2012 WBC Day 6 Summary

I had things I would have liked to do Thursday morning but decided to just get up when I woke up and not worry about an alarm or anything. The room is very cold at night so the difference for me is if I put on my super warm blanket or not. With blanket I can sleep forever. Without blanket I will wake up shivering every hour or so. Blanket on, sleep for me. I ended up waking up around noonish so I missed Vegas Showdown, Tigris & Euphrates, and food. In fact I didn't actually have anything to do until 3 so I screwed around a while on the internet.

3pm brought the second Le Havre heat. I already had a win so I didn't need to play in order to advance but I figured I would for practice and maybe to knock some people out? I ended up in a 3 player game with the GM Ken and with Daniel E. The three of us were the top 3 from last year so it was going to be a tight game. I ended up continuing my dominance of 3 player games with an 11 point win over Daniel with a big gap down to Ken in third. (Something like 292-281-205?)

6pm was the Le Havre semifinals. Our heat ran a little long so I ran back to the room to grab poptarts and granola bars. I ended up in a 4 player semifinal with Daniel, Chris Senhouse, and another dude who didn't really have a good grasp of strategy. He was a nice guy (and would sing lyrics from songs at a drop of a hat) and seemed to make reasonable decisions every now and then but clearly had no long term strategy. The following (approximate) conversion took place during the game:

Daniel - (after thinking for a few minues) If only I knew what you were going to do on your turn this would be easy.
Dude - I don't know what I'm going to do.
Daniel - I know!
Me - *nods knowingly*

Turn order was dude, Chris, Daniel, me. This is terrible for me since the dude would often make moves to set up Chris or Daniel and it was unlikely to make it through both of them and make it to me. Sitting to Daniel's left is also bad since we tend to do similar things and this means he'll probably get to do them all first. I ended up trying to differentiate myself by building a bunch of house buildings early and then hitting the marketplace for many goods. Dude ended up buying both wharves and skipped getting the colliery which let Chris scoop it up along with being the first to build boats. I honestly thought I was dead after the first few turns with how hooked up Chris was getting from the dude. I made one mistake early when I didn't notice Daniel was sitting on 5 fish and let the special building for smoked fish hit play. He quickly turned the fish into smoked fish and then sold them for 15 and bought a wooden boat which was a great start for him. I did have the smokehouse so I made a couple bucks off it when he did it a second time too. I did it once myself very late in the game as a reasonable late action. I did make use of the special building which turned wood+meat into 5 dollars and bought an iron boat with it.

Things took a turn for the better when Chris started making money in the mid-late game and started buying wooden boats instead of real things. When it came time to ship he only had 3 wooden boats which meant he could only ship 6 things compared to my shipping for 12 things. I think I may have even shipped one more time than he did. Daniel and I were both set up to build luxury liners but the dude took this opportunity to sit in the one modernized wharf while he picked up completely irrelevant offers. I ended up shipping my steel which is a fine result. Daniel took his final action in the wharf for the bad luxury liner.

Final scores were something like 170-168-161-142. I'd managed to win a 4er against Daniel. Chris was second. Once again the format involved the closest second advancing and once again they came from my table. The only difference is it wasn't Daniel this year.

I screwed around for an hour and then headed to play Ingenious at 10pm. It turns out they'd scheduled this heat in the wargamer room and I actually regret going to play. I don't know if it's a lack of air conditioning, a lack of hygiene amongst the wargamers, or a combination of the two but that room is a smelly, humid mess. I ended up in a 3 player game and came a pretty close third. Midgame I had 9 blue points and 3 lower colours so I worked on those while blue got completely closed out. With a little more experience I likely would have grabbed 5 more blue points when I could and moved on to working on the more open other colours afterwards. As it was I could only eek out one more blue point and it was my worst number by far at the end.

I almost played Pro Golf at 11pm. Vegas Showdown semis were at the same time and I was the second alternate with my close 2nd place finish. I needed either 21 of the 24 winners to show up, or 19 of them with no first alternate, or 18 and I was in. I let them convince me to skip Pro Golf and wait around. Turns out 20 winners and the first alternate all showed up so I didn't get to play either Pro Golf or Vegas Showdown.

Instead I went to Waffle House where I finally got the service I'd expect at Waffle House. I ordered sausage and got no meat. I ordered hash browns with just ham and also got cheese. The eggs were on the burnt side of cooked. It was pretty terrible. Perhaps worse is I checked out the jukebox and it didn't have Friday or Never Gonna Give You Up. How am I suppose to annoy Robb now?

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.