. The GM was opposed to changing the tiebreaker and I felt like I had a better grasp of the tiebreaker so I wanted to keep it. I suggested we play as stated but if we happened to come to a full draw we'd flip a coin to choose sides for one final game. This seemed like it would limit how long we'd be playing, and it would sate my opponent's desire for one game, and it would remove some of the sting from losing a coin flip. I think dark side is the best but I had won a couple games with light side in the day, after all. The GM and my opponent agreed with that plan.

The finals started off with me on the dark side. I ended up winning the game with 4 units alive. I think this game featured a 'Shire burn' victory where I'd lost control of Frodo but worked my positioning to force him away from the tunnel through Moria which bought me the tempo to get 3 guys into the Shire before he could get Frodo into Mordor. I think he could have sacrificed Frodo to trade with one of my guys at one point for better tiebreakers but didn't go for it because I don't think he realized I was in position for a Shire burn.

My light side plan again was to try to burn enough of his guys out that I'd win on tiebreakers. I got him down to 5 guys alive and had a tricky situation. We were down to 3 cards. I had 3-4-magic. He had 3-retreat sideways-magic. Balrog was hanging out in Moria and thanks to the bad magic ruling I knew I was guaranteed to take him out by attacking in and playing magic. (He couldn't retreat sideways since he was in the mountains.) This would guarantee at least an extra game but would cost me board position and make it harder to knock him down to 3. If I attack and play my 4 instead I'm guaranteed at least a trade unless he plays his magic card in which case he can attack out of the mountains, bringing his retreat card back into play, and maybe get a 5 character win. I decided to play safe and used magic. If he also plays his magic I win the game straight up. He played his 3. I grabbed noble sacrifice. Now I was down to Frodo+Merry against Witch King+Warg+Orcs+Saruman. He's guaranteed to win any fight we get into with his magic card.  I try to sneak Frodo forward but he gets boxed in. I know I have no hope. Rather than give in I move Merry forward into a position I'm 99% certain can only be attacked by the Orcs. My opponent doesn't kill Merry with the Orcs. Instead he moves forward to threaten Frodo. I attack out with Merry and hit the Orcs. If he wastes Magic here then Frodo will be able to kill whoever has him boxed in so he retreats sideways. My opponent can still win the game by attacking Frodo and playing his magic card. He thinks for a while and then moves someone else forward. Merry shrugs and attacks the space likely containing the Witch King. Witch King is there and dies. My opponent then kills Frodo. But because he let me kill the Witch King I win the tiebreaker and the match. Woo! (I wonder if the heat was getting to him, or if my failure to concede rattled him?)

Afterwards they have the winner of the adult tournament play the winner of the junior event. Thankfully we played this game in an air conditioned room. I wasn't sure how to approach this. Am I supposed to play badly to give the kid a chance? Am I supposed to slaughter him mercilessly? Throwing a game goes against every fiber of my being so I decided to play a straightforward but strategically sound game. I ended up guessing right each time we had to play cards (similar to my match against other Nick, actually) and blew the poor kid out. His father was pretty happy I stuck around to play the kid and chatted a bit with Bruno about Titan while we played. (It turns out the Titan finals also ran away from the sauna to the same room.)

It was 10pm by this time which was barely enough time to run to Facts in Five which was under yet another GM (the old GM is apparently under house arrest for financial fraud). The new guys ran things a little slowly at the start which meant the event threatened to run into Slapshot which is a hugely popular 11pm event. They ended up skipping the marking phase of the event and stayed up all night marking the entries themselves which seemed really nice of them. I did terribly once again and even managed to forget the Titan unit which starts with D! On the plus side I remembered Guildenstern was a G character from a Shakespeare tragedy.

I'd seen Pounder and Robb check in on Fi5 right before 11pm but couldn't find them in the immediate vicinity. I figured I'd check Slapshot for them. I walked into the room to take a look around and got signed in to the event. Eh, I guess it's time to learn Slapshot! Robb and Pounder wandered in shortly thereafter. I don't think they wanted to play but my table had 2 empty seats and we goaded them into playing. Slapshot is essentially glorified war with a hockey theme pasted onto it. You have a deck with 3 forwards, 2 defensemen, and a goalie. On your turn you can draft a new player by discarding a card and getting the top card of the appropriate deck. You can trade with another competitor by stealing a card from their hand and returning a player of the appropriate type. (Gretzky for Domi? Sounds fair!) Or you can challenge another competitor to a game. Play war against them with the winner scoring a point on the chart. As soon as anyone wins such 9 games you cut to a top 4 for the playoffs. I built a decent deck pretty early on and won a few games. Then it became clear that Robb had the superstar forward (scores on anyone) so I tried a trade with him. I got his superstar! I then went on to win 8 games while people continued to trade with me for the superstar and failing. I went for my 9th win to start the playoffs and Robb's enforcer injured the superstar! Boo! I had to play Pounder in the playoffs without my superstar. His deck was a little better than mine but I had a better goalie. We played a best of 7 war sequence and he got fortunate pairings against my goalie and won 4 of the game. He went on to win the finals of our table as well. He promptly dropped so we could go to Waffle House.

Waffle House was an all-star breakfast with the sausage I didn't get a few days earlier. Then Pounder went to bed to get ready for the long drive home. Robb and I are jerks so we went to play games. We'd told Daniel we'd play when we got back from Waffle House, after all. Daniel was playing werewolf so Robb and I went to the demo station and tried out Roll to the South Pole. It seemed like an ok 'press your luck' style game but wasn't all that fun. It might be a good game for kids who are bored with Can't Stop I guess?

I went to bed. Robb went to find werewolf games because he's a jerk.

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.

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.