When I was building my schedule for the week I'd penciled myself in to play Diplomacy at 9am Saturday morning. Come Friday night I had no intention whatsoever of waking up early to play Diplomacy. There were some short games I could play if I woke up somewhat early but my primary goal was to get up by 3pm for Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation. I ended up getting up a little before 1 and decided I didn't really want to play more heats of Titan the Arena or Ra Dice so I just screwed around on the internet and watched Olympics.
3pm brought Lord of the Rings which unfortunately was held in the sweatshop that was the wargame room. Apparently the air conditioning was broken in a lightning/hail storm and they couldn't get it fixed for us. I honestly considered not playing at all and just going back to the room but the air conditioning in our room wasn't very good either. There also weren't any other games I wanted to play all day. Maybe I should have tried to run some open gaming? Probably I should have gone back to the room to change shirts at least since my Saturday shirt didn't breathe at all and got completely coated in sweat from playing in the room. Ew.
Anyway, Lord of the Rings. The format for the event was two games against the same person in a round. Win both games and win the round. Split the games and the winner is whoever had more units alive at the end of the round. (The game is an asymmetrical Stratego+rock/paper/scissors style game.) My first round I was matched up against a kid who had just learned the game. I beat him both games. As soon as my game was over I took off out of the room in search of air conditioning. I ran into Sceadeau who was standing under the AC just outside the door. He was also hiding from the heat while waiting for round 2 to start. Pounder went and got the GM to agree to send a runner out for us before starting the next round so we could avoid the heat/humidity/funk. Yay Pounder!
Round 2 I played against a guy who had camped out a table right in front of a gigantic fan. I believe he said something about liking the air on his boys. I for one didn't care what his boys were doing under the table, I had a ring to throw into Mount Doom. I don't remember details about the match except my opponent didn't have a firm grasp on the tiebreaker so when we both won as the good guys he thought it was a draw but I'd killed more of his guys in his win so I actually won the match.
Round 3 was against Sceadeau. Unfortunately for him the tournament uses a creative interpretation of a key rule which drastically changes the power level of the two magic cards. Under any sane reading of the rules and according to everyone I've ever talked to outside of WBC the dark side magic wins. (Both magics let you play a card out of the discard pile. Dark side has a counterspell for event cards so you should be able to magic up the counterspell to negate the light side magic. The WBC ruling is light side gets to choose which card to magic and if they pick a number your counterspell fizzles.) I complained about this in last year's summary when it came up a couple times. Sceadeau apparently should have read that recap since he didn't know about the way the GM was going to rule. We both played for the unbeatable magic card. Mine was actually unbeatable which let me get a trade in a fight I didn't deserve to win. We ended up splitting the games with each winning as dark side but I killed more dudes so I won the tiebreaker.
Round 4 was against someone I didn't recognize. I remember nothing about the match except we split the games with the same number of guys alive for a full draw. Oddly enough Pounder was also 3-0 in this round against Alex Henning and they also got a full draw. Nick Henning got a draw in round 1 and both him and his opponent at the time won out so we ended up with 6 people at 3-0-1. Alex dropped to play in another semifinal which meant they didn't have to flip a coin between some of the 3-1s who were tied on opponent's record. Which mean Sceadeau made it to the top 8 at 3-1. He got to face Pounder in the quarters while I got to play my round 2 opponent again.
In the quarters I started with a dark side win with 4 guys alive. I figured I could probably pull off a loss with only 3 guys alive so I wasn't even trying to win. I was going for the long loss with tons of trading. The real trick to pulling this off is to keep Sauruman from going on a rampage. If you always have cards getting played you can recycle your deck and then threaten a noble sacrifice of Frodo. It didn't get that far as I knocked him down to 3 dudes without losing Frodo. I think he scooped? I don't remember.
The semis matched me up against Nick Henning. He's the only winner the event has ever had and I remember people talking last year as though he was unbeatable. In a game that has mind-games in it like this one I can see people who think that way actually having no chance of winning. I wanted to play him last year because I thought I could take him down. I didn't get that far (losing on a coin flip in the quarters) but I still thought I could beat him. This year there were the same grumblings from kids in the crowd about how he was unbeatable. I would have preferred to face him in the finals but I can beat him anywhere! Other Nick actually had another semifinal starting around the same time and asked if we could go play in that room instead. We probably had time for our match regardless but he'd need to play two at the same time if he made the finals. He asked the other semifinal about it and they said ok. I made myself be a little miffed that he was assuming he'd beat me. Gotta get mental bulletin board material somewhere, right? At any rate the other room had air conditioning so I might well have paid good money to be allowed to play in that room instead of the wargame room.
I'd noticed Nick watching some of my games (I played a fun game with Sceadeau using the real rules after our match) and commented that he'd been scouting out my plays. Of course in that game both Sceadeau and I did some weird things and the first fight was actually warg V Frodo. I played the semi in a straightforward manner as both sides instead of trying something crazy. I don't remember specifics but it seemed like I guessed right at every turn and won all the 'coinflips' in the game. Eyeing the sacrifice, picking the cave troll as the first enemy Gandalf fought, and so on. I won with both sides so the tiebreaker never came into effect. Woo! I do recall winning the light side game thanks to the bad magic ruling and we both grumbled about it when it happened.
Meanwhile Pounder had beaten Sceaudeau in the quarters but lost in the semis to my 4th round opponent. It was time for a rematch of my draw! For any elimination round but the finals the tournament rule is a draw results in a coinflip to see who advances. In the final the rule is you play another full match and repeat until someone actually wins. Neither my opponent nor I wanted to play a marathon series of games in the sauna. The GM said if we came up with another way of working it out we could go with that. My opponent wanted to play just one game after a draw. He wanted that one game to happen on any split regardless of the stated tiebreaker with the 'winner' of the old tiebreaker getting to pick sides. The GM was opposed to changing the tiebreaker and I felt like I had a better grasp of the tiebreaker so I wanted to keep it. I suggested we play as stated but if we happened to come to a full draw we'd flip a coin to choose sides for one final game. This seemed like it would limit how long we'd be playing, and it would sate my opponent's desire for one game, and it would remove some of the sting from losing a coin flip. I think dark side is the best but I had won a couple games with light side in the day, after all. The GM and my opponent agreed with that plan.
The finals started off with me on the dark side. I ended up winning the game with 4 units alive. I think this game featured a 'Shire burn' victory where I'd lost control of Frodo but worked my positioning to force him away from the tunnel through Moria which bought me the tempo to get 3 guys into the Shire before he could get Frodo into Mordor. I think he could have sacrificed Frodo to trade with one of my guys at one point for better tiebreakers but didn't go for it because I don't think he realized I was in position for a Shire burn.
My light side plan again was to try to burn enough of his guys out that I'd win on tiebreakers. I got him down to 5 guys alive and had a tricky situation. We were down to 3 cards. I had 3-4-magic. He had 3-retreat sideways-magic. Balrog was hanging out in Moria and thanks to the bad magic ruling I knew I was guaranteed to take him out by attacking in and playing magic. (He couldn't retreat sideways since he was in the mountains.) This would guarantee at least an extra game but would cost me board position and make it harder to knock him down to 3. If I attack and play my 4 instead I'm guaranteed at least a trade unless he plays his magic card in which case he can attack out of the mountains, bringing his retreat card back into play, and maybe get a 5 character win. I decided to play safe and used magic. If he also plays his magic I win the game straight up. He played his 3. I grabbed noble sacrifice. Now I was down to Frodo+Merry against Witch King+Warg+Orcs+Saruman. He's guaranteed to win any fight we get into with his magic card. I try to sneak Frodo forward but he gets boxed in. I know I have no hope. Rather than give in I move Merry forward into a position I'm 99% certain can only be attacked by the Orcs. My opponent doesn't kill Merry with the Orcs. Instead he moves forward to threaten Frodo. I attack out with Merry and hit the Orcs. If he wastes Magic here then Frodo will be able to kill whoever has him boxed in so he retreats sideways. My opponent can still win the game by attacking Frodo and playing his magic card. He thinks for a while and then moves someone else forward. Merry shrugs and attacks the space likely containing the Witch King. Witch King is there and dies. My opponent then kills Frodo. But because he let me kill the Witch King I win the tiebreaker and the match. Woo! (I wonder if the heat was getting to him, or if my failure to concede rattled him?)
Afterwards they have the winner of the adult tournament play the winner of the junior event. Thankfully we played this game in an air conditioned room. I wasn't sure how to approach this. Am I supposed to play badly to give the kid a chance? Am I supposed to slaughter him mercilessly? Throwing a game goes against every fiber of my being so I decided to play a straightforward but strategically sound game. I ended up guessing right each time we had to play cards (similar to my match against other Nick, actually) and blew the poor kid out. His father was pretty happy I stuck around to play the kid and chatted a bit with Bruno about Titan while we played. (It turns out the Titan finals also ran away from the sauna to the same room.)
It was 10pm by this time which was barely enough time to run to Facts in Five which was under yet another GM (the old GM is apparently under house arrest for financial fraud). The new guys ran things a little slowly at the start which meant the event threatened to run into Slapshot which is a hugely popular 11pm event. They ended up skipping the marking phase of the event and stayed up all night marking the entries themselves which seemed really nice of them. I did terribly once again and even managed to forget the Titan unit which starts with D! On the plus side I remembered Guildenstern was a G character from a Shakespeare tragedy.
I'd seen Pounder and Robb check in on Fi5 right before 11pm but couldn't find them in the immediate vicinity. I figured I'd check Slapshot for them. I walked into the room to take a look around and got signed in to the event. Eh, I guess it's time to learn Slapshot! Robb and Pounder wandered in shortly thereafter. I don't think they wanted to play but my table had 2 empty seats and we goaded them into playing. Slapshot is essentially glorified war with a hockey theme pasted onto it. You have a deck with 3 forwards, 2 defensemen, and a goalie. On your turn you can draft a new player by discarding a card and getting the top card of the appropriate deck. You can trade with another competitor by stealing a card from their hand and returning a player of the appropriate type. (Gretzky for Domi? Sounds fair!) Or you can challenge another competitor to a game. Play war against them with the winner scoring a point on the chart. As soon as anyone wins such 9 games you cut to a top 4 for the playoffs. I built a decent deck pretty early on and won a few games. Then it became clear that Robb had the superstar forward (scores on anyone) so I tried a trade with him. I got his superstar! I then went on to win 8 games while people continued to trade with me for the superstar and failing. I went for my 9th win to start the playoffs and Robb's enforcer injured the superstar! Boo! I had to play Pounder in the playoffs without my superstar. His deck was a little better than mine but I had a better goalie. We played a best of 7 war sequence and he got fortunate pairings against my goalie and won 4 of the game. He went on to win the finals of our table as well. He promptly dropped so we could go to Waffle House.
Waffle House was an all-star breakfast with the sausage I didn't get a few days earlier. Then Pounder went to bed to get ready for the long drive home. Robb and I are jerks so we went to play games. We'd told Daniel we'd play when we got back from Waffle House, after all. Daniel was playing werewolf so Robb and I went to the demo station and tried out Roll to the South Pole. It seemed like an ok 'press your luck' style game but wasn't all that fun. It might be a good game for kids who are bored with Can't Stop I guess?
I went to bed. Robb went to find werewolf games because he's a jerk.
Showing posts with label Lord of the Rings the Confrontation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lord of the Rings the Confrontation. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
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.
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.
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