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.
Showing posts with label Innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Innovation. Show all posts
Monday, August 11, 2014
Thursday, August 07, 2014
2014 WBC: Day 3
Monday morning could have had the San Juan tournament or the 3rd heat of Through The Ages. I like San Juan more than most people do, and I'm pretty good at it, but I wasn't confident in my advancing to the TTA semifinals with just a win and a good but not great second place. So I got an extra hour of sleep and went to TTA instead of San Juan. My table this time had me up against the replacement on my old team (Rich Atwater) and Chris Senhouse who's name I recognize from Magic coverage and who I've played in Le Havre before. Both people who are good at games so this should be my 3rd straight good game of TTA. Hurray!
The game itself was a little anticlimactic. I got aboard the C-bus (Christopher Columbus) and found a good territory. Chris made a mistake on an early turn likely due to playing online. He ended his turn without a juggler so his empire was in revolt. We offered to let him undo his turn to fix it (by perhaps not turning his last guy into a warrior?) but he decided he was going to corrupt if he didn't spend those rocks so he wasn't really missing much by skipping a turn of production and wanted to get the strength to not get attacked again. (Rich had hit him early already and got his only defense card.) I think losing his 4 science production was probably game losing, but it is what it is. Anyway, I saw that I was going to be able to grab James Cook early in Age II so I seeded a territory and snagged navigation. Then it turns out that at least one of the other two players had been seeding territories all game and I ended up with 6 territories total and 12 points per turn off Captain Cook. Couple this with a dominating military lead and the game was all but over by the midway point. I spent some time beating up on Rich (we had a scientific cooperation pact so I went over and raided his scientific method; then I annexed his territory; then I hit him with a war over culture). Rich managed to topdeck the one copy of Fundamentalism during the war after calling it so he was able to revolution into it via Robespierre and only lose the war by 13 instead of 18. It still dropped him down to single digits of points while I was making 12 per turn from Cook alone, so not good. I ended up winning by a large margin, something like 229-142-109.
This game was also super fast (probably the other players had checked out because of my board position and stopped parsing moves as much as normal but it may just be that we're all fast players) in that I think it ended in a little over 2 hours. I normally estimate an hour and a half per player for people who aren't super experienced at the game so getting a 3er done in around 2 hours is very fast. This gave me time to go play the mulligan round of Innovation where I played badly and lost to a fast achievement plan. I could have stopped it with a card I had in hand and probably won from superior board position but I had so many cards in my hand that I didn't bother to read them all fully. Oh well! I did find it interesting that my opponent had really sweaty/clammy hands after the game. Maybe I'm an intimidating presence? I certainly try to project an air that I know what I'm doing in a game even if I don't...
Off to Red Robin for more food. I'd decided after the last time that I didn't get enough food so I was thinking about ordering a second burger. But it turns out when you take almost everything off of a burger anyway (including the bun) and when the side is bottomless anyway you're really better off paying $2 for an extra patty in the burger than spending $9 for an extra burger. The math just doesn't work out for the second burger!
Then it was time for the TTA semifinals. They ended up with 2 people who won all 3 heats and 13 other people who won 2 heats. This means a first and a close second was good enough for one person, but only one person, and really you needed 2 wins to advance. Good thing I skipped San Juan! My table ended up featuring Nick Henning again along with a couple guys I recognized as being good at games but not necessarily as being sharks at TTA. (None of them had laurels in TTA before this year for example. Neither did I!) We were definitely considered the 'soft' semifinal by the sharks.
My game got off to a pretty good start as I was able to be starting player and start with Aristotle and pyramids as my leader and wonder. I got a lot of good things like alchemy and iron and a bunch of yellow cards. I missed out on an Age I leader as the other players got Leonardo, Michaelangelo, andDonatello the C-Bus. We got a lot of free food and no one could really handle it and I almost feel like someone should have run Barbarossa and steamrolled everyone militarily. We went a few turns around the table with everyone refusing to seed an event because we were all scared of rats. Then Age I ended, we were all sitting with 2 jugglers, and we continued to refuse to seed as we were all scared of rebellion. I ended up dealing with my happy faces by 'spite drafting' St Peter's Basilica from Mikey and building a theology, but doing so is what let Nick snag the C-Bus out from under me. I ended up drawing all the Age II territories very early on which made me sad. I hoped it was also making Nick sad, but when I said all I meant fertile, inhabited, wealthy, and strategic. I missed developed, which he got very early, and it was off to the races for him. He was the only one able to keep making guys because he had yellow dots and we didn't.
As the game progressed people kept talking about how I was in a great way but I didn't really see it. I was in a good way for sure, and the player on my right made a real mess of his game so I looked fantastic in comparison, but Nick was quietly putting together some very good things too. I set him up by offering him the military protection pact (I got a point, he got 5 strength) but somewhere along the way the board got bumped and he got reset to X points per turn, not X-1. I suspect he was actually running at X even before the board got bumped since I think one of the other players probably moved the token at some point by counting his board and adjusting without saying anything? But maybe not. We decided to just dock him a point from his last turn and move on which seemed pretty fair. He was able to use that strength to get off an attack (which was defended by 3 defense cards) and to stay the strongest through a bunch of events. I got the points which was nice too. Later on in the game I saw an opportunity to make him lose the 5 strength and knock him down to last in strength by offering a different pact to another player. I chose the guy on my right who was in last and the weakest and offered him a peace treaty. We each get a point per turn and can't attack each other. The table was convinced I was winning so he didn't want to give me a point. After he rejected it and used that as his rationale I pointed out that I wasn't actually gaining a point because I was already getting one from Nick. All I was doing was giving him a chance to earn the point too and stop being the weakest by subtracting 5 from Nick's strength. (Nick had actually disbanded part of his military to drop from way ahead to barely ahead in order to build a journalism and start making a lot of points and science. A good play, but one that probably should have been punished by losing the pact.) I still had nothing good to do on a future turn so I once again offered the peace treaty to the guy in last. He again rejected it because I was winning and he didn't want me to earn points. *sigh* I ended up later playing Gandhi and sending the pact at 3rd place. He took it for his point, so I never actually went a turn without scoring a pact point. Some times you want to hurt yourself to hurt the leader... But in this case I feel like this guy was really hurting himself to not hurt me at all. Oh well.
As the game wound down I built my military up by changing tactics cards and switching gears with 10 free rocks from yellow cards and 2 free guys from an inhabited territory II, but in retrospect I paid too much. Guy in last had really bid me up and I should have let him have it. I ended up having to sac too much and needed to spend some real rocks along with the free ones and those real rocks could have been used to good effect elsewhere. Especially since the response to my building some strength was for Nick and 3rd place to make a military pact for 4 strength each. Nick then declared a war over culture on last place using the 4 strength from 3rd and the 5 strength from me. Last place thought a bit and decided not to withdraw and give Nick a bunch of culture. He also 'let' 3rd place beat him up with an attack of some kind (raid I think) and seeded an event (no idea which impact) and I was worried that because I wasn't playing the 'whack the loot pinata' game I was going to fall from my supposedly dominating position all the way to 3rd since I wasn't really set up for end game scoring and other people really were.
The end result had Nick surge past me by quite a lot and 3rd place put on quite a run but ultimately he fell just a little shy. The war over culture was only actually worth 13 points and Nick beat me by 20 so it wasn't actually the deciding factor but it sure felt like a big swing at the time. I tried not to let it get to me mostly by checking out of the game mentally and just waiting for it to end. It didn't help that my intestines were acting up a little bit and I'd really rather have been in the bathroom instead of at the slowest semifinal table. Oh well.
On the plus side the difference between Nick and I ended up falling into the sweet spot where I was the second closest second place. This means I came 6th overall in the tournament. Top 6 get laurels in every event, so that's something, but the key is that Through The Ages is a level 6 event. Which means that all of the top 6 get a plaque! Every plaque place is a different colour and the 6th place one is pink. It's the rarest of all the plaques since not many events get 6 prizes. (By my count only 12 of the ~140 or so events get that many.) I've always wanted a pink plaque and am probably happier to have finished 6th in the tournament than I would to finish 2nd. At least this one time, anyway... Next year will be different!
I went to the room to cool down after the semis and eventually decided I'd go play Vegas Showdown at 11pm. I decided as long as I didn't really care about winning I could go have fun being silly in Vegas Showdown. I got into a table with John Corrado, Steve LeWinter, and another Steve I recognized from Innovation. John and Steve used to play Blood Bowl with me in Sceadeau's Cyanide league back in the day and are both very good at games. Steve has won Vegas Showdown before (in 2011, when I came 2nd...) and he won this game too. The game was a lot of fun. I went hardcore green since both restaurant cards came up very early and we got lots of big tiles early but we never saw the theatre. John actually ended the game by filling up his board with lots of base tiles like extra restaurants and lounges and the like. It certainly accelerated to game end, but since he ended up in last it probably wasn't beneficial to his cause to do so. Detrimental to mine since the theatre never flipped (I was sitting on 54 dollars so I was going to be able to buy it the turn it came out) but what are you going to do? Still a fun game and I regret nothing!
After the game I bumped into Greg (4th from my TTA semi) and apologized if I'd made him uncomfortable in any way about his decisions in the game but he said it hadn't been a problem. He'd also discussed the situation with John after the game and came to the conclusion that since he was guaranteed last if he let the war resolve he probably should have resigned instead of letting the person who was eliminating him reap the rewards. I'm actually fine if someone believes either way on this issue and that there is no 'right' answer but certainly my personal beliefs are to spite the one who kills you if possible. (Which may actually be a change from years past... I know I've stayed in Titan games at WBC before to let the person who hunted me down get the kill... Maybe there's a difference because the stated purpose of Titan is to kill people while military in TTA is more of a balancing mechanism? I'll need to think more about that...)
Back to Waffle House, this time with a small army in tow. The poor waitress was a little overwhelmed when 13 or so of us showed up randomly at 1am on a Monday night. My order came last and included the toast I'd explicitly asked to not get for allergy reasons so that got sent back and they had to try again. They didn't want to just throw out the food so they gave it to Ian. Score? But having the slowest eater get food significantly later than anyone else did impact how long we ended up staying at Waffle House. Which may have been bad for people who happened to have a TTA final at 10am the next day but it was fine for me since I got to sleep in on Tuesday!
The game itself was a little anticlimactic. I got aboard the C-bus (Christopher Columbus) and found a good territory. Chris made a mistake on an early turn likely due to playing online. He ended his turn without a juggler so his empire was in revolt. We offered to let him undo his turn to fix it (by perhaps not turning his last guy into a warrior?) but he decided he was going to corrupt if he didn't spend those rocks so he wasn't really missing much by skipping a turn of production and wanted to get the strength to not get attacked again. (Rich had hit him early already and got his only defense card.) I think losing his 4 science production was probably game losing, but it is what it is. Anyway, I saw that I was going to be able to grab James Cook early in Age II so I seeded a territory and snagged navigation. Then it turns out that at least one of the other two players had been seeding territories all game and I ended up with 6 territories total and 12 points per turn off Captain Cook. Couple this with a dominating military lead and the game was all but over by the midway point. I spent some time beating up on Rich (we had a scientific cooperation pact so I went over and raided his scientific method; then I annexed his territory; then I hit him with a war over culture). Rich managed to topdeck the one copy of Fundamentalism during the war after calling it so he was able to revolution into it via Robespierre and only lose the war by 13 instead of 18. It still dropped him down to single digits of points while I was making 12 per turn from Cook alone, so not good. I ended up winning by a large margin, something like 229-142-109.
This game was also super fast (probably the other players had checked out because of my board position and stopped parsing moves as much as normal but it may just be that we're all fast players) in that I think it ended in a little over 2 hours. I normally estimate an hour and a half per player for people who aren't super experienced at the game so getting a 3er done in around 2 hours is very fast. This gave me time to go play the mulligan round of Innovation where I played badly and lost to a fast achievement plan. I could have stopped it with a card I had in hand and probably won from superior board position but I had so many cards in my hand that I didn't bother to read them all fully. Oh well! I did find it interesting that my opponent had really sweaty/clammy hands after the game. Maybe I'm an intimidating presence? I certainly try to project an air that I know what I'm doing in a game even if I don't...
Off to Red Robin for more food. I'd decided after the last time that I didn't get enough food so I was thinking about ordering a second burger. But it turns out when you take almost everything off of a burger anyway (including the bun) and when the side is bottomless anyway you're really better off paying $2 for an extra patty in the burger than spending $9 for an extra burger. The math just doesn't work out for the second burger!
Then it was time for the TTA semifinals. They ended up with 2 people who won all 3 heats and 13 other people who won 2 heats. This means a first and a close second was good enough for one person, but only one person, and really you needed 2 wins to advance. Good thing I skipped San Juan! My table ended up featuring Nick Henning again along with a couple guys I recognized as being good at games but not necessarily as being sharks at TTA. (None of them had laurels in TTA before this year for example. Neither did I!) We were definitely considered the 'soft' semifinal by the sharks.
My game got off to a pretty good start as I was able to be starting player and start with Aristotle and pyramids as my leader and wonder. I got a lot of good things like alchemy and iron and a bunch of yellow cards. I missed out on an Age I leader as the other players got Leonardo, Michaelangelo, and
As the game progressed people kept talking about how I was in a great way but I didn't really see it. I was in a good way for sure, and the player on my right made a real mess of his game so I looked fantastic in comparison, but Nick was quietly putting together some very good things too. I set him up by offering him the military protection pact (I got a point, he got 5 strength) but somewhere along the way the board got bumped and he got reset to X points per turn, not X-1. I suspect he was actually running at X even before the board got bumped since I think one of the other players probably moved the token at some point by counting his board and adjusting without saying anything? But maybe not. We decided to just dock him a point from his last turn and move on which seemed pretty fair. He was able to use that strength to get off an attack (which was defended by 3 defense cards) and to stay the strongest through a bunch of events. I got the points which was nice too. Later on in the game I saw an opportunity to make him lose the 5 strength and knock him down to last in strength by offering a different pact to another player. I chose the guy on my right who was in last and the weakest and offered him a peace treaty. We each get a point per turn and can't attack each other. The table was convinced I was winning so he didn't want to give me a point. After he rejected it and used that as his rationale I pointed out that I wasn't actually gaining a point because I was already getting one from Nick. All I was doing was giving him a chance to earn the point too and stop being the weakest by subtracting 5 from Nick's strength. (Nick had actually disbanded part of his military to drop from way ahead to barely ahead in order to build a journalism and start making a lot of points and science. A good play, but one that probably should have been punished by losing the pact.) I still had nothing good to do on a future turn so I once again offered the peace treaty to the guy in last. He again rejected it because I was winning and he didn't want me to earn points. *sigh* I ended up later playing Gandhi and sending the pact at 3rd place. He took it for his point, so I never actually went a turn without scoring a pact point. Some times you want to hurt yourself to hurt the leader... But in this case I feel like this guy was really hurting himself to not hurt me at all. Oh well.
As the game wound down I built my military up by changing tactics cards and switching gears with 10 free rocks from yellow cards and 2 free guys from an inhabited territory II, but in retrospect I paid too much. Guy in last had really bid me up and I should have let him have it. I ended up having to sac too much and needed to spend some real rocks along with the free ones and those real rocks could have been used to good effect elsewhere. Especially since the response to my building some strength was for Nick and 3rd place to make a military pact for 4 strength each. Nick then declared a war over culture on last place using the 4 strength from 3rd and the 5 strength from me. Last place thought a bit and decided not to withdraw and give Nick a bunch of culture. He also 'let' 3rd place beat him up with an attack of some kind (raid I think) and seeded an event (no idea which impact) and I was worried that because I wasn't playing the 'whack the loot pinata' game I was going to fall from my supposedly dominating position all the way to 3rd since I wasn't really set up for end game scoring and other people really were.
The end result had Nick surge past me by quite a lot and 3rd place put on quite a run but ultimately he fell just a little shy. The war over culture was only actually worth 13 points and Nick beat me by 20 so it wasn't actually the deciding factor but it sure felt like a big swing at the time. I tried not to let it get to me mostly by checking out of the game mentally and just waiting for it to end. It didn't help that my intestines were acting up a little bit and I'd really rather have been in the bathroom instead of at the slowest semifinal table. Oh well.
On the plus side the difference between Nick and I ended up falling into the sweet spot where I was the second closest second place. This means I came 6th overall in the tournament. Top 6 get laurels in every event, so that's something, but the key is that Through The Ages is a level 6 event. Which means that all of the top 6 get a plaque! Every plaque place is a different colour and the 6th place one is pink. It's the rarest of all the plaques since not many events get 6 prizes. (By my count only 12 of the ~140 or so events get that many.) I've always wanted a pink plaque and am probably happier to have finished 6th in the tournament than I would to finish 2nd. At least this one time, anyway... Next year will be different!
I went to the room to cool down after the semis and eventually decided I'd go play Vegas Showdown at 11pm. I decided as long as I didn't really care about winning I could go have fun being silly in Vegas Showdown. I got into a table with John Corrado, Steve LeWinter, and another Steve I recognized from Innovation. John and Steve used to play Blood Bowl with me in Sceadeau's Cyanide league back in the day and are both very good at games. Steve has won Vegas Showdown before (in 2011, when I came 2nd...) and he won this game too. The game was a lot of fun. I went hardcore green since both restaurant cards came up very early and we got lots of big tiles early but we never saw the theatre. John actually ended the game by filling up his board with lots of base tiles like extra restaurants and lounges and the like. It certainly accelerated to game end, but since he ended up in last it probably wasn't beneficial to his cause to do so. Detrimental to mine since the theatre never flipped (I was sitting on 54 dollars so I was going to be able to buy it the turn it came out) but what are you going to do? Still a fun game and I regret nothing!
After the game I bumped into Greg (4th from my TTA semi) and apologized if I'd made him uncomfortable in any way about his decisions in the game but he said it hadn't been a problem. He'd also discussed the situation with John after the game and came to the conclusion that since he was guaranteed last if he let the war resolve he probably should have resigned instead of letting the person who was eliminating him reap the rewards. I'm actually fine if someone believes either way on this issue and that there is no 'right' answer but certainly my personal beliefs are to spite the one who kills you if possible. (Which may actually be a change from years past... I know I've stayed in Titan games at WBC before to let the person who hunted me down get the kill... Maybe there's a difference because the stated purpose of Titan is to kill people while military in TTA is more of a balancing mechanism? I'll need to think more about that...)
Back to Waffle House, this time with a small army in tow. The poor waitress was a little overwhelmed when 13 or so of us showed up randomly at 1am on a Monday night. My order came last and included the toast I'd explicitly asked to not get for allergy reasons so that got sent back and they had to try again. They didn't want to just throw out the food so they gave it to Ian. Score? But having the slowest eater get food significantly later than anyone else did impact how long we ended up staying at Waffle House. Which may have been bad for people who happened to have a TTA final at 10am the next day but it was fine for me since I got to sleep in on Tuesday!
Monday, April 21, 2014
2014 Lounge Day Games Played
I don't think I played very many games on Lounge Day, but I definitely spent a lot of time playing games. I got in games of 10 Days in Asia, Eminent Domain, Titan, and Innovation.
The Titan game was a 6 player affair featuring a lot of very rusty Titan players. I believe the game itself lasted 6.5 hours and I ended up coming 2nd. In a game of Titan 2nd place really is the first loser since you were in the game the whole time and didn't get to win. At least Adam got to go play other games after he went out first in less than 2 hours! On the plus side I got to attack with a serpent so that really makes it all ok in the end. Overall I hit the top of every tech tree with recruits of 1 colossus, 2 serpents, 3 hydras, and some unicorns and rangers for flavour. Robb went the other path and recruited entirely points from the other players in the game and ended up with a size 18 Titan. That's ludicrous! And to think, Adam had a decent chance to kill off Robb's Titan in the first couple hours of the game. Oh well! Still fun!
Eminent Domain is a game I've played twice now, and each time I walked away really wanting to play again. I fear it's actually pretty degenerate since there doesn't seem to be a lot of variance between games but for now I really want to try out the different strategies to see how they shake out.
10 Days in Asia I played 3 times this weekend and I think I may be souring on it. It's an interesting idea but it seems to end up having a really random finish. I had I think 9 different tiles I could draw or have discarded by Andrew for the win and turn after turn went by without getting any of them. Eventually Andrew drew one of the 7 tiles he needed and won. I feel like we both made interesting choices early and then sat around waiting for someone to randomly win. It might be a better 2 player game where you can try to control discards for what your opponent needs, and it might be a better game if each player had their own discard pile or something so it wasn't so trivial to bury 'good' tiles. (Eventually you reach a point where 2 of the discard piles have complete trash on top of them and then if your players are any good at game they just use the 3rd pile. In one of the games I got totally screwed because the person on my left drew the tiles I needed and therefore I never got a chance to play them as they were quickly covered up.)
Innovation remains fun. This game was a 4 players game where Adam was my partner and did a lot of cool things and I just sat around scoring points until I could play my one high level card and force the game to end suddenly by drawing out all the 10s.
I missed out on the 'high stakes' Barbu game which wasn't really very high at all because I was playing Titan, but that's ok. There's always next year!
The Titan game was a 6 player affair featuring a lot of very rusty Titan players. I believe the game itself lasted 6.5 hours and I ended up coming 2nd. In a game of Titan 2nd place really is the first loser since you were in the game the whole time and didn't get to win. At least Adam got to go play other games after he went out first in less than 2 hours! On the plus side I got to attack with a serpent so that really makes it all ok in the end. Overall I hit the top of every tech tree with recruits of 1 colossus, 2 serpents, 3 hydras, and some unicorns and rangers for flavour. Robb went the other path and recruited entirely points from the other players in the game and ended up with a size 18 Titan. That's ludicrous! And to think, Adam had a decent chance to kill off Robb's Titan in the first couple hours of the game. Oh well! Still fun!
Eminent Domain is a game I've played twice now, and each time I walked away really wanting to play again. I fear it's actually pretty degenerate since there doesn't seem to be a lot of variance between games but for now I really want to try out the different strategies to see how they shake out.
10 Days in Asia I played 3 times this weekend and I think I may be souring on it. It's an interesting idea but it seems to end up having a really random finish. I had I think 9 different tiles I could draw or have discarded by Andrew for the win and turn after turn went by without getting any of them. Eventually Andrew drew one of the 7 tiles he needed and won. I feel like we both made interesting choices early and then sat around waiting for someone to randomly win. It might be a better 2 player game where you can try to control discards for what your opponent needs, and it might be a better game if each player had their own discard pile or something so it wasn't so trivial to bury 'good' tiles. (Eventually you reach a point where 2 of the discard piles have complete trash on top of them and then if your players are any good at game they just use the 3rd pile. In one of the games I got totally screwed because the person on my left drew the tiles I needed and therefore I never got a chance to play them as they were quickly covered up.)
Innovation remains fun. This game was a 4 players game where Adam was my partner and did a lot of cool things and I just sat around scoring points until I could play my one high level card and force the game to end suddenly by drawing out all the 10s.
I missed out on the 'high stakes' Barbu game which wasn't really very high at all because I was playing Titan, but that's ok. There's always next year!
Monday, August 26, 2013
Innovation Online
One of the neatest board games I've played in the last couple years is a little card game called Innovation. It has 105 cards representing technologies throughout the ages and it was mostly fun to see what cards were included and see what combos would randomly come up. But it seemed a little random. At WBC Pounder showed me a webpage for the game and I've been playing on it for the last month. The webpage has the base game and both expansion and with repeated plays (124 games on the webpage and counting) a lot of the randomness doesn't seem to be there anymore. There are good cards and bad cards to be sure, but when I first started playing I'd just use whatever cards I drew. Now I know enough to skip using some of the bad cards (or situational cards) and work towards something else.
At any rate, the webpage is awesome and you should check it out! It's on Isotropic.
At any rate, the webpage is awesome and you should check it out! It's on Isotropic.
Tuesday, August 06, 2013
2013 WBC Day 7
Friday morning brought the Le Havre final at the stupidly early hour of 9am. One advantage of being sick all week is I'd gotten plenty of sleep the last few days, so my sleep batteries were all charged up. I got around 6 or 7 hours sleep, woke up, bought a Coke, and was in pretty good shape relatively speaking. I was still a little sick and I absolutely detest waking up so I still wasn't in a very good mood and wasn't thinking perfectly clearly but compared to previous years it was just fine.
The format this year had 3 semifinal games with the closest second also advancing. One of the winners said he has a hard time waking up and might well just sleep through it since we wouldn't move it. Which provides a bit of a conundrum... If that happened, should the final switch to a 3 player game? Should they advance the next closest second instead? That would mean he needs to also wake up at 9am and might not even get to play. What if he doesn't show either? The next next closest second? How far down the chain do we go to find a 4th player? Any warm body? Making the situation even stickier the person who is 2nd in line is the GM himself. So if he rules that we keep taking people it's to his own benefit. But if he rules that we stop at him to avoid looking like he's ruling in his own favour he actually ends up ruling against himself which is really terrible. GMing is rough enough as it is, you don't need any rules swung against you. He ended up deciding to let #5 in if it came up, but was going to decline his own spot. I think that will seem fairer on first inspection for most people so it's probably a good thing, but I think it sucks for him. It ended up not mattering since the actual 4 finalists did show up.
The final table included one of last year's finalists (another Nick) and two people new to the finals this time around. Another Nick was on my immediate right and was one of the people in last year's finals who got screwed by iron parity, and was well aware that that was probably why he lost that game.
I was in third chair. I haven't yet found the time/inclination to work out which seats may have an advantage or not. I'm pretty sure first chair is strongest, especially if a wood tile flips up first. Which it did in this game. I believe second player got 3 clay, and then I got 2 wood myself. It also seems like people don't like to spend their early money, so I also got to buy the 4 cost building firm. Interestingly no one took money to buy the marketplace. Not only that, but first player who took wood also didn't build the marketplace! So when it got back to my turn I was able to build it with my wood. I mentioned how I got both the 4 cost building firm and the marketplace in the semis and how Robb imprinted in my brain how ridiculous a setup it is to let someone have both. And here I am with both of them again. Will it continue to be ridiculous?
The location of the iron tile meant that 1st and 3rd seats were going to have good iron parity. We would always get first crack at 2 iron until someone snapped and took the single iron. For the second year in a row the other finalists refused to take 1 iron, so myself and the guy opposite me got to scoop up 2 iron offer after 2 iron offer. On top of this source of iron, and my marketplace, I also decided that my conclusion from the last game with the hardware store was a reasonable one so I was jumping over to it as well which was giving me an absolutely ridiculous amount of iron. I may even have used the black market once to get 2 iron and 2 of something else!
One key play, for me, was how everyone seemed to be neglecting the harvest phase of the game. Another Nick quickly took 2 cows and a grain but no one else was harvesting anything at all. Which meant the cow offer kept getting bigger and bigger. Eventually I took it when it was at 5! As the second person to get cows that's mind boggling. Of course I didn't take it at 2, 3, or 4 either, so I don't know that I can say other people were making mistakes either. But that one action probably gave me the resources to score 60+ points.
I had marketplace control again, which meant I got to manipulate the special buildings. There wasn't one I wanted to keep buried this game, but there was one I wanted to make sure came out. Harbour watch, which is probably the single most game warping card in the deck. It's a building that lets you use any occupied building by paying them a dollar. This means you can't block people from building boats, or from getting in all the shipping phases they want, or from picking up coal in the colliery. It means you basically get to ignore the opposition for my preferred line of play. It also means owning the colliery is even more critical than normal, so as soon as I saw this building existed I went out of my way to make a plan to get the colliery. The colliery was buried under the clay mound and the arts center I think. My play ended up being go to the construction firm, build the arts center, sell the arts center, buy the clay mound, build the colliery. A short time later I got some money (maybe by going to the cokery) and bought the harbour watch. I tried to convince people that they should be using my harbour watch in order to use my colliery but it rarely happened.
A little later on the feed lot came out, and no one had much interest in it, so I was able to do a big shipping phase to get down to 2 cows and then buy it like in the semis. Then I got to make 2 cows a turn for a while for lots of extra things to ship.
As the game played out I pretty much ignored steel entirely. The steel mill was late to come out and Another Nick was waiting on it instead of building iron ships. I think this ended up setting him back way too far. When it finally did come out he was able to make 11 steel and then was able to start building boats and setting up to ship all the stuff he'd acquired over the game, but by that point I'd already flat out bought 2 of the 4 steel ships. Guy on my left had made 2 steel with the business office and had built one also, so there was only one left for Another Nick which was really bad for his position. I ended up with 2 steel ships, 2 iron ships, and a wooden ship. The 2 steel and the wood I had bought with cash money, the iron I had made with all the iron I'd picked up.
I was paying attention to when the town was going to build a building late in the game this time, and spent the money to buy the bridge over the Seine in order to force the town to build the town hall. One of the other players was set up to build it and I wanted to keep that from happening.
I also got a late grain offer with 9 or 10 grain in it, which let me bake the full 20 loaves of bread near the end of the game. I got to ship many, many times thanks to the harbour watch. Probably 6 or 7 times, with some of those times being for 16 goods. Lots of cows, bread, and coke. I ended the game with no goods left at all.
The other players at the table were pretty much ready to concede early in the game because I had such a big lead. I thought Another Nick could catch me, but he waited too long on steel and ran out of time. I don't remember final standings, but I think he did come second. I won, by a pretty good margin. Good thing we didn't submit a team this year, it sure would have sucked to win my team event. 8P
1 o'clock brought the single elimination Innovation tournament. The caffeine from the first Coke I'd had in many weeks was keeping me ready to roll and I wasn't really feeling super sick anymore. Still sluggish with a cough, but not like I wanted to die. So I went to that. I got paired up with Rob Kircher in the first round which is a bit of a tough draw because he's really good at games and I'm really good at games. I hardly play any Innovation and I know I'm a lot worse than Robb and Pounder so I didn't have terribly high hopes. Andy (the GM) came by to watch us because he said we were the tough match for the round. (There was a mulligan round, so a lot of the really good players weren't playing in this round at all.) I ended up in a relatively bad position and Rob had enough points to get his last achievement but needed to get a 7 into play. His last turn was to draw a couple 7s and I didn't have a way to make him discard both of them. So he was going to get to play one and achieve to win the game on his next turn. I had a bunch of cards in play and finally came up with a viable line of play. I could reveal a green card from my hand and steal all his green cards. If both of his 7s were green then this play would prevent him from winning on his turn. Also, if they were green I would get to meld them all, and all my green cards, which included the card that lets you auto-win if you have 10 or more green cards in play. I had 8 of my own, so if he had 2 of them I would win on my next turn! I'd seen 3 of the 7s, and none of them were green, so there was a non-zero chance this play would work. 1 in 21, I believe! It turned out his 7s were a yellow and purple so it didn't work, but it made me happy to at least find a line of play that had a chance of working. It's like I'm changing the rules for victory and gaining status even though I lost! Yay, dopamine!
Most of the games I would normally play are done by this point in the week. There are still semis and finals and such, but I didn't make any of those because I didn't play any games earlier in the week. And I still wasn't really feeling like playing a lot of games. So I just sat around and watched the rest of the Innovation tournament. I feel like I probably went to Red Robin with Pounder after the Innovation event, but I may be misremembering. Maybe I just ate gluten free cookies. Then I played some Rogue Legacy back in the room after doing a blog post.
11pm brought Liar's Dice. I couldn't turn down my chance to be the LIAR'S DICE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD!!!!!! even though I didn't want to be in a room with 1250 dice being rolled at once with my foggy brain. I played at a table with Robb, Sceadeau, Pounder, and a couple of random dudes. I lost very quickly. Sceadeau was very mean to me and knocked me out. I wasn't the first one eliminated in the whole event so I didn't get made fun of by the whole room but it was pretty close. Pounder 'won', but he didn't want to advance so he conceded to the kid at the table who was very confused about the outcome. It's a little sketchy to me (I'd rather have Pounder eliminate everyone and just not show up to the next round if he doesn't want to play) but with a game like Liar's Dice I don't think anyone actually cares.
Hanabi was the open gaming game of the convention and Robb was one of the few people who owned a copy of the game so he was swarmed by people to play it after Liar's Dice. I sat around and watched for a bit, and then was learning some weird Flower Fall game from Matt when Randy came up and asked if we'd go learn Copycat instead. I don't have the ability to interrupt the start of a game and convince the people in it to do something else instead, but Randy does, and I'd rather learn Copycat than Flower Fall so it was all good by me. Matt ended up winning the Copycat event later in the week so he was probably just fine with getting in an extra game too.
Copycat is a game that copies game mechanics from all kinds of games and tries to kludge them all together into a good game. Some of the people I talked to thought they did a great job. I thought it was very mediocre personally. It was incredibly bland, and while the mechanics from different games were all there it didn't feel like the fun parts of those games came with the mechanics. You build a deck like in Dominion, but with the game lasting at most 11 turns and with new cards only getting shuffled in the turn after you buy them it felt like building a good/fun deck didn't matter enough. There are decisions to make on which cards to buy and which cards to trash but the game didn't last long enough for it to really feel like it matters like it does in Dominion or even A Few Acres of Snow. That said, the game was still pretty long and felt like it was dragging. Worker placement from Agricola is probably at fault here. You're placing workers down on pretty minorly relevant spaces, but there are a bunch of them and you get presented with the illusion of choice. Do I want to draw a card, or make a dollar, or earn a point? But when it comes right down to it drawing a card is worth a dollar or a point and neither of those really matter either. So it again feels like you're making decisions (which takes time) but the decisions you're making have no theme or major consequence. Through The Ages and Puerto Rico show up with mechanics, but they didn't get the good ones out of those games.
Perhaps worst of all, I didn't get to end the game on the score track. I ended with a score of 91, but the score track went 90-92-93-94-93-95. No space for 91. I fell off into the abyss never to be heard from again.
The rules are also very badly written. It wasn't at all clear if we could do some of the abusive things we wanted to do, and that made the game experience suck for me. A lot of the cards and actions are about copying other cards or actions (the 'theme' of the game being copying stuff) and one of the rules shows up in bold talking about how you can only use the base of any given card twice total. Once for the card, once for a copy. That is all. But then the explanation text for a card goes on to say how you can end up tripling some cards. And there's a card that says it comes in as a copy of a different card, not that it copies the effect of a card. So can you play that card as a copy of a good card, and then use two copy effects to copy both of those? In some senses you're getting the base of the first card 4 times. In other senses you're getting 2 cards 2 times each.
No one knew how to actually resolve it, which meant part of me was stuck feeling like I'd been cheated because the other players had done some super copying, and part of me was stuck feeling like I should be able to do the same things but would be cheating myself. It just didn't feel good. Come back, dopamine! Come back!
We then went to Waffle House, but made the mistake of showing up at 2:30 am on a Friday night. So the bars had just recently shut down and all the drunk people were at Waffle House, filling it up and making service very slow. I was more than a little worried about contamination issues but they managed to keep me from getting sick for a third time with the scrambled eggs, hash browns, and ham.
The format this year had 3 semifinal games with the closest second also advancing. One of the winners said he has a hard time waking up and might well just sleep through it since we wouldn't move it. Which provides a bit of a conundrum... If that happened, should the final switch to a 3 player game? Should they advance the next closest second instead? That would mean he needs to also wake up at 9am and might not even get to play. What if he doesn't show either? The next next closest second? How far down the chain do we go to find a 4th player? Any warm body? Making the situation even stickier the person who is 2nd in line is the GM himself. So if he rules that we keep taking people it's to his own benefit. But if he rules that we stop at him to avoid looking like he's ruling in his own favour he actually ends up ruling against himself which is really terrible. GMing is rough enough as it is, you don't need any rules swung against you. He ended up deciding to let #5 in if it came up, but was going to decline his own spot. I think that will seem fairer on first inspection for most people so it's probably a good thing, but I think it sucks for him. It ended up not mattering since the actual 4 finalists did show up.
The final table included one of last year's finalists (another Nick) and two people new to the finals this time around. Another Nick was on my immediate right and was one of the people in last year's finals who got screwed by iron parity, and was well aware that that was probably why he lost that game.
I was in third chair. I haven't yet found the time/inclination to work out which seats may have an advantage or not. I'm pretty sure first chair is strongest, especially if a wood tile flips up first. Which it did in this game. I believe second player got 3 clay, and then I got 2 wood myself. It also seems like people don't like to spend their early money, so I also got to buy the 4 cost building firm. Interestingly no one took money to buy the marketplace. Not only that, but first player who took wood also didn't build the marketplace! So when it got back to my turn I was able to build it with my wood. I mentioned how I got both the 4 cost building firm and the marketplace in the semis and how Robb imprinted in my brain how ridiculous a setup it is to let someone have both. And here I am with both of them again. Will it continue to be ridiculous?
The location of the iron tile meant that 1st and 3rd seats were going to have good iron parity. We would always get first crack at 2 iron until someone snapped and took the single iron. For the second year in a row the other finalists refused to take 1 iron, so myself and the guy opposite me got to scoop up 2 iron offer after 2 iron offer. On top of this source of iron, and my marketplace, I also decided that my conclusion from the last game with the hardware store was a reasonable one so I was jumping over to it as well which was giving me an absolutely ridiculous amount of iron. I may even have used the black market once to get 2 iron and 2 of something else!
One key play, for me, was how everyone seemed to be neglecting the harvest phase of the game. Another Nick quickly took 2 cows and a grain but no one else was harvesting anything at all. Which meant the cow offer kept getting bigger and bigger. Eventually I took it when it was at 5! As the second person to get cows that's mind boggling. Of course I didn't take it at 2, 3, or 4 either, so I don't know that I can say other people were making mistakes either. But that one action probably gave me the resources to score 60+ points.
I had marketplace control again, which meant I got to manipulate the special buildings. There wasn't one I wanted to keep buried this game, but there was one I wanted to make sure came out. Harbour watch, which is probably the single most game warping card in the deck. It's a building that lets you use any occupied building by paying them a dollar. This means you can't block people from building boats, or from getting in all the shipping phases they want, or from picking up coal in the colliery. It means you basically get to ignore the opposition for my preferred line of play. It also means owning the colliery is even more critical than normal, so as soon as I saw this building existed I went out of my way to make a plan to get the colliery. The colliery was buried under the clay mound and the arts center I think. My play ended up being go to the construction firm, build the arts center, sell the arts center, buy the clay mound, build the colliery. A short time later I got some money (maybe by going to the cokery) and bought the harbour watch. I tried to convince people that they should be using my harbour watch in order to use my colliery but it rarely happened.
A little later on the feed lot came out, and no one had much interest in it, so I was able to do a big shipping phase to get down to 2 cows and then buy it like in the semis. Then I got to make 2 cows a turn for a while for lots of extra things to ship.
As the game played out I pretty much ignored steel entirely. The steel mill was late to come out and Another Nick was waiting on it instead of building iron ships. I think this ended up setting him back way too far. When it finally did come out he was able to make 11 steel and then was able to start building boats and setting up to ship all the stuff he'd acquired over the game, but by that point I'd already flat out bought 2 of the 4 steel ships. Guy on my left had made 2 steel with the business office and had built one also, so there was only one left for Another Nick which was really bad for his position. I ended up with 2 steel ships, 2 iron ships, and a wooden ship. The 2 steel and the wood I had bought with cash money, the iron I had made with all the iron I'd picked up.
I was paying attention to when the town was going to build a building late in the game this time, and spent the money to buy the bridge over the Seine in order to force the town to build the town hall. One of the other players was set up to build it and I wanted to keep that from happening.
I also got a late grain offer with 9 or 10 grain in it, which let me bake the full 20 loaves of bread near the end of the game. I got to ship many, many times thanks to the harbour watch. Probably 6 or 7 times, with some of those times being for 16 goods. Lots of cows, bread, and coke. I ended the game with no goods left at all.
The other players at the table were pretty much ready to concede early in the game because I had such a big lead. I thought Another Nick could catch me, but he waited too long on steel and ran out of time. I don't remember final standings, but I think he did come second. I won, by a pretty good margin. Good thing we didn't submit a team this year, it sure would have sucked to win my team event. 8P
1 o'clock brought the single elimination Innovation tournament. The caffeine from the first Coke I'd had in many weeks was keeping me ready to roll and I wasn't really feeling super sick anymore. Still sluggish with a cough, but not like I wanted to die. So I went to that. I got paired up with Rob Kircher in the first round which is a bit of a tough draw because he's really good at games and I'm really good at games. I hardly play any Innovation and I know I'm a lot worse than Robb and Pounder so I didn't have terribly high hopes. Andy (the GM) came by to watch us because he said we were the tough match for the round. (There was a mulligan round, so a lot of the really good players weren't playing in this round at all.) I ended up in a relatively bad position and Rob had enough points to get his last achievement but needed to get a 7 into play. His last turn was to draw a couple 7s and I didn't have a way to make him discard both of them. So he was going to get to play one and achieve to win the game on his next turn. I had a bunch of cards in play and finally came up with a viable line of play. I could reveal a green card from my hand and steal all his green cards. If both of his 7s were green then this play would prevent him from winning on his turn. Also, if they were green I would get to meld them all, and all my green cards, which included the card that lets you auto-win if you have 10 or more green cards in play. I had 8 of my own, so if he had 2 of them I would win on my next turn! I'd seen 3 of the 7s, and none of them were green, so there was a non-zero chance this play would work. 1 in 21, I believe! It turned out his 7s were a yellow and purple so it didn't work, but it made me happy to at least find a line of play that had a chance of working. It's like I'm changing the rules for victory and gaining status even though I lost! Yay, dopamine!
Most of the games I would normally play are done by this point in the week. There are still semis and finals and such, but I didn't make any of those because I didn't play any games earlier in the week. And I still wasn't really feeling like playing a lot of games. So I just sat around and watched the rest of the Innovation tournament. I feel like I probably went to Red Robin with Pounder after the Innovation event, but I may be misremembering. Maybe I just ate gluten free cookies. Then I played some Rogue Legacy back in the room after doing a blog post.
11pm brought Liar's Dice. I couldn't turn down my chance to be the LIAR'S DICE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD!!!!!! even though I didn't want to be in a room with 1250 dice being rolled at once with my foggy brain. I played at a table with Robb, Sceadeau, Pounder, and a couple of random dudes. I lost very quickly. Sceadeau was very mean to me and knocked me out. I wasn't the first one eliminated in the whole event so I didn't get made fun of by the whole room but it was pretty close. Pounder 'won', but he didn't want to advance so he conceded to the kid at the table who was very confused about the outcome. It's a little sketchy to me (I'd rather have Pounder eliminate everyone and just not show up to the next round if he doesn't want to play) but with a game like Liar's Dice I don't think anyone actually cares.
Hanabi was the open gaming game of the convention and Robb was one of the few people who owned a copy of the game so he was swarmed by people to play it after Liar's Dice. I sat around and watched for a bit, and then was learning some weird Flower Fall game from Matt when Randy came up and asked if we'd go learn Copycat instead. I don't have the ability to interrupt the start of a game and convince the people in it to do something else instead, but Randy does, and I'd rather learn Copycat than Flower Fall so it was all good by me. Matt ended up winning the Copycat event later in the week so he was probably just fine with getting in an extra game too.
Copycat is a game that copies game mechanics from all kinds of games and tries to kludge them all together into a good game. Some of the people I talked to thought they did a great job. I thought it was very mediocre personally. It was incredibly bland, and while the mechanics from different games were all there it didn't feel like the fun parts of those games came with the mechanics. You build a deck like in Dominion, but with the game lasting at most 11 turns and with new cards only getting shuffled in the turn after you buy them it felt like building a good/fun deck didn't matter enough. There are decisions to make on which cards to buy and which cards to trash but the game didn't last long enough for it to really feel like it matters like it does in Dominion or even A Few Acres of Snow. That said, the game was still pretty long and felt like it was dragging. Worker placement from Agricola is probably at fault here. You're placing workers down on pretty minorly relevant spaces, but there are a bunch of them and you get presented with the illusion of choice. Do I want to draw a card, or make a dollar, or earn a point? But when it comes right down to it drawing a card is worth a dollar or a point and neither of those really matter either. So it again feels like you're making decisions (which takes time) but the decisions you're making have no theme or major consequence. Through The Ages and Puerto Rico show up with mechanics, but they didn't get the good ones out of those games.
Perhaps worst of all, I didn't get to end the game on the score track. I ended with a score of 91, but the score track went 90-92-93-94-93-95. No space for 91. I fell off into the abyss never to be heard from again.
The rules are also very badly written. It wasn't at all clear if we could do some of the abusive things we wanted to do, and that made the game experience suck for me. A lot of the cards and actions are about copying other cards or actions (the 'theme' of the game being copying stuff) and one of the rules shows up in bold talking about how you can only use the base of any given card twice total. Once for the card, once for a copy. That is all. But then the explanation text for a card goes on to say how you can end up tripling some cards. And there's a card that says it comes in as a copy of a different card, not that it copies the effect of a card. So can you play that card as a copy of a good card, and then use two copy effects to copy both of those? In some senses you're getting the base of the first card 4 times. In other senses you're getting 2 cards 2 times each.
No one knew how to actually resolve it, which meant part of me was stuck feeling like I'd been cheated because the other players had done some super copying, and part of me was stuck feeling like I should be able to do the same things but would be cheating myself. It just didn't feel good. Come back, dopamine! Come back!
We then went to Waffle House, but made the mistake of showing up at 2:30 am on a Friday night. So the bars had just recently shut down and all the drunk people were at Waffle House, filling it up and making service very slow. I was more than a little worried about contamination issues but they managed to keep me from getting sick for a third time with the scrambled eggs, hash browns, and ham.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
2013 WBC Day 2
Sunday starts off with Through The Ages at noon. All of last week I'd been going to bed around 9pm, so Saturday night I ended up going to bed earlier than Robb or Pounder. Again, maybe that was to get away from Space Alert, but I was also rather tired. I think I went to bed around midnight or so, which was going to leave plenty of time to wake up for noon so no alarm was set. I ended up waking up much earlier than that, since it turns out the hotel room was set to refrigerator temperature. I woke up with the chills and a bit of a sore throat. I assumed that was just because the room was so much dryer than I'm used to, drank some Sprite, and took my standard tactic for dealing with a low body temperature: hot bath! I settled in with my book (Shadow of the Giant) but didn't really warm up much despite a very high water temperature. Eventually I gave up and got up for good. I went to register while Robb and Pounder got up and showered and stuff. I got a nice collared shirt for being a GM. Woo!
In an attempt to bribe the WBCers to keep us from finding a new location (the AC dying last year was a mighty big straw on our little camel's back) the hotel gave everyone a free breakfast buffet for each day they were staying. This sounds pretty typical I would think (the place we stayed across the street in 2007 had free breakfast) but this hotel didn't have it before so one would think it was a step in the right direction. Unfortunately the buffet is really, really bad. The orange juice was so watered down I found it offensive. The bacon was rather cold and slimy. The honeydew was actually decent though, which was a bit of a surprise. Cutting up fruit isn't hard, but I would have thought they'd have found a way to fail. I stayed away from the eggs as I was worried of gluten contamination but Robb told me I wasn't missing anything.
Eventually off to Through The Ages. Randy changed the format this year to get rid of the conceding shenanigan I used last year with only your top two finishes counting this time. Not that it mattered for me, since I would only be able to play one heat anyway thanks to needing to GM A Few Acres of Snow. I showed up because there was nothing I could actually win at the same time, and because I really like the game, and because I was hoping to get put on Sceadeau's table so I could beat him. Unfortunately to use Daniel's term I was up against two stuffed animals. I ended up winning by a really large margin, and it could have been even more if I'd been focused on scoring points at the end of the game instead of on just making it to the end of a slow game without going crazy. One of my opponents had a hard time with making legal plays. I really don't think she was trying to cheat, just that she was sloppy or absent minded or felt rushed by the third player but she kept failing to spend food, resources, or actions to do the things she wanted to do. I had to pay close attention to maintain the game state. That's the sort of thing I like to do anyway (I hope to be able to learn from good plays if I watch the plays as they're happening and try to analyse them) but this game was pretty slow and it wore on me as the game went on. I'd also failed to bring my thermos down to the room with me, so I ran out of water, and my already dry throat from earlier was starting to really get to me. I got Sceadeau to do a water run for me which was awesome of him and helped some.
Despite my game being pretty slow Robb's game was nowhere near done. He was going to play in the next heat and wouldn't have time for food so Pounder and I went out for food just the two of us. Pounder wanted to go somewhere else but I decided I didn't want to risk gastro-intestinal issues while GMing a game so I pushed for another trip to Red Robin. I got the same thing, with a different drink. Burger hold most of the toppings. It's pretty great to start from a menu item and just list off most of the stuff as things to take off. Aaaaand the bun. During the meal I drank a lot of the melonade drink (lemonade and Sprite combined with some watermelon chunks) and discovered it wasn't making a dent on my throat. I had time to stop and think in the restaurant and came to the conclusion that this wasn't just a dry throat. I was sick. Super sore throat, stuffy nose, a bit of a cough, a headache, and a really warm forehead (which probably just meant a really cold hand) to go with the chills from the morning that just wouldn't go away. I haven't felt like this in a while, but it feels a lot like when I used to get throat infections as a teenager. Maybe it's the flu, maybe it's an infection of some kind. I've decided it's actually the plague, and Sceadeau has labeled me Patient Zero. Everyone is going to get to go home from WBC with my plague. I don't know if I picked it up here, or on the trip from Toronto to Kitchener, or what. Maybe I had a bad baked PoTaToE at Wendy's after all. But the bottom line is I felt terrible and didn't want to do anything but find a warm place to sleep.
So... Off to GM my event. Sunday night had the mulligan round for A Few Acres of Snow and I had to be there to run it. Pounder came along to help out and I talked to Nick Henning who agreed to also help out on Monday. Running the event started with a bit of a snag. Each game has a big triangular prism which contains things like the history of the event and a big picture of the event so people who walk into a room have a beacon to know where to go in order to sign up. They were all in the big row outside the demo area as expected... Except mine. The big concern was the registration sheets get stored with the kiosk, so not having it was going to be a real problem. Andy Lotto told me I could steal the one out of Innovation if I needed to in the short term because Don would surely fix things when he found out. A Few Acres of Snow was missing, and registration was closed to go eat. There was a sign saying they'd be back in an hour or so, which would be an hour before my round would start, so no need to panic yet. We had time to kill so Pounder went and got Innovation and we played a couple games without expansions. He blew me out both times. He plays a lot online so he knows what cards are good and which ones are not. I do not.
Eventually registration opened and it turns out my kiosk was just sitting in registration. In order to help out the events being run that day they'd set aside those kiosks in the registration room. Which would have been great, if it hadn't been locked when we wanted to pick it up. Oh well! I was able to collect it in plenty of time before the event started so no harm done. I was a little stressed out about it, so maybe a little harm done, but it all worked out in the end.
The mulligan round ended up attracting only 8 people which was a drop from last year's 16. A 9th person did show up, but they didn't know the rules. Rather than let them play I told them to come back tomorrow morning for the demo and maybe the real first round. There was nothing else the guy wanted to do, so he just stuck around to watch games. 6 of the 8 people had copies of the game which was pretty great. I wrote people's names on index cards and used those to generate pairings. I ended up playing against Kevin Lewis, who came 3rd last year. He was not happy to have to play me until he thought about it a bit more. Because I don't want the 2nd best person to get knocked out by losing twice to the best person I said I'd split up people who played in the mulligan round onto opposite sides of the bracket. If we were to play again it would be in the finals.
The game itself was over in very short fashion. He let me be the British with a bid of 5, but then forgot to use any of the bid tokens. That or he was saving them for a big flourish at the end which is entirely possible. He bought a very early settler card and I was quite scared that I he was going to be able to settle out before I could kill him even with him putting up next to no effort to stop me at all. He even let me ambush away his starting regular (though he later said that was a mistake)! Unfortunately for him the first card in my deck after my first military victory was the Port Royal card which let me attack Louisbourg quickly. He had fortified it (and Trois Rivieres) but I was still able to take it out in short order. And then my first card on the next shuffle was Louisbourg, so I was able to hit Quebec and win. The game took maybe 15 minutes from start to finish since we both had a plan and knew what each other was doing.
After that the guy who was watching asked if I'd play him a game for fun to teach him the rules. I had to stay until all the mulligan round games finished anyway so I didn't see why not. Rather then blow him out the same way I went a full British expansion strategy and ended up barely winning. Against a complete newbie who took many random actions, and had no bid tokens. Yeah, that's not actually the way to win a real game. Conquer or lose!
One game in the mulligan round went pretty long and one of the guys suggested I could just leave and he'd tell me the result later. That seemed super sketchy. I stuck around until the bitter end, and they ended up running right into the 2 hour mark. The guy who made that suggestion is someone who had emailed me a bunch of times with rules questions in the months before WBC, which was interesting.
Anyway, mulligan round over. Attendance down, but there was still the next day to boost that back up. I think Robb and Pounder wanted to play games (Hanabi I think) but I'd given in that I was sick and therefore should go to bed. The room was still cold, and I was still shivering outside the room, so Pounder gave me the blanket off of his bed. Sheet, comforter, super warm blanket, extra hotel blanket... Would that be enough to keep me warm through the night?
In an attempt to bribe the WBCers to keep us from finding a new location (the AC dying last year was a mighty big straw on our little camel's back) the hotel gave everyone a free breakfast buffet for each day they were staying. This sounds pretty typical I would think (the place we stayed across the street in 2007 had free breakfast) but this hotel didn't have it before so one would think it was a step in the right direction. Unfortunately the buffet is really, really bad. The orange juice was so watered down I found it offensive. The bacon was rather cold and slimy. The honeydew was actually decent though, which was a bit of a surprise. Cutting up fruit isn't hard, but I would have thought they'd have found a way to fail. I stayed away from the eggs as I was worried of gluten contamination but Robb told me I wasn't missing anything.
Eventually off to Through The Ages. Randy changed the format this year to get rid of the conceding shenanigan I used last year with only your top two finishes counting this time. Not that it mattered for me, since I would only be able to play one heat anyway thanks to needing to GM A Few Acres of Snow. I showed up because there was nothing I could actually win at the same time, and because I really like the game, and because I was hoping to get put on Sceadeau's table so I could beat him. Unfortunately to use Daniel's term I was up against two stuffed animals. I ended up winning by a really large margin, and it could have been even more if I'd been focused on scoring points at the end of the game instead of on just making it to the end of a slow game without going crazy. One of my opponents had a hard time with making legal plays. I really don't think she was trying to cheat, just that she was sloppy or absent minded or felt rushed by the third player but she kept failing to spend food, resources, or actions to do the things she wanted to do. I had to pay close attention to maintain the game state. That's the sort of thing I like to do anyway (I hope to be able to learn from good plays if I watch the plays as they're happening and try to analyse them) but this game was pretty slow and it wore on me as the game went on. I'd also failed to bring my thermos down to the room with me, so I ran out of water, and my already dry throat from earlier was starting to really get to me. I got Sceadeau to do a water run for me which was awesome of him and helped some.
Despite my game being pretty slow Robb's game was nowhere near done. He was going to play in the next heat and wouldn't have time for food so Pounder and I went out for food just the two of us. Pounder wanted to go somewhere else but I decided I didn't want to risk gastro-intestinal issues while GMing a game so I pushed for another trip to Red Robin. I got the same thing, with a different drink. Burger hold most of the toppings. It's pretty great to start from a menu item and just list off most of the stuff as things to take off. Aaaaand the bun. During the meal I drank a lot of the melonade drink (lemonade and Sprite combined with some watermelon chunks) and discovered it wasn't making a dent on my throat. I had time to stop and think in the restaurant and came to the conclusion that this wasn't just a dry throat. I was sick. Super sore throat, stuffy nose, a bit of a cough, a headache, and a really warm forehead (which probably just meant a really cold hand) to go with the chills from the morning that just wouldn't go away. I haven't felt like this in a while, but it feels a lot like when I used to get throat infections as a teenager. Maybe it's the flu, maybe it's an infection of some kind. I've decided it's actually the plague, and Sceadeau has labeled me Patient Zero. Everyone is going to get to go home from WBC with my plague. I don't know if I picked it up here, or on the trip from Toronto to Kitchener, or what. Maybe I had a bad baked PoTaToE at Wendy's after all. But the bottom line is I felt terrible and didn't want to do anything but find a warm place to sleep.
So... Off to GM my event. Sunday night had the mulligan round for A Few Acres of Snow and I had to be there to run it. Pounder came along to help out and I talked to Nick Henning who agreed to also help out on Monday. Running the event started with a bit of a snag. Each game has a big triangular prism which contains things like the history of the event and a big picture of the event so people who walk into a room have a beacon to know where to go in order to sign up. They were all in the big row outside the demo area as expected... Except mine. The big concern was the registration sheets get stored with the kiosk, so not having it was going to be a real problem. Andy Lotto told me I could steal the one out of Innovation if I needed to in the short term because Don would surely fix things when he found out. A Few Acres of Snow was missing, and registration was closed to go eat. There was a sign saying they'd be back in an hour or so, which would be an hour before my round would start, so no need to panic yet. We had time to kill so Pounder went and got Innovation and we played a couple games without expansions. He blew me out both times. He plays a lot online so he knows what cards are good and which ones are not. I do not.
Eventually registration opened and it turns out my kiosk was just sitting in registration. In order to help out the events being run that day they'd set aside those kiosks in the registration room. Which would have been great, if it hadn't been locked when we wanted to pick it up. Oh well! I was able to collect it in plenty of time before the event started so no harm done. I was a little stressed out about it, so maybe a little harm done, but it all worked out in the end.
The mulligan round ended up attracting only 8 people which was a drop from last year's 16. A 9th person did show up, but they didn't know the rules. Rather than let them play I told them to come back tomorrow morning for the demo and maybe the real first round. There was nothing else the guy wanted to do, so he just stuck around to watch games. 6 of the 8 people had copies of the game which was pretty great. I wrote people's names on index cards and used those to generate pairings. I ended up playing against Kevin Lewis, who came 3rd last year. He was not happy to have to play me until he thought about it a bit more. Because I don't want the 2nd best person to get knocked out by losing twice to the best person I said I'd split up people who played in the mulligan round onto opposite sides of the bracket. If we were to play again it would be in the finals.
The game itself was over in very short fashion. He let me be the British with a bid of 5, but then forgot to use any of the bid tokens. That or he was saving them for a big flourish at the end which is entirely possible. He bought a very early settler card and I was quite scared that I he was going to be able to settle out before I could kill him even with him putting up next to no effort to stop me at all. He even let me ambush away his starting regular (though he later said that was a mistake)! Unfortunately for him the first card in my deck after my first military victory was the Port Royal card which let me attack Louisbourg quickly. He had fortified it (and Trois Rivieres) but I was still able to take it out in short order. And then my first card on the next shuffle was Louisbourg, so I was able to hit Quebec and win. The game took maybe 15 minutes from start to finish since we both had a plan and knew what each other was doing.
After that the guy who was watching asked if I'd play him a game for fun to teach him the rules. I had to stay until all the mulligan round games finished anyway so I didn't see why not. Rather then blow him out the same way I went a full British expansion strategy and ended up barely winning. Against a complete newbie who took many random actions, and had no bid tokens. Yeah, that's not actually the way to win a real game. Conquer or lose!
One game in the mulligan round went pretty long and one of the guys suggested I could just leave and he'd tell me the result later. That seemed super sketchy. I stuck around until the bitter end, and they ended up running right into the 2 hour mark. The guy who made that suggestion is someone who had emailed me a bunch of times with rules questions in the months before WBC, which was interesting.
Anyway, mulligan round over. Attendance down, but there was still the next day to boost that back up. I think Robb and Pounder wanted to play games (Hanabi I think) but I'd given in that I was sick and therefore should go to bed. The room was still cold, and I was still shivering outside the room, so Pounder gave me the blanket off of his bed. Sheet, comforter, super warm blanket, extra hotel blanket... Would that be enough to keep me warm through the night?
Monday, July 29, 2013
2013 WBC Days 0 and 1
Friday was a bit of an adventure. I don't have to work, and Pounder does, so the easiest way to get things done was for me to take a bus from Toronto to Kitchener and spend the night in Pounder's basement. The downside is I bring a lot of things on a 10 day trip so I ended up having to lug a suitcase, backpack, and duffel bag around two cities. I ended up leaving some non-tournament games behind, but since we full up Pounder's trunk anyway maybe that's not such a bad thing. The first bus was full so I had to wait around for the next bus to come and it ended up being around 6ish hours from leaving my house to getting to the Google offices in Kitchener. I didn't play any games on Friday, but I did teach Robb and Pounder to play A Few Acres of Snow so Pounder could pretend to assistant GM it for me. We did go to a couple of grocery stores where I loaded up on gluten free tasty things like two bite brownies and ginger snaps. Also some terrible granola bar things that at least won't kill me so they're better than nothing.
Saturday brought the trip itself. It was about 10 hours door to door, with little in the way of getting lost. We stopped to eat at Wendy's along the way and I risked having a baked PoTaToE. It didn't make me sick. Hurray! We ended up getting into Lancaster right around the supper rush so the lineup at Texas Roadhouse was over an hour to get a table. We aborted to Red Robin since a cursory look at their webpage last month indicated I could probably eat there. It was a half hour wait for a table, but I wanted to go to Staples in the same complex so it wasn't so bad. I got some index cards and some pens to help run A Few Acres of Snow. Red Robin featured eating their main cheeseburger but with the tomato, onion, relish, sauce, and bun removed. I got their lettuce bun instead, and replaced the fries (which may be cross contaminated and are hence scary) with steamed carrots. It ended up being both tasty and didn't make me sick, so a win all around!
Back to the host where we had 10 people who wanted to break into two games of 5 each. Space Alert and Vegas Showdown. I don't much like either game, but I really hate Space Alert and I'm willing to play Vegas so I went with that. Then two more people showed up, turning 10 into 12. Rather than do the smart thing of becoming 3 4 player games we went with the same 5 player games and a 2 player game. On the plus side I got to slide out into the 2 player game, where I played Innovation with both expansions against Andy Lotto which was both a learning experience and quite fun. I ended up winning with a broken leader who let me achieve cards off of my board whenever I tucked a card with an industry symbol.
I am apparently old or something, as rather than stay up late hoping to get into another game I went to bed. It may have something to do with the fact that the most likely game to start was going to be another Space Alert game.
Saturday brought the trip itself. It was about 10 hours door to door, with little in the way of getting lost. We stopped to eat at Wendy's along the way and I risked having a baked PoTaToE. It didn't make me sick. Hurray! We ended up getting into Lancaster right around the supper rush so the lineup at Texas Roadhouse was over an hour to get a table. We aborted to Red Robin since a cursory look at their webpage last month indicated I could probably eat there. It was a half hour wait for a table, but I wanted to go to Staples in the same complex so it wasn't so bad. I got some index cards and some pens to help run A Few Acres of Snow. Red Robin featured eating their main cheeseburger but with the tomato, onion, relish, sauce, and bun removed. I got their lettuce bun instead, and replaced the fries (which may be cross contaminated and are hence scary) with steamed carrots. It ended up being both tasty and didn't make me sick, so a win all around!
Back to the host where we had 10 people who wanted to break into two games of 5 each. Space Alert and Vegas Showdown. I don't much like either game, but I really hate Space Alert and I'm willing to play Vegas so I went with that. Then two more people showed up, turning 10 into 12. Rather than do the smart thing of becoming 3 4 player games we went with the same 5 player games and a 2 player game. On the plus side I got to slide out into the 2 player game, where I played Innovation with both expansions against Andy Lotto which was both a learning experience and quite fun. I ended up winning with a broken leader who let me achieve cards off of my board whenever I tucked a card with an industry symbol.
I am apparently old or something, as rather than stay up late hoping to get into another game I went to bed. It may have something to do with the fact that the most likely game to start was going to be another Space Alert game.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
2012 WBC Day 3 Summary
Monday featured three events I really wanted to enter. San Juan started at 10 and would go for likely 6-7 hours. A Few Acres of Snow started at 12 and would likely go for 8-10 hours, but I could skip the first 2 hours because of the mulligan round Sunday night. Through The Ages was at 10 and was the third heat. I already had a first and an incredibly close second (lost by 1 point) so ideally I should have been in a good way to make it to the semis already. Unfortunately the posted tiebreakers cared about your third best result instead of how close your second was and they were treating a last place as being better than not playing at all. This meant I would lose to any first-second-showed up combo. I was musing about this last night with Sceadeau and Randy (the GM) and thought that maybe I should just show up and use the honourable withdrawl rule to concede on turn 1 and get a third place. Randy immediately said he'd just give me a third place in the scoring system if I showed up instead of having me screw over a game. I don't think I would have screwed over a game but the fact that I 'should' have done so is a bit of a problem and letting me just get a third is certainly a good solution. Randy said he's going to change the tiebreakers next year to fix this issue by only counting your top two finishes.
I decided I didn't want to risk a Through The Ages game going more than 4 hours and causing me to miss A Few Acres of Snow which looked to be mine for the taking so I ended up showing up at 10 and getting my third place. I ended up being by far the best 1-2-3 record but that was only good enough for 19th place with top 16 advancing. If I'd gotten up to 1-2-2 I would have been the best of those and finished something like 14th and made the semis. Oh well.
What I did end up doing was playing A Few Acres of Snow at 12. The GM let me know that I could play round 1, lose, and still advance because I won the mulligan round the night before. Great! Maybe I can play someone good for a stupidly high bid and figure out what a reasonable bid is going to be. Not to be. My opponent had played once before. He let me have the British for 3 and then proceeded to never use any of the free actions. I did my only British opener (buy rangers, make 6 and buy governor, governor away Pemaquid and St Mary's, make money and buy guns, attack, win) and blew him up.
Round 2 put me up against someone who didn't understand the bidding system and didn't know the game but had been told a rudimentary British strategy. He thought we were bidding victory points instead of bonus actions and was planning on winning by taking Quebec so points wouldn't matter. This is true and is why points aren't the bidding currency. At any rate I ended up accepting a bid of 7 to play the French. After I accepted the bid he let me know that he had another event in 2 hours so he was going to concede just before he won. I think that's sketchy and would rather he knock me out and then drop. The game went about as expected except he screwed up pretty badly by not realizing he could put his ships cards into the fight. Oddly enough he knew he could buy the ships card for 6 and put it into the fight but never realized he could put Norfolk and New Haven in. He did put Boston and New York in and then either had weak draws or misplayed and consistently made 2 or 3 dollars per turn instead of 6. This let me keep up in military power during our Port Royal fight while disking out most of my board. I screwed up by putting Montreal on the fight before settling Fort Frontenac so I couldn't end the game immediately upon termination of the fight in Port Royal. He wanted to concede because he couldn't see a way the fight would end until I pointed out to him that he could put Norfolk on the pile. He promptly won the fight. He also beiseged and won in Halifax (I raided Port Royal away to slow him down from attacking Louisbourg) and managed to settle and disk up Fort Frontenac and Oswego before he won in Halifax. I then conceded the fight in Halifax and won the game on points.
Round 3 had me face off against Alex Henning. I'd been watching her and her brother (other Nick) play in the first round and saw that they'd both played, and won, as the French by going a hardcore disking strategy against people who didn't go hardcore attacking. She let me have the British for 2 and let me know that she'd only played like 4 games total and only as the French but had been told a good strategy by her brother. This let me know what her plan was, but it didn't matter at all. I have a very specific British strategy that I use every game. I used it this game and it worked as expected but it was actually relatively close to her disking out in time to win. The key was that I managed to siege Port Royal and Halifax before she could disk them up which both gave her two dead cards and which forced her to settle an extra two locations in the west before she could use up all of her disks. A close game, but not one any different than the games on Yucata where I win every time as the British.
Round 4 was against Nick Henning's friend and apparently the only person he ever played against before WBC. They're pretty good at games in general and had worked out a strong French strategy but I don't know that they ever used the full hardcore British attack. People kept referring to the British attack plan as the 'Halifax Hammer' because everyone seems to think you should take Halifax first. I ignore Halifax and kill Port Royal and it works just fine, thanks! I believe he let me be the British for 5 this game. He opened the game with a very fast siege of Pemaquid on turn 2. I managed to keep that fit going while I worked to governor away my bad cards and starting buying stuff. I did this by buying my siege artillery early on and throwing it into the fight. After I'd stabilized he ended up buying his siege artillery and throwing it and coureurs de bois into the Pemaquid fight to put me down by 4. I couldn't stop the fight but I could attack Port Royal with my regular infantry and my rangers! He won Pemaquid, I won Port Royal. He couldn't settle since Quebec was in the fight. I could settle and now had Port Royal. I started a quick siege of Louisbourg but hadn't quite realized I was behind in military strength (I lost a regular when Pemaquid resolved but he lost nothing when Port Royal resolved) and ended up losing the fight in Louisbourg. I bought a couple more regulars and went right back in and won this time. From there it was an easy trek to Quebec.
Round 5, the finals, was against Nick Henning himself. He bid me up a little more than the other two did but not by much. I got the British for 6 and pretty much knew he was going to use the same strategy I'd just beaten the previous two rounds. He again sieged Pemaquid on turn 2 but I had a better hand setup to deal with it this time. I had both Norfolk and New Haven on hand! Right into the pile they went! Good-bye mediocre cards! I governored away the really terrible cards and went to work making money. Pemaquid was tied up with 4 strength apiece and I had a fresh regular in hand (my deck at this point being rangers, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and maybe a regular) and he thought I was going to put the regular into Pemaquid to win the fight. Nope! I attacked Port Royal with it instead. I really like this plan since it ties up some of my bad cards and some of his good cards for the rest of the game or until he withdraws from the fight. Every single turn from here on was some combination of make 6 dollars, buy a regular, or put a regular into the Port Royal fight. Nick was doing a good job of ambushing my regulars with his 4 ambush cards but I really don't care. I think it's actually a new positive for the British to lose a regular in an ambush as long as they have a rangers to block and can make 6 a turn. Eventually I won in Port Royal and moved on to Louisbourg. He got me into a tricky position where I was going to lose the fight in Louisbourg unless I put one of my 4 good cards into the fight. I chose to put New York in and bought a ships card instead of a regular which surprised Nick and all the spectators. I then proceeded to keep making 6 a turn using the ships instead of New York and eventually was able to start buying regulars to put into the fight. He'd been working on expanding a little to the west and was trying to use Quebec and intendant to get all his disks into play before I could hit Quebec. Ultimately I won in Louisbourg and reserved my ships card. I actually like buying a ships because a siege of Quebec is hard to set up while digging for Louisbourg but being able to reserver ships (and not locations) lowers the constraints on the specific hand you can build. Louisbourg ended up being the last card in my deck after the reshuffle which was really unfortunate and let Nick get all but 2 of his disks in play before I could start a siege. He'd pulled off a couple ambushes while I was waiting for Louisbourg and I didn't think I had the stuff to take Quebec just yet. Fortunately for me the one starting location he had yet to disk was Trois Rivieres. So I started a siege there instead! I won that fight in relatively short order and settled it. By this point I'd cycled back into the Louisbourg card and launched an attack on Tadoussac. Nick had run out of money ambushing by this point and tried to trader with a bunch of western furs. I pointed out that he couldn't actually use those cards anymore since they had no support from Quebec once he lost the fight in Trois Rivieres. He finished the turn, thought a bit more as I won the fight in Tadoussac, and conceded. I was up on points and he had 2 functional location cards left (Quebec itself and Gaspe) and no real way to actually take actions anymore. Victory!
I'd been worried that there was a degenerate French strategy with a medium bid value which involved cycling into newly bought military cards for a quick win in Boston. I don't think anyone had tested such a thing (i only thought of it in the shower before the event) and I don't feel anyone really used their free actions to the fullest extent (by cycling extra times to force a key reshuffle). The entire event I kept hearing people talking strategy and everyone seemed to think there was an appropriate counter to any strategy and the game was therefore well balanced and there isn't a British problem. I think they're all crazy and maybe after the event people will believe me more? Though I guess really all I proved was that I can beat new players and the Henning strategy so maybe there really is a counter to my plan out there. All I know is no one has ever used it against me.
After the event Pounder thought I should go eat so went to Olive and Jasmin's Asian Bistro. It turns out it shut down in the last year since the doors were locked and the tables removed. Frowns. I ended up wating at Fuddrucker's again. I had a burger this time and it was ok. The bun was terrible so I just ate it with a knife and fork.
After food Pounder and I played two games of Innovation. He won the first one by getting into age 6 while I was still in age 1 thanks to a good combo of cards. I won the second one because Pounder ramped into age 10 while I was still in age 7 but I was able to trade my lowest card in hand for his 2 highest cards (both 10s) and both of those cards had winning clauses which won the game for me. Woo!
The night brought either Ra or Vegas Showdown. I decided I really didn't want to play a thinking game after a day of A Few Acres of Snow so I went to play Ra. I ended up at a table with Alex Henning again. Fortunately for her I'm terrible at Ra so I wasn't going to manhandle her in Ra the way I did in A Few Acres of Snow. The game went like most Ra games do where I call Ra super-aggressively and then lose when I'm forced to buy bad things by people who want to punish me for being aggressive. Round 2 I had the sun combo of 1-2-8 and actually got the best buys I think since the age ended with most people still having suns to go. Ultimately the scores ended up 40-38-36-26-24 with me being the 36 after having lost 5 points for lowest suns. Grr! Alex was the 38 and Dominic from Quebec was the 40.
Open gaming featured a 5 player game of Agricola with Robb, Pounder, Daniel E, and Winton. We borrowed the pimpest of pimped Agricola sets I've ever seen with ludicrous clay meeple things for all the resourced and families. I played the green player whose families was entirely redheads. Woo! I rarely play Agricola and we drafted the cards and I feel like I didn't know what was good or not. I ended up drafting 3 different cards that scored bonus points for eating pigs so I went that route. I managed to get 12 wood onto the basin maker! I ended up coming last thanks to tiebreakers with Robb but since Daniel gave Robb 2 points on the last turn in order to spite Pounder from getting 1 food I'm going to take a moral 4th place.
Off to Waffle House where I had an All-Star. Then sleep. Sweet, sweet sleep.
I decided I didn't want to risk a Through The Ages game going more than 4 hours and causing me to miss A Few Acres of Snow which looked to be mine for the taking so I ended up showing up at 10 and getting my third place. I ended up being by far the best 1-2-3 record but that was only good enough for 19th place with top 16 advancing. If I'd gotten up to 1-2-2 I would have been the best of those and finished something like 14th and made the semis. Oh well.
What I did end up doing was playing A Few Acres of Snow at 12. The GM let me know that I could play round 1, lose, and still advance because I won the mulligan round the night before. Great! Maybe I can play someone good for a stupidly high bid and figure out what a reasonable bid is going to be. Not to be. My opponent had played once before. He let me have the British for 3 and then proceeded to never use any of the free actions. I did my only British opener (buy rangers, make 6 and buy governor, governor away Pemaquid and St Mary's, make money and buy guns, attack, win) and blew him up.
Round 2 put me up against someone who didn't understand the bidding system and didn't know the game but had been told a rudimentary British strategy. He thought we were bidding victory points instead of bonus actions and was planning on winning by taking Quebec so points wouldn't matter. This is true and is why points aren't the bidding currency. At any rate I ended up accepting a bid of 7 to play the French. After I accepted the bid he let me know that he had another event in 2 hours so he was going to concede just before he won. I think that's sketchy and would rather he knock me out and then drop. The game went about as expected except he screwed up pretty badly by not realizing he could put his ships cards into the fight. Oddly enough he knew he could buy the ships card for 6 and put it into the fight but never realized he could put Norfolk and New Haven in. He did put Boston and New York in and then either had weak draws or misplayed and consistently made 2 or 3 dollars per turn instead of 6. This let me keep up in military power during our Port Royal fight while disking out most of my board. I screwed up by putting Montreal on the fight before settling Fort Frontenac so I couldn't end the game immediately upon termination of the fight in Port Royal. He wanted to concede because he couldn't see a way the fight would end until I pointed out to him that he could put Norfolk on the pile. He promptly won the fight. He also beiseged and won in Halifax (I raided Port Royal away to slow him down from attacking Louisbourg) and managed to settle and disk up Fort Frontenac and Oswego before he won in Halifax. I then conceded the fight in Halifax and won the game on points.
Round 3 had me face off against Alex Henning. I'd been watching her and her brother (other Nick) play in the first round and saw that they'd both played, and won, as the French by going a hardcore disking strategy against people who didn't go hardcore attacking. She let me have the British for 2 and let me know that she'd only played like 4 games total and only as the French but had been told a good strategy by her brother. This let me know what her plan was, but it didn't matter at all. I have a very specific British strategy that I use every game. I used it this game and it worked as expected but it was actually relatively close to her disking out in time to win. The key was that I managed to siege Port Royal and Halifax before she could disk them up which both gave her two dead cards and which forced her to settle an extra two locations in the west before she could use up all of her disks. A close game, but not one any different than the games on Yucata where I win every time as the British.
Round 4 was against Nick Henning's friend and apparently the only person he ever played against before WBC. They're pretty good at games in general and had worked out a strong French strategy but I don't know that they ever used the full hardcore British attack. People kept referring to the British attack plan as the 'Halifax Hammer' because everyone seems to think you should take Halifax first. I ignore Halifax and kill Port Royal and it works just fine, thanks! I believe he let me be the British for 5 this game. He opened the game with a very fast siege of Pemaquid on turn 2. I managed to keep that fit going while I worked to governor away my bad cards and starting buying stuff. I did this by buying my siege artillery early on and throwing it into the fight. After I'd stabilized he ended up buying his siege artillery and throwing it and coureurs de bois into the Pemaquid fight to put me down by 4. I couldn't stop the fight but I could attack Port Royal with my regular infantry and my rangers! He won Pemaquid, I won Port Royal. He couldn't settle since Quebec was in the fight. I could settle and now had Port Royal. I started a quick siege of Louisbourg but hadn't quite realized I was behind in military strength (I lost a regular when Pemaquid resolved but he lost nothing when Port Royal resolved) and ended up losing the fight in Louisbourg. I bought a couple more regulars and went right back in and won this time. From there it was an easy trek to Quebec.
Round 5, the finals, was against Nick Henning himself. He bid me up a little more than the other two did but not by much. I got the British for 6 and pretty much knew he was going to use the same strategy I'd just beaten the previous two rounds. He again sieged Pemaquid on turn 2 but I had a better hand setup to deal with it this time. I had both Norfolk and New Haven on hand! Right into the pile they went! Good-bye mediocre cards! I governored away the really terrible cards and went to work making money. Pemaquid was tied up with 4 strength apiece and I had a fresh regular in hand (my deck at this point being rangers, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and maybe a regular) and he thought I was going to put the regular into Pemaquid to win the fight. Nope! I attacked Port Royal with it instead. I really like this plan since it ties up some of my bad cards and some of his good cards for the rest of the game or until he withdraws from the fight. Every single turn from here on was some combination of make 6 dollars, buy a regular, or put a regular into the Port Royal fight. Nick was doing a good job of ambushing my regulars with his 4 ambush cards but I really don't care. I think it's actually a new positive for the British to lose a regular in an ambush as long as they have a rangers to block and can make 6 a turn. Eventually I won in Port Royal and moved on to Louisbourg. He got me into a tricky position where I was going to lose the fight in Louisbourg unless I put one of my 4 good cards into the fight. I chose to put New York in and bought a ships card instead of a regular which surprised Nick and all the spectators. I then proceeded to keep making 6 a turn using the ships instead of New York and eventually was able to start buying regulars to put into the fight. He'd been working on expanding a little to the west and was trying to use Quebec and intendant to get all his disks into play before I could hit Quebec. Ultimately I won in Louisbourg and reserved my ships card. I actually like buying a ships because a siege of Quebec is hard to set up while digging for Louisbourg but being able to reserver ships (and not locations) lowers the constraints on the specific hand you can build. Louisbourg ended up being the last card in my deck after the reshuffle which was really unfortunate and let Nick get all but 2 of his disks in play before I could start a siege. He'd pulled off a couple ambushes while I was waiting for Louisbourg and I didn't think I had the stuff to take Quebec just yet. Fortunately for me the one starting location he had yet to disk was Trois Rivieres. So I started a siege there instead! I won that fight in relatively short order and settled it. By this point I'd cycled back into the Louisbourg card and launched an attack on Tadoussac. Nick had run out of money ambushing by this point and tried to trader with a bunch of western furs. I pointed out that he couldn't actually use those cards anymore since they had no support from Quebec once he lost the fight in Trois Rivieres. He finished the turn, thought a bit more as I won the fight in Tadoussac, and conceded. I was up on points and he had 2 functional location cards left (Quebec itself and Gaspe) and no real way to actually take actions anymore. Victory!
I'd been worried that there was a degenerate French strategy with a medium bid value which involved cycling into newly bought military cards for a quick win in Boston. I don't think anyone had tested such a thing (i only thought of it in the shower before the event) and I don't feel anyone really used their free actions to the fullest extent (by cycling extra times to force a key reshuffle). The entire event I kept hearing people talking strategy and everyone seemed to think there was an appropriate counter to any strategy and the game was therefore well balanced and there isn't a British problem. I think they're all crazy and maybe after the event people will believe me more? Though I guess really all I proved was that I can beat new players and the Henning strategy so maybe there really is a counter to my plan out there. All I know is no one has ever used it against me.
After the event Pounder thought I should go eat so went to Olive and Jasmin's Asian Bistro. It turns out it shut down in the last year since the doors were locked and the tables removed. Frowns. I ended up wating at Fuddrucker's again. I had a burger this time and it was ok. The bun was terrible so I just ate it with a knife and fork.
After food Pounder and I played two games of Innovation. He won the first one by getting into age 6 while I was still in age 1 thanks to a good combo of cards. I won the second one because Pounder ramped into age 10 while I was still in age 7 but I was able to trade my lowest card in hand for his 2 highest cards (both 10s) and both of those cards had winning clauses which won the game for me. Woo!
The night brought either Ra or Vegas Showdown. I decided I really didn't want to play a thinking game after a day of A Few Acres of Snow so I went to play Ra. I ended up at a table with Alex Henning again. Fortunately for her I'm terrible at Ra so I wasn't going to manhandle her in Ra the way I did in A Few Acres of Snow. The game went like most Ra games do where I call Ra super-aggressively and then lose when I'm forced to buy bad things by people who want to punish me for being aggressive. Round 2 I had the sun combo of 1-2-8 and actually got the best buys I think since the age ended with most people still having suns to go. Ultimately the scores ended up 40-38-36-26-24 with me being the 36 after having lost 5 points for lowest suns. Grr! Alex was the 38 and Dominic from Quebec was the 40.
Open gaming featured a 5 player game of Agricola with Robb, Pounder, Daniel E, and Winton. We borrowed the pimpest of pimped Agricola sets I've ever seen with ludicrous clay meeple things for all the resourced and families. I played the green player whose families was entirely redheads. Woo! I rarely play Agricola and we drafted the cards and I feel like I didn't know what was good or not. I ended up drafting 3 different cards that scored bonus points for eating pigs so I went that route. I managed to get 12 wood onto the basin maker! I ended up coming last thanks to tiebreakers with Robb but since Daniel gave Robb 2 points on the last turn in order to spite Pounder from getting 1 food I'm going to take a moral 4th place.
Off to Waffle House where I had an All-Star. Then sleep. Sweet, sweet sleep.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
WBC 2011 - Day 7
The last Sunday of WBC tends to be a fairly quiet day. There are only 3 games with open heats with 16 other games having their finals in the morning. Pounder and I don't take Monday off work so if we're going to get home at any reasonable hour to sleep for work we need to leave before they even take place. Or at least we should, anyway. Puerto Rico holds both the semis and finals on Sunday morning and for 2 of the last 3 years one of us made the finals. This has lead to a semi-joking ban from playing Puerto Rico since we probably don't get to leave until 2 in the afternoon if we do make it to the finals.
This year there was a new wrench in the works... No functioning car. Were we going to have to spend an extra night? Cab to Philly and fly home? Who knows! I briefly considered trying to wake up early to play Transamerica but that seemed a little mean to Pounder who had to wake up extra early to try to get the car fixed. Better to sleep in to make sure I could be awake on the ride home. And I'm terrible at Transamerica anyway.
We checked out of the room and gave our suitcases to the front desk for safe keeping while we waited for news on the car. Pounder kept calling to harass the garage about it. (They'd towed it fine but had no empty bays to work on it and the squeaky Canadian wheel hopefully gets the grease, eh?) We played a few hands of Bottle Imp in the lobby. Bottle Imp is an interesting little trick taking game with an ever shrinking trump suit. Scoring is quirky in that the person who takes the last trick with a trump scores negative points instead of positive points for the hand. (Their soul gets banished to hell.) Fun game.
We ate and then Robb had a nap on a coach in the hotel lobby while Pounder and I played a game of Innovation. By this point the garage had given us a rough estimate and it was looking like I'd get home around 1am with Pounder and Robb getting to Waterloo around 2. Our game was cut short when they called an hour early saying the car was ready to be picked up. Pounder headed out in a cab while I cleaned up the game and then read some more Game of Thrones.
The ride home was pretty uneventful (flash showers aside) though I discovered you can get pretzles as McDonalds in the states. It was pretty good! Ultimately I got home before midnight so the threat of lost work was gone. (And the hotel internet still wasn't fixed in the morning so I had no way to get in contact with anyone about maybe being absent. Very frustrating that they couldn't get the internet to work.)
This year there was a new wrench in the works... No functioning car. Were we going to have to spend an extra night? Cab to Philly and fly home? Who knows! I briefly considered trying to wake up early to play Transamerica but that seemed a little mean to Pounder who had to wake up extra early to try to get the car fixed. Better to sleep in to make sure I could be awake on the ride home. And I'm terrible at Transamerica anyway.
We checked out of the room and gave our suitcases to the front desk for safe keeping while we waited for news on the car. Pounder kept calling to harass the garage about it. (They'd towed it fine but had no empty bays to work on it and the squeaky Canadian wheel hopefully gets the grease, eh?) We played a few hands of Bottle Imp in the lobby. Bottle Imp is an interesting little trick taking game with an ever shrinking trump suit. Scoring is quirky in that the person who takes the last trick with a trump scores negative points instead of positive points for the hand. (Their soul gets banished to hell.) Fun game.
We ate and then Robb had a nap on a coach in the hotel lobby while Pounder and I played a game of Innovation. By this point the garage had given us a rough estimate and it was looking like I'd get home around 1am with Pounder and Robb getting to Waterloo around 2. Our game was cut short when they called an hour early saying the car was ready to be picked up. Pounder headed out in a cab while I cleaned up the game and then read some more Game of Thrones.
The ride home was pretty uneventful (flash showers aside) though I discovered you can get pretzles as McDonalds in the states. It was pretty good! Ultimately I got home before midnight so the threat of lost work was gone. (And the hotel internet still wasn't fixed in the morning so I had no way to get in contact with anyone about maybe being absent. Very frustrating that they couldn't get the internet to work.)
Thursday, August 04, 2011
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.
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.
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