2014 WBC: Day 7

Friday morning brought the finals for my team game, Le Havre. I was up against Pounder and a 3rd guy I didn't recognize. Thanks to the format for the tournament I again got to start in first seat due to my 2 wins in the heats. Pounder was the next highest seed so he was in second chair and I would again be fed by a 3rd guy who didn't have a history of success in the event. The first tile again had a wood on it and I got to start with 3 wood and the 4 cost building firm into marketplace. Unfortunately this time I was playing with someone else who really wanted to vendor the sawmill for half a wooden boat so Pounder jumped right into the marketplace. I think he'd first picked cash to buy the 6 cost building firm too, so he even got 3 things. In retrospect I now think maybe it's right to not build the marketplace, especially if someone else buys the 6 cost building firm. Maybe I should be first picking clay so I can grab a single iron and build the sawmill the hard way?

Anyway, the colliery was pretty easy to access in this game (under both the clay mound and black market) and I set up to get it. Pounder build the building on top of them, righty bought the clay mound, and I was able to buy the black market and construction firm up the colliery and the local court. Which I vendor shortly thereafter for a wooden boat of my own! Pounder is all in on operation use the colliery, and so is the 3rd guy, actually to the exclusion of taking what had always seemed like a required grab of 2 iron. Twice during the mid-game I got to take 3 iron offers... Now this does mean I was also turning down at least 2 shots at 2 iron, so it's not like people were going crazy. But I definitely had a ton of iron. I'd also managed to pull off a couple of big black market grabs (2 iron, 2 cows and 2 iron, 2 wood, 2 francs) which may have made the other players leery about taking 2 iron and giving up another black market play?

At one point I'd made 6 bricks because I had a bunch of clay and there were some good buildings available and then I made a double build of cokery and steel mill. I'm not sure how right that was. They are worth 40 points combined which is a pretty good action, but it also meant I was going to be at the end of the line for converting coal to coke and then iron to steel. The coal totals were something like 21 for Pounder, 17 for me, and 9 for the 3rd guy? (One of the special buildings let you convert food to coal and charcoal and Pounder killed his cows in order to use that building while I did not.) The iron totals were more like 2 for Pounder, 3 for 3rd guy, 6 for me so I felt like even getting to make stuff 3rd it would probably still work out ok for me. Then the town built a special building (I never once used the marketplace so I didn't know what could be coming) and the steel works hit. 15 energy and one iron for two steel. Pounder now suddenly had a really good way to get the stuff for multiple steel ships. This felt like a real problem for me and I went into the tank. I ended up deciding I had no way to handle it and just bought it so I'd at least get some entry fee action back. Pounder went to it and was able to snag the first steel ship. Then he went back for 2 more and could get the second one. I ended up getting to make my coke and decided that rather than wait around for the 3rd steel ship I'd just ship a bunch of coke and buy the second one. I did later build the 4th one as well.

As the game wound down I ended up counting up my symbols and found I had almost all of the bank related symbols and was able to buy it for a profit. I don't think I mentioned it, but I did the same thing in the semifinals with the town hall. Rarely is it ever worthwhile to pay the hugely inflated prices for those buildings but I got to do it two games in a row. Woo!

I ended up breaking 300 for the 3rd game in a row. Pounder came in at around 276 and the 3rd guy was around 200. Victory!

Pounder and I then headed to the Agricola room to play in the noon heat. We arrived and most of the players were already seated even though we were about 5 minutes early. I guess the Agricola crowd is a lot of eager beavers. Unfortunately for us the GM had underestimated how many tables he'd need and we ended up standing around with Sceadeau and it looking like we would all have to play each other despite showing up on time for the heat. This is contrast to the previous heat where they'd started too many tables and I was going to get stuck at a 5 player game until Elaine stepped up for us. This heat ended up having a few more people straggle in and they were able to start 2 tables from those of us standing around. I get the desire for efficiency but it does feel like pre-pairing people before knowing how many games will need to happen is error prone. But I guess for most people it probably worked out great?

I ended up at a table with Pounder, Steve LeWinter, and a 4th I don't remember. I didn't get the guildmaster this game so I didn't know what to do. In fact, I don't remember a single thing about this game. Except that I came 3rd and Steve won.

I could have gone to play Spyrium or Stone Age but the right choice was definitely to eat. Pounder, Sceadeau, and I walked to Red Robin and Elaine met us there with their car. I tried out their salted caramel milkshake because I love salt on everything. Except, it turns out, in a milkshake. It was not very tasty and I didn't drink very much of it at all. The burger was delicious though!

I then could have gone to play Wits & Wagers but decided to chill in the room for a bit. That got boring and I eventually wandered down and found that Pounder, Robb, Sara, and Duncan were a team for Wits & Wagers and there was a spare chair right beside them... Ok, fine, Wits & Wagers it is! I got to the game in time to share my wisdom about fish. The fastest fish in the world definitely clocked in at a massive FOUR miles per hour! We ended up losing everything at the end but that's ok because the rules are made up and the points don't matter!

Following Wits & Wagers was potentially the Agricola semifinals. Would a 1st, a 2nd, and a 3rd be good enough to advance? Turns out the answer was yes! The semifinals were going to use the WM deck mixed in with the E, I, and K decks. This was going to be a problem for me since I've never seen WM cards. Daniel showed me a few of the better ones but then I got thrown into the deep end. I started off by taking a guy that lets you get an extra building resource each time you take building resources but you have to spread them out on the board to collect later. Turning reed+stone+food into reed+stone+stone+food felt good to me, so I decided to run it. I then got passed guildmaster (that guy's good with extra stone!) and then stonecutter! I now had a plan for my game. Collect some stone and try to buy all of the stone things. The minor were passed the other way and the guy passing to me (Rob, the GM) made a comment about how he was really hooking me up with one card in his pack. I looked through the 6 cards and couldn't see anything amazing. There was a baking tray that would combo very well with my stonecutter... But there was also a WM card that looked very confusing. It was a ram that ate food each harvest and cost a sheep to play but counted as a sheep for breeding and scoring. It also let you breed sheep 4 extra times during the game. A single stable would be enough to let the ram and a sheep breed up an extra sheep for 2 food over and over again. Assuming you had a fireplace anyway. I assumed that since it was the card I didn't recognize and that the pack had a 'bomb' in it that it must be that card and took it. It turns out that was a mistake. Maybe I was getting pranked? Rob later said baking tray was the bomb card though it ended up going 4th and went unplayed. I sure wish I'd had it though since it would have been awesome with my stonecutter. *sigh* I then took a card that lets you demolish a built wooden room for 7 fences. You have to build fences before you reno but if you pull that off it feels really good. I used that to get enough space to breed sheep normally and didn't really need the bonus from the ram. I eventually played him because I'm stubborn and it was a minor food bonus (and a point) but taking him over the baking tray probably cost me the game. I also ended up with the cabinetmaker (4 wood if guildmaster is already in play) and the village well. My game plan was pretty clear. Collect lots of resources and build as many majors as I could get my grubby little hands on.

It worked out pretty well, though I misplayed at one point. I had the resources to build the pottery and I wanted to play guildmaster. If I build pottery first and then play guildmaster I get 2 clay. If I do it the other way I get 4 clay. 4 is bigger than 2! Unfortunately I played guildmaster and then Rob snap bought the pottery. I actually needed the 2 food from the pottery to feed myself that round and ended up having to take 3 food off traveling players instead. Doing it the other way safeties the contract and might have been enough in and of itself to win me the game. Certainly if I had baking tray I feel like I'd have won the game. As it is I ended up coming a pretty close 3rd, and then probably only because no one else at the table had read one of the cards played by the guy on my right. It made a single cow into a 4 point play for him and other people could have taken it as a good point action for themselves and screwed him. Considering how close the game was that was probably the difference. The guy on my right (Eric) ended up winning by a point over Rob who was a couple points ahead of me. I do feel like with more practice (and having ever seen the WM deck) I probably win that game. Oh well. There's always next year?

This game finished in time for Liar's Dice so I ran off to play at a table with Robb, Sceadeau, Pounder, Elaine, and Andy Latto. Robb smoked us and then chose more Liar's Dice over Waffle House. Mistakes! Waffle House so good!

2014 WBC: Day 6

Thursday morning brought the second heat of my team game. I knew the format this year for Le Havre had changed to preferentially play 3 player games in all rounds and I wanted to do what I could to make sure the semis and finals got as close to exactly 9 people as I could. The first heat had 6 games, which meant 6 winners. Assuming the second heat had the same attendance that would make 12 winners which sure looks like 4 player games in the semis to me. So I decided that I wanted to play to knock someone else out to limit the winners to 11. I also really like the game and haven't played it enough so I wanted to play it again anyway. It also turns out that the listed format for the event included information on seeding for the semis and finals so winning a second game would keep me from having to play other people who won 2 games in the semis and would actually also guarantee I get 1st seat in the semis unless there were at least 4 double winners. So it was a really, really good idea to play a second heat.

I showed up close to 9 after once again stopping by the Coke machine for some morning caffeine. This time the Coke bottle said I should share a Coke with Nick. I took that to be a good sign! I wander into the room where Le Havre is setting up and Mike Kaltman accosts me for coming in to play. He has apparently already convinced Daniel Eppolito to skip this heat in order to play Ra Dice in the same room. (I wonder if as assistant GM he told Daniel about the seeding plan and how advantageous it would be to win a second heat? He sure didn't tell me.) Mike tries his best to dissuade me from playing which feels like a really bad thing for someone to do. I get why he did it (he lost his first heat and needed to win this one to advance and his odds of doing so go down if Daniel or I get placed at his table) but it really rubs me the wrong way. So when I get assigned a seat and it's at Mike's table I get a grin on my face.

It ends up being a 3 player game and I get 1st chair. I buy my 4 cost building firm and pick up wood. I build the marketplace. I go to the marketplace. I get the sawmill. I sell it with something else (probably wood at the joinery, maybe a franc offer) to get a wooden boat. Pretty standard stuff. I set it up so the first or second special building to drop is the farm. This building has a 1 franc entry fee and pays out 2 wood, 2 fish, 2 grain, 1 cow, and 1 hide. This was still early enough in the game that 3 wood is a near instant grab... Would you trade a wood for 5 things? I would! And did, a couple of different times. I didn't take a grain offer or a cow offer and got set up to harvest that stuff from the farm. No one else at my table was willing to do so. I don't really understand why. Getting 4 extra things to ship (the grain and cows) for an early action is pretty good and it's a way to get some of the extra wood people desperately crave in the early game. Sure, fish suck, but when they come as an add-on it's fine. (I will also note that in Mike's recap of the event he talks about how he thinks the game is stale and boring because everyone does the same things to win and the special buildings aren't important enough. But I thought this special building was important enough and I do think going to it gave me an early edge that eventually snowballed into a bunch of points.)

The early game is also about setting up to be the person who gets to build the colliery. I did some mental math and worked out that I wasn't going to be able to build the colliery until the town built a building to unlock it, and that Mike was going to get first crack at building after the town did so. He had the resources on hand to build it, so things were looking a little bleak for me. But then he took a build action and spent a bunch of his resources... Even worse for him, he built the building that was blocking the colliery. I was now the one in line to get the colliery, and super early too. I did, and I used it a ton while the other players often skipped their chances to use it.

From that point it was pretty much all over. I got all of the things and scored all of the points. I think it was my highest score ever, well over 300. The third player at the table commented on how her 186ish point total was also her highest score ever. I feel like that's what happens when the table essentially colludes to power the colliery out fast. The early colliery action combined with the early farm meant I really wasn't taking offers at the rate you'd normally expect in a game. This let all the offers build up more for everyone which means all the scores are going to go up. The more actions the table takes to earn resources without taking an offer the higher the scores should go. The game was also super fast and was done in under 2 hours. I don't know how much of that was the table giving up from my early lead and just going through the motions? Or how much of it was us all just being naturally fast players?

I considered going to play something like Galaxy Trucker at noon but decided I'd rather tool around a bit on the internet and then go eat. I ended up bumping into Sceadeau and Elaine and baby and we headed off to Red Robin. It was here while Sceadeau was talking to the waitress about sides that I discovered that even though the steamed carrots were taken off of the menu they still exist in the restaurant and I could totally get some instead of the random fruit salad. Hurray!

4 o'clock came around and it was time for two different semifinals. I could play Le Havre, my team game, or I could play Galaxy Trucker. Had to be my team game! I hope next year these games end up scheduled at times that don't conflict with each other so I can do both. It was now that I really figured out just how important it was that I played that second heat. They used a wonky formula to break ties and I'm not sure how relevant it was? It had something to do with percentage of points at the table or something but my numbers were pretty low. I feel like beating Nick Vayn in the first heat should have been worth more than crushing people who really didn't know what they were doing like Pounder did in his heat but his tiebreaker ended up way higher than mine. I'm not sure if there would have been a better way to do it? Randomly amongst people who didn't play a second heat maybe? Really encourage everyone to play twice... Anyway, I ended up being the only double winner so I was the #1 seed and would get to be starting player in every game. Unfortunately for me Daniel E ended up as the #6 seed because he didn't play (and win) a second heat. This meant that we were, once again, matched up in the semifinals. Along with the #7 seed who was not nearly as experienced with the game as we were. As another advantage of the seeding system it was mandated that we sat in order 1-6-7 which meant random guy would be playing immediately before me. Hurray!

I started by taking 3 wood and buying the 4 cost building firm. Daniel took dollars and didn't buy anything. (I figured he was probably saving up to buy a boat.) 3rd player took a wheat. I built the marketplace on my turn. Then the 3rd guy took 3 clay on Daniel's turn. Daniel cracked a sarcastic joke about how he was playing the game. 3rd guy responded by putting the 3 clay in front of Daniel instead of back on the board. This prompted another sarcastic remark about how Daniel might want to make his own moves and then he made a big show of going into the tank to consider all the possible options. Parsing the order of the buildings for colliery plays, that sort of thing. He eventually settled on taking the 3 clay. 3rd guy took some wood and then I went to the marketplace for clay, iron, coal. Daniel immediately remarked that he'd made a mistake by taking the clay and he'd thrown away the game due to rust. 3rd guy would have nothing of it, thinking my position was not very good and saying things about how he routinely crushes people who vendor the sawmill for a boat. This seemed like a ridiculously statement for him to make, especially since he'd commented when he sat down about how he only plays 4 player games and has never played with only 3. He'd asked us for the differences and we'd honestly told him the important stuff. I guess he decided we had to be wrong since I was making a play for the important stuff and he thought I was making a mistake.

To make a long story short... I was not making a mistake. I don't know that I was guaranteed to win after turn 2 or anything but I'd definitely put my odds much higher than those of the other players. And I did end up winning by a pretty significant margin, again scoring over 300 points and winning by 50 or 60 over Daniel and 150 over the 3rd guy.

The game wasn't terribly interesting after the opening. Daniel played very slowly which is a difference from previous years but I think he was trying to find a line of play to dig himself out of the early hole he was in from my early strength. I got the colliery when Daniel parsed out that I was guaranteed to get it and gave up on trying to block my build of it. He instead went to it once and squatted for a long time. He finally moved, told the 3rd guy it was his turn to go in and squat, and that's what the 3rd guy tried to do. Unfortunately for them the next special building was the harbour watch I'd carefully preserved on top of the deck. Daniel said he considered vendoring one of his buildings solely to go to my marketplace to check for a dangerous building because I'd checked to see who got first crack to buy this one. But it wasn't me who had first crack, and I would have first crack next time, so it was entirely possible I'd done it in order to bury something away from 3rd guy. And it would have been costly to give up on his other action and lose a building for a couple goods and some information. It was probably only right solely when the top building was precisely harbour watch. But it was, and it meant the plan of squat in the colliery was thrown out the window. Even worse, 3rd guy didn't understand how powerful the building was and failed to buy it. I did. Which meant I could use my own colliery for 1 franc any time I wasn't personally the one inside. Daniel also made use of the harbour watch to kick me out of the colliery every now and then. Third guy refused to do so. Either because he didn't want to give me stuff or more likely because he simply didn't understand what was going on. He also flat our refused to build a boat. He sat around making food in order to feed himself every round instead of getting a boat. It was baffling. I even reminded him at one point that I had a modernized wharf since he had a lot of iron in front of him but he didn't care. He'd rather pay Daniel a franc to smoke 6 more fish or to slaughter more cows. I actually thought during the game that he was flat out trying to kingmake Daniel because of how much he refused to take actions that were good for him if they would give me anything. Maybe to prove Daniel wrong with his early game assertion that I'd already won? But in retrospect he might just have been _really_ bad. I can't figure out any other reason to refuse to build boats. No boats means no shipping. What are you doing to score points if you never ship? Build stuff I guess, but he wasn't building a lot of things. He was spending all his time feeding himself!

We were really close to running out of time and played the last turns in a frenzy since we all had somewhere else to be. We barely finished in time and Daniel and I took off for the Agricola room. I was a little slower since I stuck around to haggle over moving the finals of Le Havre first. We decided not to move it since I wanted to play Agricola and the only time the other guy wanted was during it.

I showed up to Agricola, pulled a card, and was again assigned to a table with Bill Crenshaw. We were the only two people at said table. I think they'd overestimated how many people were going to show up for the round and ended up starting too many tables. They started consolidating tables on a whim and then decided to just break my table of 2 down and stick us into 5 player games. Bill was uninterested in playing a 5 player game and I was more concerned with the way the tables were being chosen for getting an extra person. Any table that had started fast was getting exempt, which seemed to be rewarding faster people or people who showed up extra early to the detriment of those who'd started later. While a small debate was breaking out over this between the GM and the assistant GM a 3rd guy showed up. I'd have thought that would mean we'd play a 3 player game but now they wanted to form up 3 games of 5. But they'd been convinced it should be random amongst all tables so they were going to force some games to restart with us added in unless a 4th for our table showed up right that instant. Elaine happened to be standing around and while she didn't really want to play she decided to run it in order to make people happy. Yay Elaine!

I opened this draft with guildmaster once again, but this time I was passed charcoal burner second. I'll say straight up I was pretty bad at Agricola until very recently, but one thing I knew back in the day was that charcoal burner was very good. He's guaranteed to be 4 wood and 4 food at the very least and can often be even more than that if people upgrade to cooking hearths. It turns out Sceadeau thinks he's in the top 3 non-banned cards so getting passed him either means righty opened a ridiculous pack or he's bad. I ended up also drafting a slaughterman so I was all set up to get free food from my other players all game long. My minors opened with a house goat which I've long thought to be the best minor. More completely free food and a point to boot on a card you can use to start player early. Run it! My opening pack had a two card combo (ladder and chicken coop I think) and I made a note to take one of those on the wheel if the other was gone to keep them out of the same person's hands. We'd drafted a bunch of cards when Bill stopped the draft to ask righty about what he was doing... Righty had already drafted 5 cards and was looking at a pack containing 3 more. In a draft where you're supposed to get 7 cards. We really didn't know what had happened. Did he take two cards from one pack? Did he somehow pick up multiple packs at once and combine them weirdly? Everyone's draft ended up screwed up and we didn't have a good solution. Rather than call the GM we tried a quick fix Bill suggested which didn't work and resulted in needing another quick fix. Eventually we all got 7 cards and since we were pretty sure the first few picks were fine we were probably good to go... Halfway through the game Bill played chicken coop after already playing ladder and alarm bells went off in my head. I hadn't seen either of those cards back! How did he get both of them? Maybe Bill had cheated? Far more likely righty had taken one of them and then put it back into a different pack somehow. The whole thing was screwed up. Whatever, it wasn't that good of a combo anyway, just keep running it.

Especially since as badly as righty had screwed up the draft... He'd screwed up the play even more. At one point he tried to take 3 clay when there was a 4 clay space on the board. We let him take that back. Later he tried to plow with plow and sow available. We let him take that back. Finally he set up to reno and fenced on turn 14. Then he renoed on 13 and took wood on 14, letting me fence. He couldn't reno anymore because he was stone and he couldn't fence because I took the space. We didn't let him take that one back since it wasn't a strictly wrong choice. Wrong in retrospect once he knows I'm taking fences but if he was getting to fence later he wanted the extra wood. I'm sure he made lots of other misplays along the way which set me up, too.

I ended up winning by a fair margin, but losing fences probably knocks me to second. Since his major screwup should have still let me build fences I didn't lose any sleep over it. He was guaranteed reno+fences so I was safe to snag fences in 14 regardless.

I could have played pro golf but I decided I didn't really want to learn it what with having a final for my team game at 9am the next morning. I tried to go to bed early but Pounder ruined it for me by making me count my calories from the day and telling me I was too hungry and had to go to Waffle House at 11. Him telling me that made me hungry so I had to get out of bed and go eat more pork chops. I'm pretty sure he did it because he was also in the Le Havre finals and was trying to sabotage my sleeping plans! And not at all because I actually needed to eat...

2014 WBC: Day 4

Tuesday is a big day for WBC as a whole with the entire morning and afternoon dedicated solely to a gigantic game auction and auction store. The only tournament allowed to have any games played on Tuesday before 6pm is Through The Ages which has the final during that time. I guess they feel like losing 4 or 5 people from the auction is not a big loss? But if they ran something (ANYTHING) with open entries then that thing would get a ton of players and the auction would lose out. I guess it would also be hard to get volunteers to run the auction and auction store if it required them to not play games that were going on. So I understand the need for this quirk in the schedule but it means Tuesday is pretty much only for open gaming or for sleeping in.

No one scheduled me for any open gaming so I went with operation sleep in. I was still the first one in my room awake and I think I got up around 11am. Then I wandered around for a while, watched a bit of the TTA final, and wandered some more. We had plans to go eat steak at 3pm (10% of the bill from the Texas Roadhouse goes to the open gaming library at WBC) and ended up running into Sara and Duncan and Andrew around 2. We played a game of Splendor to kill time. I won! Then we ate steak. Yeehaa!

A full 17 events get started at 6pm but I didn't really have a strong desire to play any of them. I'd play History of the World but I had Le Havre at 9pm and History would go too long. So I ended up going to El Grande. Not so much because I like the game because I actually tend to dislike political area control games. More because Pounder and Robb really like it so it's worth inflating the attendance numbers for them. Also it's Robb's team game and I wanted a chance to take him out like I did with Jason in TTA. Note that even though I beat Jason in a heat he still came 2nd...

As it would turn out I ended up playing at Robb's table of El Grande. With one of the 'werewolf kids' (Jeff) who is suddenly not really a kid anymore and who is pretty good at the game and Eric who I recognized from Sceadeau's group of gamers. I didn't recognize the 5th guy but I think he was one of the crew of good gamers who come down from Quebec, so probably going to be a rough table? It ended up being rough for other reasons though. It turned out Eric didn't really know how to play... Worse, he kept screwing up the same rule over and over despite being reminded every turn. You can't move into or out of the king's region! He doesn't like that! It's the first rule! He even managed to try to spin the king's region on turn 8 with the GM watching. The official result was supposed to be the card owner got to bone him but the GM decided that was too harsh and just chose the region he should have chosen with a promise to update the rules for next year. No one had ever broken that rule before! Then on turn 9 he managed to do it again! He spun the king's region from the pit! This one was resolved by the rules and his 8 guys died instead of impacting the game. Eric would have lost regardless, but he should have stolen points from SOMEONE.

It was also rougher than it should have been because I can't read. At one point we needed to secretly choose a region to score. Jeff had no cubes at all on the board so I knew he was going to block someone. (If multiple people pick the same region it doesn't score.) I felt like he was going to spite Robb if he could, but Robb had 2 awesome regions and was just going to pick between them. So I decided Jeff was going to skip Robb and go after the next person in line which I figured would be me. So I didn't want to go to my best region. I also didn't really see a good blocking play so I decided to score a region I was tied in for a couple extra points. We flipped the wheels and I'd worked it all out correctly. Jeff scored my good region. What really surprised me was that Robb had come and blocked my second region. So I figured he'd probably gone another level, worked out what I worked out, and then hoped Jeff would score something of Robb's anyway...

It turns out what actually happened was Robb picked between his two regions at random and I had mixed up the words Aragon and Granada. They have a lot of the same letters, right? So my great deductive reasoning and planning got thrown out the window and I ended up taking a 50% chance to spite Robb 6 points by spiting myself and the Quebec guy 4 points each. Oops? At least Robb flipped the coin in my favour... Would have been really bad to score both his regions!

Anyway, I built up a decent point lead and then people started turning on my despite not actually being in a good board position. I didn't have as many guys in play and they were all stacked up in a couple regions. So I was scoring big points a couple of times but other people were scoring smaller points all the time. Robb was getting spited too, including one time where he set up a perfect move for Eric and Eric decided to do something completely random instead. This meant I got to go next, undo Robb's move, and score a bunch of points for myself. Woo!

El Grande is also in a time slot that's a little too short for the game. People who know what they are doing will get done in 2 hours. Eric did not know what he was doing, needed a rules refresher before we started, and played very slowly. So we were in real danger of going way over time. This meant the rest of us had to play really fast on the last couple turns which sucked for me. I threw a ton of points away near the end by taking what looked like a decent move but turned out to do nothing instead of spite drafting the scoring card and not activating it. Lots of people got 8 or 10 points to my nothing and I'm pretty sure it directly determined the winner of the game. But I couldn't take the time to think because of how delayed we were. Bah.

The game ended up with the guy from Quebec silently scoring tons of points in all the regions, getting all his guys in play, and winning pretty handily. Jeff came second. Robb and I tied for 3rd, but I had him on tiebreakers. If I don't punt the spin a wheel and if I take the time to think through my last couple turns I think I might have won, but what are you going to do? At least I finished ahead of Robb in a heat of his team game!

El Grande took more than 2 hours so I couldn't go play Lost Cities. So I screwed around for 40 minutes or so and headed to Le Havre. The format for Le Havre changed this year to be preferentially 3 player games which is great for me since I seem to do much better in 3 player games than in 4 player games. It fits my play style better I guess? Anyway, this heat had 20 people show up which resulted in 4 3-player games and 2 4-player games. This meant if you brought a copy of the game (and arrived early enough to set it up) you had a 66% chance of playing a 3er and if you didn't you had a 57% chance of playing a 3er. I guess that means you should bring a copy if you wanted to play a 3er with this number of people showing up? I didn't bring a copy, and I got unlucky, so I was at a 4 player table. With Nick Vayn who made the finals the last two years and two people who learned a lot from our game. Guy on my right went first and opened with taking money and buying the marketplace. I bought the 4 cost building firm and gave him my last dollar to take clay+iron+coal which I parlayed into the sawmill and then a wooden ship after a trip to (I think?) the joinery. Nick manipulated the board well and built the colliery so I was really worried about my ability to win this game, especially since I couldn't use it at my first opportunity after he built it since I was flat broke and didn't think it was worth trading my action and my only hammer to get 3 coal. But then rather than move out of the colliery once he got in Nick decided to just sit there and pick up offers. He seemed really happy to do it too, since it was preventing me from getting more coal and I was clearly getting thrown off 'my game' by not being able to scoop up extra coal. Nick did get some pretty good offers with something like 5 cows, 5 grain, 8 wood, 8 clay, and 2 iron being taken by him. Eventually I decided we weren't going to get to play a standard game and snapped first. I built both wharves. (Well, I think the town built one and I bought it, but I did end up with both in front of me.) I picked up some wood, turned it into charcoal, and used 8 charcoal to make 5 steel at the steel mill. I picked up an extra steel at the business office and made steel a second time for 4 more I think. I made 4 only coke in the cokery, but I was the first one to do so and it put me ahead of the curve. I think I built 2 steel ships, 2 luxury liners, and shipped a few times. It wasn't my best score ever, but it was enough to barely win the game over Nick with scores somewhere around 189-182-120-103. The 4th player was the GMs mother in law and she clearly knew what some of the key things were in the game but not really how to string them together. She vendored a bunch of stuff to buy the shipping line, which is strong. But then she'd use it with one boat to make 9 dollars. Maybe if you own it that is actually a good use of 3 cows and a coal? At least if you can leverage that bump in cash into something good... (I certainly used the first two special buildings in this game to turn 4 grain and 4 wood into 12 dollars and to turn 6 bread into 18 dollars.) She ended up using the cash to buy an iron ship and then going back to ship with 2 boats! Which she used to buy an iron ship! One more round of shipping and she was completely out of resources and was sitting on 3 iron ships, a shipping line, and nothing left. She knew to hit the marketplace early, and to pound the colliery whenever she could. But something went off the rails a little and she just ran out of stuff. She certainly seemed to be having fun though, so everything is good!

Nick complained a bit after the game about not having enough energy himself to do what he wanted to do. I told him that's because he blocked his own colliery! He needed to skip an offer take to go somewhere, ANYWHERE, to accelerate his next turn in the colliery. Especially when you're the one who owns it... If other people come in you get stuff. If they don't you get coal. The worst thing for the colliery owner is to have someone sit in it. So don't sit in it yourself! I'll pass up some very good offers just to move out of my own colliery. The corollary to that is I'll also consider taking slightly suboptimal offers to sit in someone else's colliery. I'd rather someone else squat in it, to be honest, but I'll do it myself if I have to. So I feel like Nick made plays to screw me but ended up screwing himself since I adapted to the game with less energy in it better than he did.

Pretty sure we went to Waffle House again, this time with fewer people. I had the same thing and it was good. Sceadeau's meal got boned (they threw in extra ham for funsies) and he had to send it back. They again didn't want to throw out the food so they gave it to us anyway so Robb got two meals. Hurray?

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.

2013 WBC Day 6

It turns out the Lancaster Host has a thermostat in the hotel room which implies you have the ability to set the temperature that you want for the room. The three of us want drastically different temperatures so there is normally some minor bickering which ends up getting resolved by setting the room really cold and Pounder giving me the blanket off of his bed. Last year the AC just didn't work very well at all so the room never got into the really cold range despite Pounder's best efforts. This year we were in a different room and it was very mild outside so the AC was definitely able to win the fight. It won so well, in fact, that I was able to work out how the thermostat actually works. Short answer: ZE THERMOSTATS! ZEY DO NOTHING!

Maybe it does something in the winter when the heaters are able to run, but in the summer it doesn't matter where you set it. Higher than current temperature? No impact. Lower than current temperature? No impact. Instead there's a light switch on the wall that toggles the state of the air conditioner. You can either have it running full blast to continuously lower the temperature in the room or you can have it turned off entirely. No middle ground. No intelligent control system using the information we know is available (current temperature and desired temperature). On or off. That is all. By this time of the week I'd finally figured it out and we had a plan for how to try to keep the room in the right range. Run the AC during the day so the room ended up really cold, but turn it off when we went to sleep. This would have the room slowly warm up during the night but hopefully not so hot that it would disturb sleeping. Or if it did then someone would just stand up and flick the switch again and start it cooling off. Definitely a better situation than completely freezing or stupidly warm!

At any rate, super temperature tech meant I was able to sleep in without waking up super cold or covered in sweat which meant I got to sleep a long time. Eventually I was up and around before 3, which had the second heat of Le Havre. Now, we're lazy so we didn't actually submit a team this year but if we had Le Havre would have been my team game. So even though I'd only felt like playing 1 game of Can't Stop over the previous couple of days I felt like I should probably put in the effort to play at least one game of Le Havre. Other factors weighing in favour of showing up even though I still didn't feel great are that it is my favourite game and the GM had asked me a couple times in passing in the hallway if I was going to make it. GMs want lots of people to play their games in order to maintain prize status and such, and I have made the final every year thus far so there is some history to preserve by having me show up. And I try to be a nice person, so maybe that helps too.

Le Have ended up with 15 people for this heat, which would mean 3 4 player games and a single 3 player game. I was randomly assigned to the 3 player game. Yay! I'm much better at the 3 player game than the 4 player game and my brain wasn't really working well so it would probably be for the best to have the more natural number of players for me. Then a 16th person showed up so we had a 4 player game as well. Boo!

I actually hadn't played Le Havre since last WBC. It's my favourite game, but I don't own it. When I first learned it a few years ago at WBC in open gaming I liked it so much I made my friends play it (on Pounder's copy I think) a bunch and so many of them liked it that they all bought copies too. Sky, and Pounder, and Robb, and Aidan, and Duncan all owned the game so if I ever wanted to play it most of the people I was gaming with could bring it along. No need to buy it myself!

Combine that rustiness with being sick and things weren't going so well. An early special building was the one that lets you turn 15 energy and 1 iron into 2 steel. I'd ignored that building the last time I saw it in play (the finals at WBC in 2010) and the two people who used it blew me out. So I went looking for a good way to use it. I ended up building the cokery and had a bunch of coal ready to convert immediately before the first steel ship was going to come up for purchase. Everything seemed to be coming up Milhouse! Then the guy on my left went to the cokery to build up enough energy to use the special building himself. He was going to be start player the turn when the steel ship came out, so he was going to get to build it before me. At this point I could abort, do other things, and wait two more rounds for another steel ship while hoping no one else set up to build it on me or I could go crazy. Ignore coke and instead spend 5 coal getting the steel right now. That would get me the first steel ship and set up a decent shipping phase I thought, so I went for it. Unfortunately the guy on my left owned the special building, so he could have vendored it, gone to the now vacated building, and beat me to the steel ship after all. Doing so would cost him 6 points, but I'd thrown away probably 20 points with my play (5 points from the cokery conversion and 15 points from not having 3 extra coke) so if I thought my play was right then I should have thought his counter play was right. I did see his counter play, I just ignored it. I think maybe my game plan was hope for opponent misplay which is a terrible, terrible line of play. Even if it works I'm not going to be happy because I like to win games by beating the best my opponents have to offer, not by having them goof the game away.

It turned out he didn't sell his building, so I did get that steel ship. Which put me in a great position. So great, in fact, that the player opposite me decided to go out of his way to keep me from shipping an extra time in the end game position. Probably right anyway, but he said he only did it because he thought I was so far ahead. Doing so the way he did actually gave my right hand opponent an extra shipping phase. The end result of the game was the guy opposite me won by like 6 points, but the guy on my right came back to tie me with his extra shipping action. He had 1 extra franc in unshipped goods which is the first tie breaker, so I came 3rd in the only heat I was able to play.

Oh well. I was annoyed that I hadn't played well enough to win but I was sick so I didn't feel too badly about it. And the 3rd seminar by the win at life lady was happening in an hour so I could just go to that instead. It was going to be on physical movement and how terrible shoes are for people. I feel like I was going to know most of what she had to say from listening to Sky talk about his barefoot adventures but I still wanted to go and see if I could pick up any info to pass along to him.

I had the hour to kill first, so I swung by the Le Havre semis just in case. The GM had said in advance that he was going to take 16 semifinalists no matter what, and he only had 30 people across the 2 heats, so a close 3rd might actually be good enough to advance. I showed up and it turned out they only had 9 people who wanted to play in the semis including me. They'd also stated in advance that they were going to have a 4 player final table, so their plan on how to get there was to play 3 semifinal games of 3 players each and advance the closest 2nd place. That's pretty standard for previous Le Havre tournaments. I'm not a big fan because there's just something I don't like about having someone who didn't win a semifinal end up winning the final. One year I beat Daniel in the semis, but he advanced and beat me in the final. So we were 1-1 against each other that year, but he got to be the overall winner because of the ordering of the wins. It works according to the rules and all, but I don't really like it. Of course when you only have 30 people show up and only play 9 heat games total I don't know how to build a better format! They had to advance a 3rd place dude just to get to 9 people in the semis as it was! I think I prefer just playing a 3 player final with this setup because Le Havre plays well with 3 or 4 people but you have to do what you spelled out in advance.

I ended up getting paired against the GM (and last year's winner) Ken and with Rob who I vaguely knew through Sceadeau's Vent server. He didn't seem too happy with the pairings. Apparently our table with the 2nd and 3rd people on the laurels list for this event is going to be a rough win. Closest second gets to advance though, so no problem!

In this game I ended up in first chair, and the first tile came up with a wood on it so I was able to take my optimal first turn of grab 3 wood, buy the building firm for 4. I believe I then got to build the marketplace on my next turn. When Robb first taught Pounder and I to play Le Havre he made it very clear that letting someone do this would be game losing. So someone has to pick up dollars and buy the marketplace if the first player takes wood and buys the building firm. I don't know if this is actually true, but it's been an axiom in my Le Havre strategy since the very beginning. I got to get them both in this game, and it was pretty awesome. Especially as I learn the different special buildings and figure out which ones I want to come out or not, marketplace control seems really important. Being the one who owns it means you're more likely to be able to go to it when it matters, and you can sell it off at a truly important time if you have to.

As the game progressed I commented on how the Hardware Store actually seemed to be a lot better than I'd previously given it credit. Ken was using it a lot to good effect. From the finals last year I knew Ken was eyeing a way to end up buying or building the colliery. So I needed to do the same thing. It was sitting under the brickworks and the abattoir. The town was due to build the abattoir soon, and Ken would get to go first right after it did so. We both were sitting on the raw materials to build the brickworks and the colliery. But there is another option... Buy the abattoir for 8 and then build them both in one action! Things set up with a 6 franc offer which I was able to take on my second to last action before the town built the abattoir. Which meant my last action was to go to the construction firm, buy the abattoir, and built both buildings. I was just in on the money to do it.

I think the colliery is by far the best building in the game. Practically every way to score a lot of points involves coke in some way. You need a ton of energy to make steel, or you need a ton of energy to power the shipping line. There may be a hardcore builder plan that can ignore coke? But everything else wants coke. And because the cokery gives you a dollar for each coke, and because coke is the second best thing to ship, having extra coke is just fine. How do you get more coke? Having more coal. How do you get more coal? Hit the colliery every single chance you get. As a result I feel like it's the most used building in the game, and it has a relevant entry fee, so owning it is worth a ton of stuff. Or maybe you can convince someone to not go to the colliery on their turn to do so and then you get way more coke than they do. So you get to win.

Anyway, I now have the colliery. We also got what may be my favourite special building in the game to come out: the feed lot. I love it, because it lets you do a really early shipping action, buy it, and then replace the cows from that early shipping action. It probably lets you take an extra shipping action, and gives you 6 extra cows, so just buying it is like gaining 16 points. And you get extra cash in mid game, which can let you buy some relevant things. I think I ended up shipping using coal for power instead of coke in order to scoop it up, but it was still worth it. I think I used the money from that shipping to also buy the building that gives you a brick off the cost of every building. Which itself let me take an action to buy a 12 point building for free in the saw mill which was nice.

Rob ended up making a mistake I'd made in the finals a couple years ago. He set up to build the town hall, but then did something else first and then the town built it on him. I remember being really bitter at myself when it happened to me, so I can imagine how he felt. I legitimately hadn't noticed it was going to happen to him either, or I probably would have mentioned it. I just flat out missed that the town was building a building that round. That was probably a 30ish point play that just vanished on him, which is a big problem.

At any rate, with owning the marketplace early, and the colliery mid game, and the feed lot to get free cows I ended up with a pretty ridiculous score. 303 points, with Ken around 250 and Rob in the 220 range. Looks like I get to play in the finals. Woo!

The finals were scheduled for 9am the next day, which I really didn't want. I wasn't really expecting to play another game all week, so I could move it to pretty much any time slot that didn't involve having to wake up early while sick. The other two table winners concurred, but the closest second place guy wanted to play at 9am. Maybe that was because he saw how badly we wanted to move it? Maybe because he had something else to do all the rest of the day? Maybe he just doesn't like change. I can cop to rejecting a final move for that reason in a previous year so I can't really complain. I guess I'll just have to set an alarm and get up early on Friday.

I wandered around a bit, posted a blog post from the room, and eventually went back to Waffle House where I got the exact same thing for the second night in a row and still didn't get sick. Woo!

2012 WBC Day 7 Summary

Friday morning brought the finals for my team game: Le Havre. Apparently all three of the other finalists had failed to win a heat and had all advanced as alternates. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's one thing to fill a semifinal field up with alternates to make for properly sized games... But the semifinal field has 12 people which includes those 3 alternates. We could have played 3 3-player games with a 3 player final instead. And I'm not just saying this because I prefer 3 player games in Le Havre. Vegas Showdown didn't advance any alternates because it hit 20 winners who showed up even though it meant different sized semifinals from finals and I think that makes sense. I didn't win a heat therefore I shouldn't feel like I deserve a semifinal slot. If it's a game like Tigris which can play as a 3er but really needs to be a 4er then I think it makes more sense. Oh well.

At any rate I ended up in first chair with a fish/wheat tile coming up. This means I don't have an awesome first choice (3 wood or maybe 2 clay) and ended up taking 2 wood. I also bought the 4 cost building firm. As the tiles came out it became clear that I had good iron tempo and good cow tempo. (I would get first choice of 2 iron every 4th time through the game unless someone took a single iron.) No one ever broke the iron tempo so myself and the guy across from me (Ken, the GM) got 2 iron every single time it came out. This denied both the other two players any iron for an awfully long time. Chris went for a marketplace plan which let him get some iron but the other guy pretty much ignored iron and got a poor score as a result. Oddly it seemed like only Ken and I wanted to go to the black market to scoop up the 2 iron from it as well.

One of the special buildings was the harbour watch which changed the game significantly. I took a buck offer and bought it as soon as it came out since I figured it would get used a lot by the other players. It didn't, which surprised me, though I did use it a lot myself. I got my game plan to function pretty well with a lot of shipping on 3 iron and a steel ship. Mostly bread and cows but some extra coke and steel as well. Unfortunately for me Ken was implementing almost the same plan. He got most of the other iron ships and a couple of the steel ones. He had both wharves and the colliery which meant he earned a lot of money from entry fees. (He pulled off the build wharf-buy black market-build colliery play.) It felt like I got my share of everything for my plan but someone else got way more than their share because the other players weren't going for it. He was one step ahead of me most of the way. He made coke first, and steel first, and got the higher valued boats. He also got a luxury liner. The end result had Ken way out in front with me a distant second and the other two a fair bit behind me. I continue my streak of finishing behind Daniel and one other guy in the finals. This time Daniel didn't make the finals so I got second. Maybe next year no one else will show up and I can win!

We finished in under 3 hours so I had time to go play another heat of Race for funsies. I already had 2 wins so I was going to advance anyway but I like the game. This round was played using the first expansion and goals. I forget exactly what I did but I ended up getting both of the big goals and a lot of other points for a large victory.

I didn't have anything I really wanted to do until 5pm and the Race semis. I went back to the room to screw around and ended up going to Red Robin for lunch with Robb and Pounder once they realized they had a bye through the first round of Innovation thanks to the mulligan round.

5pm was the Race semis which were actually quarters. They had 30 winners show up and decided to advance them all. They went with the somewhat odd plan of playing 8 games (6 4-player games and 2 3-player games) with the top 2 of each game advancing. They seeded the #1 and #2 seeds into the 3 player games (a pretty huge advantage since 2 of 3 would advance). With 3 heat wins I was the #1 seed and got into a 3 player game. We played with the first 2 expansions and my game got off to a pretty silly start. My home world was the one where I draw a card for each rebel planet during produce. The first three actions were develop, settle, produce. I developed space marines, settled a rebel planet, and drew 2 cards in produce. One of the other players kept calling produce for me (I don't know if he was trying to make me win with him second or if it was legitimately his best play but it sure hooked me up) and I ended up with 2 galactic federation cards in my hand. There's only supposed to be one in the game. We decided that since I had them both I should just throw one away and get a new card. So I ended up with a bunch of rebel worlds worth tons of points and tons of 6-cost developments worth tons of points for a really huge score. The third player ended up accidentally cheating by playing a military planet he couldn't conquer and no one noticed for a few turns. We didn't know how to deal with it but it was pretty obvious from the boards that he was going to be last anyway so we just played on. The game ended soon thereafter for a huge win for me.

The semifinals were all 4 player games with only 1 player advancing. I was in a game with the same dude from my Le Havre semi who did everything he could to throw that game to one of my opponents. He did the same thing in Race as well. One guy was set up for a huge produce/shipx2 cycle. Dude kept calling produce for him so the guy got to keep shipx2ing for huge points. I don't think it was intentional by any stretch of the imagination. I just think he plays games obliviously and it ended up really screwing me hard in this game. The winner was up by 20 something with me in second. Second wasn't worth anything in this game though! I think I ended up getting 6th but unfortunately Race is a 3 plaque event so no sand for me.

7pm had Battle Line starting in the Race room. My race game ended at 6:58. I figured I'd give it a spin. I got blown out of my first two games and ended up in an irrelevant third game against someone with 2 breakthrough wins. I did manage to beat him so I finished at a 1-2 record.

I considered playing Ingenious at 10pm but was actually watching the League of Legends arena (the internet worked enough to stream a low quality feed) and the Olympics in the room with Robb and Pounder and didn't feel like leaving.

11pm was Liar's Dice which we did go to. I played at a table with Robb and he prevented me from becoming the LIAR'S DICE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD for another year. I lost my first 2 or 3 dice on exactas on the other side of the table and then walked right into Robb having nothing of my bid to lose the rest of them.

Waffle House for a 3-egg + plain hashbrowns meal. Then bed.

2012 WBC Day 6 Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012 WBC Day 4 Summary

Tuesday is the most important day of the week for many people at WBC. They hold a 7 hour long board game auction that fills to the brim every year. There's also an auction store you can wander through at the same time. WBC gets a piece of the action and I believe it's via the auction that they keep entry fees as low as they do.

I am not one of those people. I have never really even considered going to the auction or selling an item in auction. Someone told me today that Rail Baron went for $70 so maybe I'll try selling that next year? Probably I'll just be lazy. At any rate they don't schedule any events during the auction which makes Tuesday a day of opening gaming for many people. Personally I get to do one of my favourite things... Sleep!

Robb ended up waking me up at 3pm so I could go have steak for breakfast. WBC has a deal with the nearby Texas Roadhouse where any money spent by WBC members on Tuesday from 3pm to 10:30pm has 10% get funneled to support the WBC open library. We like steak at the worst of times so giving us an extra incentive to turn our meat eating into board games? We're all over that! I ended up eating an 18oz steak for breakfast and I don't regret a thing!

Actual events start at 6pm and I had an hour to kill so I wrote about A Few Acres of Snow. I had a few options for games to play at 6: El Grande, Robo Rally, or St Petersburgh. I don't really know how to play any of those games well and maybe should have just gone to Robo Rally but I decided to give St Petersburgh a spin. Pretty much all I really know about the game is the mistress of ceremonies card is broken on the first turn. In my game I got her on the first turn. I then proceeded to bumble my way through the rest of the turns (making several key mistakes) and ended up barely winning the game 84-82-81-75. At one point I built the upgrade that gives you one dollar off your aristocrats and then failed to use the discount for my next 4 aristocrats. Doing so meant I didn't have enough money to properly play out my admiral card on top of my duplicate aristocrat and rather than wait a turn I put it over a unique one on the assumption that I'd get another copy of it. I didn't (though I did have a 50% chance of doing so with my observatory) so I compounded my first mistake with another. I was at the table with the GM and he didn't offer to give me the missing money once I'd noticed I'd been anti-cheating. I wonder if he would have if I'd been at another table and called him over? Or if I had boobs and a cute face? I'm a little annoyed that no one else pointed out that I'd been anti-cheating but mostly I'm bitter at myself. I blame playing the game exclusively online.

9pm brought the first heat of my team game: Le Havre. This game featured two very new players (both sitting to my left) and one relatively experienced player to my right. I ended up going for a 'make all the coal here' strategy by acquiring the marketplace, colliery, cokery, iron min and coal seam, and smelter. I thought I was in a good way when suddenly it appeared like I wasn't going to get a steel ship at all due to wharf tempo. It looked like they were going to split 3-1-0-0 with me getting none at all! Then the guy to my right decided to get a 3rd steel to make a luxury liner instead of buying a third steel ship and the guy across from me decided to spend his steel on the bank. Only two of us even bothered to use the shipping line and one guy ended with a loan. I'd picked up 6 loans but paid them all off in one big shipping phase. (Well, I saved off a turn to use the local court as one of my last actions but I could have paid them off if I wanted to.) Ultimately getting the steel ship and using the shipping line twice let me pull a fair bit ahead. I won pretty comfortably with the scores something like 210-159-154-106.

After Le Havre came Waffle House where I ate 3 scrambled eggs and some hash browns with no onions. Specifically declaring no onions seems to be working as my hashbrowns have been relatively onion free all week thus far!

Then despite waking up at 3pm I went to bed right after Waffle House. I wanted to try to get up for Race For The Galaxy at 9am.

WBC 2011 - Day 5

I had finals at both 9am and 11pm on Friday so I tried to go to bed 'early'. I ended up lying in the dark not sleeping for a couple hours and kept waking up to check my watch since I was afraid the alarm wouldn't be set properly again. Sleeping through Race for the Galaxy was unfortunate but not disastrous. Sleeping through the finals of my team game would have been just about the worst thing that could happen at a board game tournament. (So not actually that bad in the grand scheme of things but I still didn't want it to happen.) I ended up sleeping for around 6 hours, getting up and showering in plenty of time, and was able to grab a blueberry muffin and a can of Coke for breakfast.

I ended up getting 3rd seat in the 4 player Le Havre final. Dan was first and grabbed 2 wood. I don't even remember what I got but I did buy the 4 cost building firm and got into the loan business. Dan built the marketplace and I got into it first and set up the tavern as the card to drop. I later left and Dan went in himself and made noise about denying the card on top. (He didn't have any grain so it seemed likely he'd want to bury it.) I ended up going back to the marketplace and flipping them back again before it dropped and I believe I then used the tavern to turn wood and grain into a boat, then again for the shipping line, a colliery, and a steel mill. (One of those may have been from shipping.)

I ended up in a bad tempo position when it came to getting the steel boats. I didn't have the steel on the start of turn 15 when I was going first and by the time I did have my steel together players 1 and 2 built their steel ships the moment they hit the board. I've never really looked into the timing of these before and I think I definitely will need to borrow a set from someone and really look into things like this. If the summary card I found online is correct it looks like there are 4 steel ships and the first people to get cracks at them are the people in seats 1, then 3, then 1 again, then 2.

Not getting a steel ship meant I ended up needing to eat some food on the last few turns and wasn't able to ship as many things as I normally would.

I also badly misplayed one action. I set up to build the dock (I needed to get a second brick) by going to the hardware store. (I also needed a 3rd iron so I could make steel for a luxury liner.) Then the town immediately built it on me with nothing weird going on in between. I just totally missed that it was going to get built. Typically we'd been pointing out what was going to get built soon and move it a little ahead of the rest of the buildings but it didn't happen with the dock. It's no excuse since I should have been paying attention to it myself but unfortunate that I let myself get lulled into a false sense of security. If I'd not gone to the hardware store I could have gone to the iron building instead which would have both gotten me more steel to ship for points and would have blocked the building from Dan who went there right afterwards.

The game ended up being both very close and not close at all. Dan won by 40 points but the other 3 of us were within 6 of each other. Something like 191-151-148-145. I was the 148 and surely would have had 2nd place if I hadn't messed up the one turn with the dock. I did manage to win my 4 player heat but the bottom line is I'm just not good enough at 4 player games in general to beat Dan. At least I can take some satisfaction from winning our 3 player semi and will need to study up on the 4 player game for next year.



At 12 I had nothing really to do so I wandered by the Samarkand demo which had just started. It seems like a simple and fast game with some strategy involved so I'd like to give it a try at some point.


The third heat of Agricola was at 1 but Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation was at 2. I skipped LotR for Agricola last year so I figured I should do the opposite this year. Especially since last year 1 win wasn't even enough to advance to the semis. They changed the format this year with a new GM and switched to 5 player games meaning both that there were fewer winners in each heat and more spots (25 vs 16) in the semis. I hung out around the sign up booth anyway since I knew some people who were going to play and tried to help organize a picket line. A bunch of people had 1 win, see, and there were currently 18 unique winners thus far. If you get 7 or fewer tables in the 3rd heat they all advance for sure to the semis. More tables and (assuming unique new winners) you get some old winners getting knocked out. So if you had a win you could either play and hope to not lose or you could sit out and create fewer tables. (At first the GM said a first and a last was better than just a first so Sceadeau wanted to sign up and then not really play and just accumulate negative points with scripted actions so the GM made first and last the same as first.) The picket line ended up falling through and everyone standing around played anyway.

I wandered off to the vendor booth, bought a copy of Innovation, and went to the room. The internet was down again so I read some Game of Thrones and then went to Lord of the Rings.


The format for Lord of the Rings was 4 rounds of swiss with a cut to top 8. We had 30ish people so 3-1 was almost certainly going to advance. The way each round worked was you played 2 games against the same person. Once as evil, once as good. If the same person wins both games they win the round. If you split then the tiebreaker is number of characters you had alive when you won. If you're still tied then you draw the round. This is an interesting format but it seemed to often turn the second game of a match into a race to slaughter people if you won the first game. It also added some silly situations like attacking with Frodo and playing noble sacrifice guaranteeing that you lose the game but possibly killing one extra unit!

One thing I noticed is how young the room was. Most of the players were teenagers and many were girls. I don't think I was the oldest one there but I was definitely way up there. (A similar thing happens in Queen's Gambit too, but mostly it's teenage boys there.)

My first round was against a teenage boy who didn't really seem to have a grasp on strategy. I lost a couple coin flips (possibly by out-thinking myself) and ended up winning as dark with only 2 units left. This meant I had to either win as light side or kill 8 of his dudes in a loss. It ended up really not mattering since he threw out his big numbers willy-nilly and lost his orcs early. Gandalf was then able to obliterate pretty much all of his units. I got to a point where I had a guaranteed win against anyone I play against and almost went into auto-pilot but then I realized he didn't have to have the warg back in Mordor. It might have been the witch king who could attack sideways which would have ended me. I played it slowly and it turned out the warg was way out in the middle of nowhere and I would have lost with my reckless play.

Round two was against another teenage boy who liked to talk about how bad he was and how I was going to beat him for sure. Complimenting my plays and such. Not sure if he was just nervous or if I'm somehow intimidating or if he was playing mindgames with me. He certainly thought I was playing mindgames with him. Whenever he'd reveal a piece I'd say hello to it (because I'm weird, it's just what I do) "Hi Pippin!" and it seemed to bother him somehow. At one point I had a coin flip (eye for his noble sacrifice vs bigger number) in a fight of 'the Gimster' vs Shelob and I wanted to make sure he knew I knew it was a coinflip so I made a comment asking if the Gimster was ready to blow himself up. It caused him to go into this weird double-think feedback loop as he tried to figure out why I said that. We both ended up playing numbers. He then decided that letting me talk before he made a play was a bad idea because clearly I was in his head so he started just playing a card immediately as soon as the pieces were revealed.

At one point we both played our magic cards and I had eye of sauron in my used pile. I said I was magicking for eye to counter his magic and he said that didn't work. I found in the rules where it said evil picks first and he said that just meant my card was worse and that he gets to pick a number after I choose eye. This is totally not how we play it and I said I was pretty sure it worked my way but we could ask the GM if he wanted. He decided not to press the issue and let me counter his magic. I ended up winning this match.

Round 3 I was playing against an older guy. (It seemed like the undefeated people tended to be the older ones.) I started as the good side and lost a couple coin-flips. I kept assuming he was going to try to eye my noble sacrifice so I kept playing numbers and losing. It became pretty clear that I wasn't going to win so I switched to murder mode with the intention of just killing as many of his guys as I could. I used all my guys and then attacked with Frodo with the intention of noble sacrificing him. I again thought he'd eye it though, so I played a number and so did he. In retrospect he probably didn't even think I would do that (maybe I should have made a comment!) and was just guaranteeing the win by killing Frodo with a big number. I ended up running Saruman down one side killing off both Merry and Legolas which pretty much meant I was going to win with more dudes than he did if I won at all. I managed to kill Gandalf with the orcs after losing only 1 dude (several retreats to set it up though) and the rest was smooth sailing.

Round 4 I was up against Rob Flowers and the games weren't even close. He won as the good guys with a pretty robust number (5 maybe?) so I knew I had my work cut out for me. I made a couple risky plays trying to kill units without losing any (not using Boromir up front, playing a 5 in the pippin vs shelob fight, etc...) and they all backfired. He ended up winning with a 7 in the second game.

It turned out they had 2 people at 4-0 and 7 at 3-1. The tiebreaker was strength of schedule and I was a little worried since every single one of my opponents lost all of their games after they played me. On the plus side I did start 3-0 so I had played one of the 4-0s. I ended up 5th overall and was matched against another teenage boy. He seemed to have a decent grasp of strategy but had already conceded victory in the event. I guess Nick Henning is a god among elves, at least according to my opponent, and he was just hoping to lose to him in the finals. (Other Nick brought a hand-made game with him, Lord of the Rings: Shotfrontation, where all the pieces are shot glasses and you drink when you kill a unit.)

At any rate, the actual game. I started as evil and got into a guaranteed win situation. I had Frodo contained and had set up my discard to have my 6 and my eye. I still had my magic card so I was guaranteed to win any given fight and I had one with Frodo coming up. I made the attack, we both played magic, and he said I couldn't eye his magic. This time he did appeal to the GM and somehow the GM ruled in his favour. I had to pick my card first but if I picked eye he could just pick a number and beat me. (I looked up the FAQ on BGG today and they agree with the way we play, for the record. I wonder if I should find the GM's email address and ask about it again?) I shrugged and picked my 6 instead. I still had Frodo contained and would win without losing any other pieces. Unless he picked noble sacrifice here, which he should have, to get the extra tiebreaker point. He took retreat and died a few moves later.

Coming back the other way I ended up in trade-off mode and got down to 2 pieces left on my side: Frodo and Legolas. They were both one space out of the mountains. My opponent had 4 pieces left but most were on my side of the river. If I could get Frodo through I would probably win. But he still had the flying nazgul so it was going to be a guess. I decided I probably couldn't come up with a right solution and maybe he could read me so I did it completely random. He guessed right and jumped Frodo.

So we were tied. In the swiss that would have just been a draw. In the finals we would have played another two games. In the quarters? Coin-flip to advance. He called heads and heads it was.

I tried to get the internet to work for a while, failed, and went to find Robb and/or Pounder. Robb had just lost in the Agricola semis and Pounder was in the process of losing in the Race semis. We went for food (Red Robin I think) and then had an hour to burn before I had to play in the Vegas Showdown finals. We went to Jay's Cafe to try out Lancaster which I had read the rules for the night before.

Lancaster was an interesting and short game. Guaranteed to play over exactly 5 turns and with a few different paths to score points. We cheated in two major ways so what we played wasn't really the actual game but all 3 of us had different plans and came within a couple points of each other so maybe it is a good game. We meant to play it again later but they packed it up before we got around to it.

The Vegas Showdown was a 5 player game with Rob Flowers and some other guys I didn't really recognize. One of them commented at the start about how he didn't really know how to play and didn't know how he possibly beat Randy Buehler (last year's champion) in his semi-final match. He seemed more concerned about not getting to play the colour red than actually playing the game. He kept trying to give red points each time he scored. At one point he put a big bid on a high roller's room and someone pointed out to him that he couldn't place it without a table games. He then undid the bid, but two turns later got into a huge bidding war with Rob Flowers that ended with the other guy paying a lot for a building he couldn't place. He tried to place it and had to be reminded again that he needed a table games.

As far as how my game went I saw that early on both restaurant cards had come out and decided to not build any of them. I started with a slot machine and then a fancy lounge for 21. A few turns later I got a second fancy lounge for 12. I built a normal lounge and then the next turn publicity was banned so I renovated to put my fancy lounges in play. At this point I was up to 3 slot machines (1 from a slot surplus) and had to figure out how I was going to put them on the board. I ended up going to 3 slots along the wall in yellow, lounge from blue door, fancy lounge from lounge, fancy lounge from fancy lounge. I bought a second lounge to fill some yellow space and come closer to connecting. And then I got a 3rd fancy lounge for 18. This let me connect, get 5 triangle points, come a sportsbook/theatre from filling yellow, and have low competition for the theatre. Unfortunately the other fancy lounge was owned by righty so I was going to have to position myself to outbid him. I didn't spend a single dollar for the rest of the game to make sure that would happen. He actually had the lead in cash for a while but kept trying to buy other things. (On one frustrating turn he actually bid 15 on a lounge only to have the 'not-red' guy bust in with 18. I think it connected him so it wasn't actually bad but it was frustrating for my theatre plan.)

Meanwhile the guy across from me was set up to buy the 5-star steakhouse. Instead he did some math and bought a nightclub for 33. (I was actually going to use that and a renovate as a backup plan to fill my yellow but the 33 was out of nowhere.) Then everyone else spent money and he was able to get the steakhouse for like 21. And the dragon room for 25.

Tile after tile was flipped and still no theatre. Not-red guy got to pull strings once and picked pretty much at a random. He didn't pick big but also didn't pick the lowest pile either. I got to pull strings once and got a big one with no theatre. We were down to no flats, no smalls, and 2 biggies. People bought exactly 2 buildings so we were possibly going to get another turn...

First card? Score diamonds and add a biggy. Diamonds were split 5-4-0-0-0. The tile was the space age sportsbook. Next card? Slot builders on strike and game end.

Lounges did pay out points near the end of the game (I got 10 points) but never paid cash. I went through the draw pile afterwards and 5 of the 8 cards were biggies. So I had a 5/14 chance to build the theatre on the last turn. Doing so would have been worth 12 for the theatre itself, 5 for filling yellow, and 2 more triangle points. I'd lose 5 points worth of money for a net gain of 14. The guy with all the good stuff wouldn't have had a good play and I think would have had to publicity for 1 point. We both would have earned a point in money from an extra turn of income, I think. End result? He beat me by 12. So getting an extra turn would have probably been the win. Having the theatre actually come out early certainly would have been.

Sometimes the tiles just conspire against you I guess. Having the lounges eventually pay off points was good enough for second place though.

It looked like I'd missed Werewolf Prom while playing the finals. Pounder and Robb were already asleep when I got back to the room (Settlers in the morning!) so even if I thought sneaking in late was a good idea I couldn't have really found my suit in the dark anyway. Oh well, maybe next year there'll actually be a solid date listed for it so I can plan ahead.