Notre Dame: Conclusions

Two and a half years late, but I've finally gotten around to digging up the conclusion I wrote for my Notre Dame strategy series. Here it is!



Putting it all together...

Ok, so we know we need to kill 28 rats, pick up 10 cubes, make 8 gold... Oh yeah, and pick up as many VPs as we can. We only get 27 actions total and yet we want to pick up 46 resources. Assuming each of rats, cubes, and gold are equivalently 'hard' to do, a good strategy has to be finding a way to take actions which generate large numbers of at least one of those resources. The more we can get in one action the more actions we free up for actually winning the game! So, lets go over all the actions you can take and look at what each can provide. There are 24 different actions you can take, 9 cards and 15 bribes.

The Cards

Guesthouse - 1 resource only (lets not kid ourselves, if you play 4 guesthouses you can't win)
Car - 1 resource and between 1 and 3 VPs (or no resources and 4 VPs)
Bank - geometric resource progression (~2 resources, see below)
Cube-house - geometric resource progression (~2 resources, see below)
VP-house - geometric VP progression (though mostly just to proc parks!)
Hospital - Between 2 and 9 resources depending on when you play it
Park - 1 resource and potential VPs (~7 VPs, see below)
Balki - any of the above
Notre Dame - lose 2-4 resources for VPs (~4 VPs, see below)

Basic Townsfolk

Moneylender - 2 resources and 1 VP
Monk - 2 resources and 1 VP
Doctor - 2-8 resources
Wench - 1 resource and 3 VPs
Jester - Best action of above
Minstrel - 3-6 resources or 3-6 VPs or 18+ resources or 21+ VPs (see below)

Phase A Townsfolk

Night Watchman - 3-6 VPs
Bishop - 1 resource + best unused card
City Guard - 2-7 VPs

Phase B Townsfolk

Rat King - 0-9 VPs
Lawyer - 0+ VPs (Most often 0 or 3)
Guild Master - 2-12 VPs

Phase C Townsfolk

Queen - 4+ VPs
Carpenter - 3-7 VPs
Mayor - 3-15 VPs


So, what does it all mean? By and large, very few actions actually generate multiple resources. The only ones that really do all kill rats, so while you need to take a couple of them you can't focus on just those as your big resource actions. Minstrel is the clear winner in terms of both resources or VPs, but he's tricky to use. He can bring in the most gold, but doing so strands a lot of cubes in the bank. In order to use him fully you need to have 3 cubes in one square already. Moving 2 into the bank is pretty mediocre, it's like a very bad money lender and still requires a plan to get them out again. (A second jester or maybe just leave them in for +3VPs on phase C guyo.) Minstreling two into the hospital or park actually seems really good early game now that I look at it. The only downside to moving two out early is you won't have three stockpiled to move out from that square for a better jester later.

One thing really worth pointing out is winning scores are often in the 70-80 range. Ignoring park related actions the best you're looking at realistically is scoring 9 from a single action, and there are preciously few chances to score even 9. What this means is over the course of the game if you're going to win you're going to be scoring small numbers of VPs frequently. Scoring points frequently is what really makes the park shine, so I'm pretty sure a winning strategy has to involve the park.

Remember how we wanted 46 resources out of 27 actions? Most of the big point plays don't generate any resources at all, so you need your resource plays to make as many resources as possible while trying to maximize the jester. As such it seems like a very strong plan is to try to get 3 cubes into the bank or the cube house early. Get in, get your 6 of a resource, and then throw them into the park or the hospital. (Park if you won't get plagued by doing it, hospital if you will otherwise get plagued.) If possible, repeat again for the other one. Use your early bribes to generate the cubes and cash you need to get this plan going. (Bribing the night watchman for 6VPs on turn 1 seems good, but I'd rather take moneylender, wench, or monk over it.) Playing into the park is worth a resource and is the highest VP card play you can make. I've been passing these early to set up a tripleton and I'm no longer sure that's correct.

Notre Dame is bad. It costs you two resources (you lose the gold and a cube) and it only returns 4 VPs in the worst case. Being the only one into ND might be worth it, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to try to skip it from now on. Later game NDs get better because it's one action to proc the park twice.


Geometric Resource Progression - What does this game mechanic actually do? Assuming you don't Jester into a production building you earn 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5 resources. Note, 15 cubes is more than you could possibly want. 15 gold is enough to play a full ND every phase on its own with no other gold pickups. So, the 5th guy will rarely if ever be played in either building. While you get a ton for him, it's a mostly wasted ton. Anyway, how much is an action worth on average? It depends how often you go. If you go once, it's worth 1 resource. 2 is worth 1.5. 3 is worth 2. 4 is worth 2.5. 5 is worth 3. So you're likely getting 2 resources per action from the bank and cube-house, maybe 2.5 per.

Park - How much is it actually worth? As an upper bound, assume each guy in the park is worth .5 VPs per VP generating action. Notre Dame counts as two VP generating actions for this analysis. Each phase you can take at most 3 bribes worth VPs (and likely will) likely one ND, and maybe 1-2 cars/VP houses. So a park guy to start phase 1 is likely worth 10.5 VPs. To start phase 2 is likely worth 7 VPs, and to start phase 3 is likely worth 3.5 VPs. Likely is actually a misnomer here since it's not precise at all and quite possibly an overestimate since sometimes you won't bribe for VPs and sometimes you play parks mid-phase, but you could also end up earning more points out of it because you could just play all cars and VP-houses. Also, the first guy in the park is worthless, he doesn't make .5 VPs in reality but if you get two guys in the park they make the full 1. Overall, the park action is probably worth around 7 VPs in the early-mid game and 4 in the mid-late game. It's not worth much at the very end.

Notre Dame - How much is it actually worth? At worst, everyone plays their ND card and you end up with 2 bonus points to go with the 1 for going to ND in the first place. As well you get 2 park procs, which can be very clutch. At best you get a solo-ND for anywhere from 6-12 bonus points. Most likely you'll get 4 plus the park procs, which we're really assigning to the park and not to ND.

Minstrel - What does it do? What it does really depends on where you put the cubes. If you put them in the bank or cube-house then you're likely to only actually go there once or twice. As such, you're getting 3 or 6 resources from the action. If you put them in the hospital you kill 3 rats a turn for the rest of the game, so if there are 7 turns left (best case scenario) it's worth 21 resources. (I say that's best case because you need to have 3 cubes in one spot before you can make optimal use of it, and that'll take a couple turns.) If you put them in the park you score 1.5 points per VP action for the rest of the game on average, so using the park calculations above you're getting 21ish VPs out of doing it at the end of phase A. Moving them to the car or the guesthouse is a huge mistake. Moving them to the VP house is worth 3 VPs every time you move to the VP house which sounds good, but consider moving them to the park instead. Unless more than half of your remaining VP actions are VP houses, you're better off in the park in the abstract sense. Now, since the park works only on even numbers it's not quite as clearcut, you might only need more than a third of your actions to be VP houses to profit. Most likely, though, that still won't be the case. Especially since I'm going to hate draft your VP houses on you if you need them to win! End result... The hospital and the park both benefit from leaving cubes in and not so much from activating them, and they have monsterous payouts if you move 3 cubes into either of them, especially early. A final thing to consider with the Minstrel is how it impacts the final scoring cards, discussed next.

If everything has worked out swimmingly for you then you'll have all the resources you need by the final round and you'll be able to buy all 3 of the big point cards. So if you have 3 cubes in the bank and transfer them all to the park you lose 3 points from the Mayor. Assuming the park was your biggest spot before that you get the 3 points right back with the Queen. If you didn't have 3 in the park before then you don't lose anything making the trade. You also lose 1 point from the Carpenter by emptying the bank. Overall you likely lose 1 or 2 points by making this play but do get them right back by proccing the park for at least 1 more on all 3 of these bribes.


In conclusion, what do I advise? Well, you need to balance acquiring enough of every resource with the need to focus on specific resources in order to get enough of them in the early game. I like to get one of my gold or cubes by playing cards and the other with bribes or by driving my car. Then you can minstrel them out and into the park where they'll have the biggest impact on your VP acquisition. Notre Dame is a trap early game and just costs too much to use. Late game it's not very efficient but it's one of the few ways to proc the park so it's good if you've overloaded the park. It's also good if you've got a ton of money because you can cash in for many bonus points on the play.

Great Canadian Board Game Blitz Recap

Last weekend was Fan eXpo and with it came the Great Canadian Board Game Blitz which I made a brief post about last week. A lot of that post centered on the format and how getting a lucky seed in the first round was very powerful. It turns out the format had changed between the event I won in July and the one last weekend to try to fix that problem.

What they did was they randomly seeded everyone for round 1, and then they reversed that seeding for round 2. So if you had one of the very good spots in round 1 you'd end up with a very bad spot in round 2 and vice-versa. Or if you're picking in the middle you're never in a great way or a bad way. You won't get to start a game in either round but it's pretty likely most if not all of the games which were chosen will still have spots left. If everyone always picked their best game, were comparably skilled at their best games, and had similar drop-offs as they progressed down their list in order this seems pretty balanced. People at one extreme rate to win a game and come last in a game and people in the middle rate to get a second and a third. Under the scoring system those are worth the same amount and if you outperform your expected value you'll place highly going into the game selection in future rounds.

Of course, those assumptions aren't likely to hold, but this format still seems pretty fair. I'd be tempted to extend this format across the whole event, and just rotate selections every round instead of reseeding by record. Then everyone would progress through each of the potential spots and have the same chances of getting 'screwed' or not. (Maybe keep the last round seeded to open up interesting game choices as people try to gang on the leader?)


The event itself had 23 people play in it, though not everyone played in every round. They'd prepared the game list to accommodate many more people than that by having 9 games available for each round. 5 games were played of those 9 each round so not getting to start a game had the potential to be pretty bad here. Your top 4 games in a given round might not even get started... Oh well!

I end up getting dealt the 9 of diamonds, with game choices going A-2-...-K in clubs then in diamonds. Not every card was dealt and I believe that put me picking 3rd last in round 1 and 3rd in round 2. (Woo, new format!)

Round 1 Game Choices - Bohnanza, Citadels, Dominion, Ingenious, Modern Art, Roll Through the Ages, Saint Petersburg, San Juan, Three Dragon Ante

Picking so late in this round was potentially disasterous for me as it has a lot of games I haven't played or actively dislike playing. Bohnanza, Citadels, Ingenious, Modern Art, Roll Through the Ages, and Three Dragon Ante all fall into this category. Note that only leaves Dominion, Saint Petersburg, and San Juan as games I want to play. Fortunately all 3 were picked, and even more fortunately when it was my choice there was a seat of San Juan open. (Along with 2 seats of Citadels.) So, I went to play San Juan which was by far my best game of this lot.

I was at a table with my friend Duncan (the only other person playing who I knew) and two people he was teaching the game to. I believe one had played the game once and the other was completely new to the game. I was seated in third chair and the first round started with builder (aqueduct, tobacco, tobacco, prefecture), craftsman, prospector (me), and mayor (Duncan). I think prefecture is the best building in the game in a 4 player game so I was immediately worried that Duncan was in a strong position. I was in a good seating position though, as the guy to my right was a big believer in crafting and selling. The first two turns he crafted and sold and I prospected. (Note: selling indigo + tobacco = 2.8 cards, selling tobacco + 2 prospectors = 3.8 cards...)

My second building was the library, which I think is the best building in the game in a 2 player game. (It's only really good when you pick prospector or builder which you're guaranteed to do in a 2 player game. In a 4 player game you're often forced to call something else which devalues it a little.) As it turned out I actually got to builder or prospector every turn but 1 over the course of the whole game, so it was very strong.

Eventually both myself and another player build prefectures of our own, which hurt Duncan's position. He also wasn't truly abusing prefecture the way I like to, which is to not call mayor. Count on someone else to mayor for you, giving you 2 cards on their action, and just call prospector or builder yourself. Sometimes they won't but often they will and I think you really want to give them rope to hang themselves. If they steadfastly refuse to mayor the whole game then maybe you need to call it yourself but probably then I'd just try to build silver and piggyback on all the crafting and selling that has to be going on. (To be fair, I value the extra card selection at almost nothing and tend to just look at things from a strict card advantge standpoint.)

My buildings ended up being Indigo, Tobacco, Library, Quarry, Poor House, Prefecture, Statue, Archive, City Hall, Palace, Hero, Guild Hall. I built the archive to proc Por House but it actualy ended up coming home in a big way. The turn after I build the archive I was forced to call something that wasn't prospector or builder. I called mayor and looked at 8 cards thanks to the library. I kept hero, city hall, and guild hall from what I looked at, to go with the palace that was already in my hand.

Duncan had a chapel early on and put a lot of cards under it (9 I think, maybe only 7?) but he didn't build a single big building. He was 12 points behind me so he would have needed 2 good big buildings to hope to catch up but it was a little unfortunate for him as the guy who kept mayoring to never build a big building. (I don't know if he drew some early on and discarded them though. I help my palace for most of the game which made my poor house pretty terrible but did let me build it eventually.)

Final scores ended up 42-32-30-22, with me being the 42.


Round 2 Game Choices - Alhambra, Blue Moon City, Carcassonne (with river), Medici, Ra, Race for the Galaxy, Thurn and Taxis, Ticket to Ride, Ticket to Ride: Europe

I got to start a game this round due to the reverse draft order (though with a win in round 1 I would have gotten to anyway). I started Race For The Galaxy, which is seriously the only game from this list I both like to play and know how to play. I'd be willing to play Alhambra but everything else gets a big thumbs down from me. Good thing I got to start a game!

I sit down at the table and it's a guy who knows how to play teaching 2 other people how to play. I don't think either of them had played before. The guy that knew how to play suggested using alternate starting rules for just the two new players, giving them the 'default' hands for their start world and having us draw the real way. This is both against the rules of the tournament (no house rules) and just not fair. I could see setting it up so we all used the default hands or so none of us did but having just some people do it rubs me the wrong way. As such, I kiboshed the suggestion. The other guys didn't seem to mind too much. He also wanted to remove the Gambling World from the deck because he thinks it sucks and is confusing. I made him keep it in. As Pounder says, when you're learning Race and find a card confusing, just discard it to build something else!

I don't remember much about the game, except that I ended up actually building the Gambling World because I needed a way to ship a good for a VP. The gambling portion actually came home (I named 6, of course) and gave me the alien 6-cost building when I already had a couple alien planets in play.

Final scores ended up 39-32-29-9, with me being the 39.


Round 3 Game Choices - Carcassonne (with River, Inns & Cathedrals, Traders & Builders), Galaxy Trucker, Hansa Teutonica, In the Year of the Dragon, Notre Dame, Power Grid: Factory Manager, Settlers of Catan, Stone Age, Vegas Showdown


I was the only person with 2 wins, so I got to start the first game this round. Now that we're into a round that's longer than an hour I like many of these games. I'd feel pretty confident playing any of Hansa Teuetonica, Notre Dame, Factory Manager, Settlers, Stone Age, or Vegas Showdown. Notre Dame was removed from WBC this year so I haven't had a chance to play it in a while and I really like it, so I picked it.

It ended up being a 5 player game where none of the other 4 players had ever played before, so I taught them the rules. One of the players was obviously a hardcore gamer (he missed the first two rounds and hence picked last in this round and had to play the only open game) but the other three were more casual which made teaching the game a little tricky. He picked everything up immediately but I like to expound on certain things to drive important things home to the other new players. He got a little antsy at that and I'm a little worried the explanation ended up a bit rushed but like most games Notre Dame is something you need to play a few turns of to really understand the flow.

All three of the more casual players missed at least one bribe and 2 of them got plagued by rats. Not terribly unexpected, really, since Notre Dame is all about juggling many limited resources and you need to play a bit to get a feel for what you can afford to skimp on. The hardcore guy was sitting to my left and drove his car around a lot. (I don't like driving my car very much, so he got a lot of car cards and scooped up all the 4 pointers I think.) I minstrelled 3 dudes into the park from the cube house and played 3 in there of my own by midway through age B, so while I had almost no VPs at that point I was scoring 3 extra on every action for the rest of the game. It ended up being a lot closer than I would have liked but the park came home.

Final scores ended up 75-70-41-29-23, with me being the 75.


Round 4 Game Choices - Acquire, Amun-Re, Container, Endeavor, Kingsburg, Nexus Ops, Princes of Florence, Puerto Rico, SmallWorld

With 3 wins I got to pick first again. This round had a number of games I'd like to learn or play again because I've only played once (Amun-Re, Container, Endeavor, Nexus Ops) but no games I both really want to play and am good at. I was in good position to finish highly in the event so I opted to play something I'm good at but don't like a lot... Puerto Rico.

I end up in a 4 player game of Puerto Rico with 3 people who have either never played before or have only played once so I am again teaching the rules of the game to all of my opponents. The lady who ended up going first asked what she should do which put me at a bit of a quandry. I know what the generally accepted default action is (settle for quarry) but I rarely if ever do it. I like building a small market or settling for corn but I'm not sure if I should offer strategy advice I don't believe or if I should teach people to play games the warped way I do. I end up telling her the common opening is to settle for quarry but that people sometimes do other things like buying a small market. She settled for a quarry (a strong general action for sure, I just hate to give up on early plantations) and I took a corn. Then I built the small market.

As the game progressed I built the first coffee and got to sell it. This bought me a harbor, and I ultimately bought a wharf as well. I skipped crafting one turn to sell coffee to build a large building, which ended up being a pretty pathetic Guild Hall. (Only 4 bonus points.)

The game dragged on for a long time with none of the end conditions rapidly approaching. The second harbor didn't get purchased so VPs were slow to move. No one bought a bunch of extra production buildings with lots of holes (typical of a building Guild Hall strategy) so guys weren't threatening to run out. And buildings in general were slow to get built (the lady with all the quarries frequently had no bucks during builders and couldn't build anything). Eventually we ran out of shipping points. I had 51 of them, which is more than half of the starting number.

Final scores ended up 72-53-51-39, with me being the 72.


Round 5 Game Choices - Agricola, At the Gates of Loyang, Caylus, El Grande, Pillars of the Earth, Power Grid, Steam, Tigris & Euphrates, Tikal

With 4 wins I again got to pick first. It turned out a lot of people dropped out before this round (it conflicted with the masquerade at Fan eXpo which is really impressive; I would have dropped out to go to it if I wasn't in contention). We ended up with 15 people which split into 5 games of 3. At the time I made my choice I didn't know this was going to be the split. I'd have assumed with 15 people we'd do 3 4s and a 3. Certainly at the event I played in in July the last round lost people and they actually played a 4, a 5, and a 6 with 15 people. As such I made my choice pretty much solely based on maximum number of players and went with Tigris & Euphrates. It's actually not great without 4 people so I'd have gone with Agricola if I knew it was going to be a 3er.

Overall scores going into this round (amongst people who could catch me) were 25-22.5-21.5-21.5-18-17.5. A win or a second place in this game and I win the event for sure. 3rd place only gives me 4 points, so the next 3 people could pass me if they won. A 4th place is worth 2, so all 5 could pass me with a win. Now, it turns out both 21.5s and the 18 dropped out and we only played 3 player games so only the guy in 2nd could pass me. He opted to start Caylus instead of sitting down at my table so his destiny was not in his own hands.

Ultimately I end up in a game with a gentleman who had played once before and one who had never played before so I was once again teaching the rules of a game to all of my opponents. Tigris & Euphrates is a game I don't even really understand how to win and had absolutely no clue until I'd played like 5 or 6 times which makes it hard to teach other people what they need to do to win. I explained the rules and went over how to score points a couple times but I feel like I didn't do the greatest job. Both opponents formed an early monument (good for scoring points) but built them with only one matching leader in the kingdom. I was able to drop in uncontested on both monuments to score up extra points.

A third monument got built in similar fashion (I already had a leader of the second colour in the kingdom) and I used a disaster to kill off the other leader and move in on my own. For a couple turns I scored a monument point of every colour. We ended up building 5 monuments over the course of the game and on the last turn I got 3 green points from monuments. (All 3 green monuments were in 1 kingdom!) The game ended on treasures and I had 5 of the 8 which were taken.

Final scores ended up 12-9-6, with me being the 12.


So, overall I came first with a win in every round but it honestly doesn't feel very satisfying. I had 15 opponents across 5 games (some duplicated) and only played against 2 people who knew the rules of the game going in. I didn't play a single game against the people who finished 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th overall. I think the problem there is that my approach to the event differed from other people's.

For example, I played the same guy in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Tigris & Euphrates and he said afterwards that he was picking games to learn them and was glad he kept playing me because he got to pick up some tricks for each game. The people I played Notre Dame with gained a big appreciation for the park because of my plan there. A lot of my opponents were just there to have fun and learn some games and they seemed to have a great time.

I was there to win a big tournament. I guess I did, but I want to win by being the best of the best, not by having no competition. That isn't meant as an insult, but I don't think someone that just learned the rules to Tigris & Euphrates, Puerto Rico, or Notre Dame has a very big chance of winning. If Duncan had played in every game I'd picked and I'd still won the tournament I'd have felt like I really did something since he knows the rules and is pretty good at all of those games.

There were good players there. They had 5 winners of smaller events show up, so clearly people who can win games were in attendance. They finished 1, 4, 5, 7, 11 but other than Duncan in round 1 I didn't play against any of them. I don't know if they intentionally avoided me, or if I just picked games they didn't want to play, or if wearing a Waluigi costume kept them away. Ultimately I ended up missing the Q&A with Spike and the masquerade event at the con (along with a bunch of other stuff) and didn't really come away feeling satisfied. I don't know that there's any way to fix this either, since I doubt they'd get a big enough turnout of just hardcore gamers. (And even then, if I'm not picking a game every round I could easily end up as someone who is playing games for the first time and then hardcore or not I'm not going to be a challenge.)

I'll definitely be on the lookout for other events run stand-alone like the one in July but I'm not convinced I'd play again at Fan eXpo.

WBC 2008 -> Day 5

Prelude
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap

Puerto Rico – 11am – I’m a big fan of sleep and didn’t have any pressing reason to wake up so I didn’t. Eventually I got up and showered and looked at the schedule and decided to run the 11am PR heat. Now, I’d played a lot of PR on BSW back in the day but since it got removed I’ve rarely played the game. (At one point someone asked me how many games I’d played in the last year to prep for the event and I think I said 1.)

At any rate, I end up randomly going first this game which isn’t a position I like. (I love to ship corn!) I don’t have any notes for this game but I know I first turn quarried (something I rarely do) but then audibled into a harbour/wharf shipping position and won.
Amazing Space Venture – demo – 12pm – My PR game ended pretty fast so I wandered by the demo area. This game is a Carcassonne variant with space ships and cards. (As an aside, were you aware that Carcassonne is in the Word spellchecker? It actually suggested it as a revision to Carcassone.) I didn’t play the game and it mostly just looked like it was making Carcassonne more complicated for the sake of making it more complicated and not to make it any better. I certainly wouldn’t buy the game after the demo but I would be willing to try it at some point.

Agricola – 1pm – This wasn’t an actual round, but Robb, Pounder and I decided we had nothing to do for a couple hours. Pounder wanted to play Agricola again after playing a heat and the demo looked interesting enough. I forgot how important people were and ended up spending all my wood on fences and therefore couldn’t expand my house. I lost by a good margin but decided I really liked the game. (It is one of three games I bought shortly after WBC, along with Race for the Galaxy and Twilight Struggle.)

Puerto Rico – quarterfinals – 6pm – There’s a large gap here so I’m assuming we went out for food after Agricola. I’d won my PR round so I figured I should go to the quarters and see if I’d advanced. It turns out 8 people won 2 games and advanced to the semi-finals while everyone who won a game got into the quarters. For the elimination rounds they switch to bidding points for position. I again don’t have any notes for this game so I’m not sure what specifically happened but in generalities I know I was playing against David Platnik (a Titan player who seemed to be pretty good at games in general) and two casual gamers. It very quickly became apparent to both David and I that one of us was going to win the game (he was to my right and was hardcore building while I was hardcore shipping) and it came down to the final turn. The player across from me was governor and had to pick a job. If he goes one way David wins, otherwise I win. He picked a job that made me win.

After the game I was talking to Robb about what happened and he questioned why I’d bid to sit behind David. I knew going in that he was going to be good, so I should try my best to sit on his right, not his left. (This way he can’t spite draft me and its likely random players won’t know when to spite draft. I do know David made a couple unobvious choices that hurt me that other players likely wouldn’t have.)

Notre Dame – 8pm – I get assigned to a table and it turns out three of the players are reasonably new (2 of them had to have rules clarifications to start the game) and the 4th guy seemed to really know what was going on. Sadly he was on my immediate right and if seating position matters in PR it really matters in ND. Righty got passed a C1 Notre Dame, for example, after playing a hardcore money strategy. The guy who passed it to him later lamented that he didn’t get to play a Notre Dame card in round C. Of course you didn’t, you passed it! Anyway, I ended up exactly tied with the guy on my right. We went to the GM and the decision was made that we’d both be treated as winners because it would make the numbers better for the semi-finals. (Pounder later pointed out that this is actually against WBC rules, but what are you going to do?)

Notre Dame – semi-finals – 10pm – It turns out there were exactly 8 games played over the two rounds. Pounder won games in both rounds and two of us won the same game in round 2, so there were 8 people to advance. The GM decided to go with 2 4-player games, with the top 2 advancing from each game. I ended up at a table with Robb, Brian Kowal (a Magic pro back when I sometimes was on tour), and some other dude. I don’t remember much about the game other than that it was very close. The other guy and I advanced in a very well played game.

Notre Dame – finals – 12pm – Pounder and David Platnik advanced from the other semi-final table. I ended up sitting to Pounder’s left which is very bad for me. (I wrote some analysis about the game which is in the archives here, and Pounder is probably the only person who has read it. I know he agreed with a lot of what I had to say and we have very similar strategies. Having him drafting before me puts me in a lot of trouble.)

Anyway, I end up making a very dangerous play. I play a Notre Dame card in round A and only pick up one dollar which results in my having no money going into B1. I have 4 cards in 9 that I can draw to give me a dollar, or Pounder can pass me one and I’m ok. I have an 82% chance of drawing a card I need, but fail to, and Pounder doesn’t pass me one. It turns out Pounder drafted a guesthouse instead of passing it to me and didn’t play it, blowing me out. I missed my bribe in B1 and then had to scramble to try to get back into a playable position. This forced me to pass extra VP-house cards to my left, which David gladly scooped up on his way to the victory.

Pounder ended up 3rd, I came 4th, and Robb came 5th. Go Waterloo!

I had a 9am PR semi-final to attend the next morning, so I bowed out of potential open gaming after our midnight final finished. I suspect we went to the Waffle House anyway, and then Robb went searching for a werewolf game while Pounder and I crashed. (Pounder had a long drive in the morning so he wanted to sleep too.)

Notre Dame: Cubes

There's one final resource to discuss in Notre Dame, and that is cubes. Cubes are a tricky beast to analyze as there's no clear penalty for not having enough of them. With dollars if you run out you can see what you weren't able to bribe. If you get plagued you lose immediate VPs. When you run out of cubes you just have to move some cubes around. In fact, most games even if you were to pick up max cubes you'd still have to move some around at some point, so it's not a game-losing penalty by any stretch of the imagination. Often there's not even any downside to having to move cubes around but sometimes it can be crippling. So, what do cubes do, and how many do we really need?

Cubes have a couple purposes. They...

• Allow the geometric progression of the bank, cube-house, and VP-house to function.
• Let you drive further in your car.
• Operate the hospital and park on an on-going basis.
• Allow you to score VPs by bribing some phase specific guys, especially the phase C guys.

The first group is often expendable. Once you use the bank 3-4 times you don't really need to go back, so the cubes you have sitting there are just waiting to be moved. This can be when you run out of cubes and move one on your standard action or by one of the moving bribes, but a strong strategy often seems to me to be to get 3 cubes into the cube house or bank and then move them out to somewhere else.

The second group is tricky, and often depends on how many other players are driving in their cars. It's pretty easy to get into a situation where your car is stranded if you ever move a cube out of this square. This not only wastes the rest of the cubes in the car square, it also makes the car card uselss. Once you abandon the car, though, you can freely move the rest of the cubes out.

The third group is mission critical. You can very rarely afford to move cubes out of either the hospital or the park. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but generally speaking once you put a cube in either square you should plan on it staying there. The go-in action of killing a rat is mediocre, those squares are good because of the staying ability they have. The hospital is practically must-have for 2-3 cubes and the park wants an even number.

The fourth group is critical to winning many games. There are three different scoring guys in phase C and you want to consider at least one of them with your cube placement over the course of the game. The three are 1 VP per occupied square, 3 VP per triple occupied square, and 1 VP per cube in your most populated square. Because of the triple occupied guy I tend to try to have 3 guys in the hospital. 2 will sometimes suffice if you work at killing rats in other ways, but the third guy in is worth 3 VPs, so might as well put him in there and worry less about rats as well. (There's also a 2 VP per doubleton guy in phase B who can be big VPs as well.)

Cubes can also be removed from the game a couple of different ways. If you get plagued you lose a cube from the most populated square as well as the 2 VPs. You can get this cube back, but it goes to your bad pile so it's a non-trivial process. Losing from your most populated square can be ok (if you've finished using the square) but often it's brutal. Losing cube 4 from the park is depressing, and losing a cube from the hospital makes you cry. The second way is by going to Notre Dame. At the end of the phase all cubes in Notre Dame are recycled back to bad piles. This is a necessary evil as going to Notre Dame is often how you win, but it is something to keep in mind. Someone who goes to ND early without also picking up some cubes is in trouble as they'll then only have 3 cubes to work with.

How do you get cubes you may be asking. Exactly the same ways as you get gold, oddly enough, with one extra way. That way is the Bishop, one of the guys you can bribe in phase A. He lets you take a cube from your bad section and put it onto any empty square on the board, activating that square. This guy is awesome. Not only does he give you a free cube, he puts it into play and gives you a free action. Even if your best spot is to guesthouse for a cube it still beats bribing the monk, I think, because it gets the cube into play where it can do things and that's worth losing a VP early game. You should always plan for the bishop and try to leave a good square open, bishoping into the hospital or park on turn 2 is amazing.

So, how many cubes do you need? You start the game with 4 and there's a hard limit of 14, so you can only ever pick up 10 plus the number of times you get plagued/go to Notre Dame. If you're trying to maximize the triples card you want all 14 cubes, to try to arrange in 5 groups of 3. (Along with Balki you get 15.) However, that's a little extreme. Putting the 4th in the park seems better at that point, as it'll also boost the max cubes guy as well. More cubes is better, because any stragglers you can leave behind over the course of the game in otherwise empty squares are worth 1 VP.

I think you need three in the hospital. You need to deal with 28 rats over the course of the game and 3 cubes in the hospital is a great start to accomplishing that goal as well as being worth the 3 VPs for a triple. Most people want to load up the park (and I think they're right) so you're looking at wanting at least 2 and probably 4 guys in the park. I had 8 in the park one game and it was as awesome as it sounds. (12 VPs for taking the max cubes guy in phase C!) As well, you need likely 2 guys for Notre Dame, 3 for whatever section you're working on right now (bank/cube house/car/VP house) and one or two to move around on mediocre actions. Minimum then, you're looking at wanting 2+3+4+3+2=14 guys. Note because a couple will recycle from ND and because by game end you don't really need the 3 for whatever you're working on this isn't the maximum that you could have, but it's close. With some forethought and planning you can generally turn most of your extra cubes into VPs with the phase C bribes, so having the extra guys rarely hurts.

Remember, this is a game of finite actions, so getting max cubes does come with the lost opportunity cost of being able to do other things with your time, but you can often turn those extra cubes into enough VPs to make them worthwhile. You can always get away with less (if you only have 5 or 6 cubes you just don't park) and you won't feel like you're losing, but you probably are. On the other hand if you can't bribe or if you get plagued you see the direct result of the misplanning and you feel bad about it.

Notre Dame: Bucks

Bucks. Dollars. Doubloons. Gold. Currency has plenty of names in games, but it all comes down to one thing... Exchanging currency for goods and/or services. In Notre Dame money is used in one of two ways, both revolving around bribery.

First of all, each round you get to bribe a member of town. Doing so costs you one gold and lets you take one action. You can bribe at most one person a round, though you can pass. Now, 3 of the 6 generic bribes are worth a gold plus other things, so bribing tends to be something you really want to do. I have never found myself in a situation where I thought to myself 'Gee, I should just not bribe'.

The second thing you can do is bribe the clergy who live in Notre Dame. While bribing the townsfolk can get you lots of different things bribing Notre Dame is worth one thing and one thing only... Victory Points! However, you can only pay up to 3 gold each time you go to ND, and you can only go to ND if you draft the ND card specifically. On average I'd say people tend to go to ND twice a game though personally I try to go at least 3 times.

So, how much gold do you need for the whole game, and what can you do to make gold? Well, you want to bribe all 9 times, so that's 9 gold. At a minimum if you're going to win I think you're looking at heading to ND at least twice for 1G bribes, so the absolute minimum you need is 11. I think the expected maximum is likely a 1G ND and two 3G NDs, for a total of 16. The last game I played featured 3 3G NDs and a 1G ND for a total of 19 but that requires people to pass a lot of ND cards, and you to generate a lot of money. For now, 11-16 seems like a reasonable range to aim for.

How do you make money?

• The bank card is worth 1G per cube in the bank
• The ghetto is worth 1G
• Driving in your car can get you 1G
• Bribing the wench can get you 1G
• Bribing the moneylender can get you 2G
• You start the game with 3G

It is quite possible to bribe the money lender all 3 times he comes out which with your starting 3G gets you to 9G. Two buggies/wenches can get you to 11G pretty easily, and all without touching the bank. Of course, getting all 3 money lenders means skipping a phase C big-VP bribe and is also very risky when you consider the moneylender could come in phase C3. (Where the extra bucks are worthless.) It's also worth noting that the gold buggy is only 1VP, so while buggying for gold once is slightly better than banking for it, going twice is just worse. (Worst case scenario, the extra gold you gain from the second bank can be cashed in for 2VPs when you would have had a 1G ND.) Of course, if you have a populated park the buggy starts looking better and better.

Now, gold is the one resource where we can clearly define how good extras are. Going from a 1G ND to a 2G ND is worth 2VPs always. From 2 to 3 is worth 3VPs. Ideally, you're better off with a 1G ND and a 3G ND than 2 2G NDs. (+1VP for same gold cost.) As such, I think if there's any question about having enough gold you should err on the side of a 1G ND early.

Another way to turn extra gold into VPs is by taking an extra ND action. This is easier to pull off early than late since late game righty often has the bucks to go himself so he doesn't pass you his ND. Early, if you have the bucks, you can sometimes draft an extra ND and cash it for 1G. How much is that worth?

Assume the ND closes out for N cubes or for N-1 cubes. Then in a 5 player game it's worth 3VPs or 4VPs. In a 4 player game it's worth 3VPs or 4VPs. In a 3 player game it's worth 3VPs or 5VPs. In a 2 player game it's worth 6 or 3 VPs. Also, the extra NDs cost everyone else a small share of the ND pool if they went to ND that round. Finally, you get at least one park proc out of it, maybe two if it's your only ND for the round. Even with no parks an extra ND is always better than spending an extra G on another ND, with one exception...

The extra ND costs you a card play. If that card play would be worth nothing, the extra ND is better. If it's worth something how good it is compared to overloading a different ND depends on your park situation. Evaluating this really requires evaluating how good the other action would be for you, and that's on a pick by pick basis during the drafts. From a strict gold standpoint though, more NDs is better.

Notre Dame thoughts

Turns out... I'm lazy! So many things I kept meaning to post, so many times I just didn't bother. I've now heard of two people who randomly stumbled into this place and I like re-reading it myself, so I should really keep going. So, here's some thoughts on the game Notre Dame.


First things first, this is a very short game in terms of how many decisions you get to make. It's not like PR or SJ where you can spend some time building up resources and then use those resources to power out VPs in late game. There is no late game. There are three different resources you have to juggle in addition to collecting VPs, and you have to take that into account while you're playing. Those resources are cubes, gold, and rats.


Rats: The order of the bribe cards is random, but at the end of the game the same ones will always have come out. As such, there are a finite number of rats. In the first stage (A) there are 12 rats. In the second stage (B) there are 13 rats. In the third stage (C) there are 12 rats. As such, if you don't want to get plagued you will have to deal with 37 rats over the course of the game. Note, you get 9 for free, as your rat marker starts on the 0 space.

Ending the game with the rat marker lower than on the 9 is wasteful. There is no intrinsic benefit to having killed extra rats. (Extra money is a tiebreaker, so it does something. Rats, not so much.) The time you spent killing those rats could have (and likely should have) been spent doing something better. In fact, the only time a low rat count is particularly good is the beggar king, a phase B card that turns rat spaces into VPs.

Now, how do you deal with rats? There are a few ways. (Remember, if you're trying not to get plagued you need to deal with 28 rats over the entire game.)

• Hospital: Every cube in the hospital is worth 1 rat, plus one rat for every turn left in the game. Note:If you are at 0 you don't get the initial benefit of the hospital, so a turn 1 hospital only deals with 9 rats, not 10. A turn 2 hospital also deals with 9 rats, so delaying a turn doesn't hurt, not that you really get that choice.
• Park: Placing a cube here is worth 1 rat. That is all. (And potentially a ton of VPs...)
• Buggy: Not always possible, but often you can get 3VPs and kill 1 rat.
• Guesthouse: Kill 1 rat. Sometimes you could kill 2 rats. I can't imagine you winning with that many cubes in the guesthouse though.
• The Doctah: Score 0 rats for the round. Your hospital still kills rats this turn, so you actually can move backwards. Some games this will be worth 7 rats, some games it will be worth 1. This guy is a general dude, so he can be bribed all 3 phases if you want.
• The Wench: 3VPs and 1 rat for a gold. It's like driving in your car!
• Getting plagued: After you lose 2VPs and a cube from the board you go down to 9 rats. Sometimes this can deal with a lot of rats, if you get a big rat turn with 7+ rats. Of course, in order to have this work you need to be pretty high up in rats as it is. Try not to use this tactic every turn!

In addition, a few of the bribes let you move cubes around. Moving them into the hospital can deal with rats! In particular, the mistrel lets you move 3 cubes without activating the building. This still deals with 3 rats a turn!

I had one game recently where turn 2A had 8 rats. The Minstrel was available to be bribed, and both Josh and I used it to move 3 cubes into the hospital, allowing us to both barely not get ratted. The other two players just got plagued. However, because we'd used up 8 rats on B1 there were only 5 left for B2 and B3, and this meant they were able to recover. Josh and I, with our 5 cubes in the hospital, were going to drop in a hurry. On turn C1 the Mistrel came up again, and I threw 3 cubes back out of the hospital into the park instead of claiming big VPs from whatever the round C bribe was. I ended up ending the game at exactly 9 rats and the extra cubes in the park really came home I think. (I scored The Queen with 8 cubes in the park for 12VPs!)

I won that game, but if the Minstrel hadn't come up in C1 I probably would have lost. Maybe a 33% chance at winning is a good play, but it's not clear and certainly won't be right every time, but it is an example of a less straightforward way to deal with rats.

At any rate... We need to handle 28 rats and the vast majority of our options only kill 1 at a time. We get to take 27 actions total in the entire game. 18 card plays and 9 bribes. It should be painfully clear that taking 1 rat actions can't be good enough. We need to take a couple actions which deal with many rats, and there are really only a couple of those that are ever available. As such, it's pretty important to take advantage of them when they arise.

Visit the doctor if he's going to kill a bunch of rats. Everyone can figure out to take him on a 7 rat phase but what about a 4? The fact that we're even considering a 4 rat doctor should make a phase A hospital look really good. It kills 8-9 rats! Even a phase B hospital kills 5-7 rats.

I strongly believe a phase A hospital is so good that I will first pick it every time. I can't think of a situation where I'd rather have anything else. Even if I know doing so will guarantee my opponent a solo-Notre Dame, I think it has to be done. The alternative is giving him my hospital and his, pretty much dealing with his rat problem for the whole game.

What about Balki? (Good Buddy!) The problem with putting Balki in the hospital is that for a hospital guy to be really good he wants to stay there the entire game. I have a similar problem with Balki and the park. I've put him there early before and always been sad when I have the option to draft future Balki's later in the game. It feels like sticking Balki in the hospital or the park is condemning him to live there forever. (Not always a bad thing, but something to keep in mind!)

One important thing to consider is the Bishop. You can bribe him to put a guy into the hospital for you if you haven't drawn or played your hospital yet. It is quite possible passing your hospital is ok if your plan is to just bribe the bishop, especially in a multi-handed game. (Though you can always play the hospital and then Bishop into anywhere else but ND.) Personally I like bishoping into the park so I can end up with 2 guys in the park and 1 in the hospital, but I could be way off base there. Bishoping into the hospital and then playing your own hospital card the next turn is awesome. That coupled with a couple parks and one doctor should be good enough.

Guesthousing a rat seems horrible. It's like the hospital or the park without any of the upside. Driving your car over a rat is a good number of VPs and can really be worth it in a pinch. If you need that rat dead it's way better than driving into 4 VPs.

Brettspielwelt

I took the night off raiding today so I could play on BSW and go to sleep early, and am I ever glad I did. That this is true speaks volumes about my will to raid right now, I think, though that could just be because I've been sick all week and sleep is the thing to do when you're sick.

At any rate, it turns out Notre Dame is on BSW. It's one of the games I played at WBC last year, the one with the drafting component to it. I played like 9 games tonight and had a blast playing it. I'm getting a decent grasp of at least one strategy, anyway, though it seems like there's probably better ones out there. At least I'm not getting destroyed by the plague very often!

WBC 'report', Part 2

So you've just stayed up extra late learning a new game and there's nothing good at 9am the next morning... What do you do? If you answered sleep in then you are a wiser man than I, for I chose to get up early and play in the Risk event. Risk is not what I would call a terribly good game. It's also not very fun if you're playing with the wrong kind of person, but that's something I forgot. Plus, Risk is the 'most normal' game at WBC and I kinda wanted to be able to name a game people recognized if they asked me what I'd done. My grandmother knows how to play Risk, she's almost certainly never heard of anything else at WBC.

At any rate, it was a 6 player game and I went first. The way people placed on the board I ended up the only person with a force in South America. There were 2 people in Australia, 2 in Europe, 1 in North America, and 1 in Africa. Having not played the game in years I'd forgotten how brutal the turn-in scheme was, going first I think I probably should have taken a turn off so as not to be forced to turn in for 4...

Personal strategical failures aside, the game was 'interesting' to say the least. The two people in Australia refused to fight. They both had all their armies down there, and they just didn't move. One of the guys in Europe chose to ran away, and attacked Africa. The other guy in Europe just took Europe and no one made any effort to stop him. Finally I used my turn-in to go the long way through Alaska to back door it to stop the carnage but it was a bad plan. Other people cashed in for 10+ armies and took me out before I got to go again. Oh well, on the plus side I was finished (barely) in under 2 hours which gave me time to head for an 11am game.

Pounder was up to play Tigris and Euphrates and I decided to play too. Unfortunately it was an 'A' level event which meant no demo and they expected everyone to know the rules. I'd played a couple times before, but it was 4 years ago... I figured I could pick it back up again, especially if I could glance at the nifty rules placards everyone gets.

Turns out my table was using a German board, so the rules placard was conveniently written in a language I couldn't read. I got a brief run-down of turn order during game setup, and away we went! I had fun but I misremembered one rule about how internal conflicts worked which ended up giving one of my opponents a huge lead. One of the other people in the game then made the same mistake I did a couple turns later, the same guy capitalized on it, and that was pretty much the game.

1pm, and the third Queen's Gambit heat was starting. I'd had a lot of fun the night before playing it, and there wasn't anything I was dying to play scheduled opposite it, so I signed up. I got to play the other side in this game, drawing Darth Maul. It was during this game that I learned how blocking a window didn't actually stop you from jumping from floor to roof. Once my opponent clarified that rule for me I stopped worrying about blocking her. A much better use of my droid cards was just to shoot people. I ended up winning the Jedi battle, but Darth Maul only had 1 health left. I took advantage of a rule that allowed him to run out, kill people, and then run out of line of site which let me kill a large number of her guys without fear of Maul dying. I believe I then drew a healing card for Darth Maul and he went the distance for me. Go evil!

5pm had Acquire on the schedule which Pounder and I wanted to play. Pounder had also played Queen's Gambit and his round went to time, so we couldn't get into a 3pm game if we'd wanted to. We decided an hour and a half break was a good time to go eat, so we went to the Amish diner. We weren't really in the mood for a big meal so we had a slice of pie and a milkshake each. The pie was only ok (lemon merangue but no where near as good as my mother's) but the milkshake was insane. We'd each ordered a strawberry milkshake so they made a bunch in a blender and gave us the 'leavings' in a jug along with our two large glasses. When I say strawberry I actually mean strawberry, and not just pink. There were huge hunks of real strawberries in the milkshake. We finished up our glasses and went to divvy up the rest. Turns out there was enough to fill up both of our glasses with plenty left over! When it was all said and done there was about five and a half full milkshakes in the jug, which made for a really awesome deal. (Of course, a meal of 3 milkshakes in an hour might not be the sanest thing, but it sure was tasty and filling.)

5pm was Acquire, a game of building hotels, buying stock, merging hotels, and selling stock. I got into a 4 player game with a guy who really knew the game, an older lady who kinda knew the rules, and a 13ish year old who also kinda knew the rules. This is a game where having your hotels get merged off the board is very good for you, and having your hotels get merged into large hotels is very good for you... The first merger was the kid joining two hotels he had no part of, which pretty much just gave myself and the other guy a huge lead. The kid realized what he'd done by his next turn, but it was too late to recover. (A feeling I knew all too well from Manifest Destiny the day before!) Ultimately the guy who's game it was pulled out a close victory over me with the other two nowhere near us.

7pm saw the first Puerto Rico round on the schedule. Unfortunately for me, I was completely exhausted. I didn't particularly want to play a thinking game in that state, so I wimped out and went back to the hotel to sleep early. I didn't actually end up playing PR at all over the course of the event. Robb ended up making the semifinals and Pounder lost in the quarterfinals to an annoying ruling. Someone forgot to restock the boat after a mayor phase, so instead of there being 9 on the board when Pounder was to call mayor the next turn there were only 4. They could clearly retrace everything that had happened after that mayor phase but the GM decided the ruling was 1 per player... Oddly enough that game was mentioned in the recap because it was won (barely) by the #2 indigo player who scored 69 points. I watched chunks of the game and I'm pretty sure she benefited pretty hugely from that boat miscue, but what are you going to do?


So I got to sleep by 8pm, which is something I used to do on occasion on a normal day when I work at 3am. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that I ended up waking up around 3am on Friday morning. This time also coincided with everyone else arriving back to the room. I tried to get back to sleep for a few minutes but gave up and decided to just go play DS at the conventional hall.

I wandered around for a bit first, but 4am is a shockingly quiet time. A rowdy werewolf game had just wound down and there didn't seem to be anything going on in any rooms. I went to the wargaming room where there were actually a few people looking in on 'A World at War', which is the 60+ hour long game. They were looking at games and commenting on the positions and such. They sounded knowledgeable, which is pretty crazy... You'd have to put in a lot of time playing a 60 hour game to get good enough at it to comment on board positions. (Not that I'm one to talk, having put who knows how much time into playing Titan for example!)

10am on Friday had the Queen's Gambit single elimination finals scheduled, and with two wins I was in ok position to make the top 16 but sadly wasn't a lock. It turns out the #1 tiebreaker is actually owning a copy of the game! (They need 8 copies to show up in order to actually run the round, and it's been out of print for a long time.) I managed to squeak in at position #15, one of a few people without a game who qualified. I ended up liking the game enough that I bought a copy on eBay for way more money than it originally sold so I won't be in that position next year!

I drew evil in my quarterfinal match, and the single elimination rounds played by a different rule... If no one has won after 2 hours, evil wins. This was to make sure the game actually progresses and they could play all 4 rounds in time. (Also, a pretty solid Naboo strategy is to ignore Anakin I think, assuming that if you get a stable palace position you will eventually win.) This actually came close to coming up in my game, as the game ended with 3 Naboo characters alive and like 1 minute on the clock when Anakin finally blew up the mother ship. I quite possibly lost because of not knowing a rule, I thought a deck of cards reshuffled when it didn't. Oh well, live and learn! The one thing that bothered me was a spectator who knew my opponent accused me of cheating by intentionally playing slowly to try to time the game out. Having only played twice before it did take me time to read some of the cards, but I was going as fast as I could. Perhaps more importantly my opponent actually played very slowly for the first hour or so. We were playing beside another friend of his, and they were chatting a fair bit and not playing quickly. If winning was more of a priority for me I guarantee I would have won that game, either by killing 1 more guy by taking my time planning out turns or by timing him out. That's not how I am though, and I'm rather cheezed that I was accused of cheating. At any rate, I was out in the quarterfinals by the slimmest of margins. Frowns.

I've lost track of time, and I don't know what I did until 5pm. I might have played a game of Titan, but I don't think I did. I browsed the vendor area I think, and possibly attended some demos. At 5pm was a Lost Cities draw. I hadn't played that game in at least a year, and only ever on BSW. I used to play a fair bit with Tom Gannon on there, I think. Anyway, it seemed like a fun thing to do. I sat down with my opponent, had her give me a brief rules refresher, and then off we went. Lost Cities is a card game where you play 3 hands, summing the scores over all 3 hands. After our 3 hands... We were tied! Apparently this doesn't come up very often, from the GM report it sounds like it's happened 4 times in 3 years. The tiebreaker is to play a 4th hand... In that single hand I ended up outscoring the total from the previous three... (I had a triple bonus tiled excavation with enough cards to get the 8 card bonus.) This was the 3rd heat of 4 and I seem to recall they used a weird scoring system so because I started in round 3 it was unlikely I'd make the cut to the finals... So I didn't even think about it!

7pm was the start of the single elimination Battle Line tournament. Battle Line is another card game, this one a game where you play 3 card poker on many different fronts. The way they ran this tournament was to put people into pods of 4, and have you play round robin in your pod. Overall winner of the pod advances to the next round. I was actually mentioned in the GM breakdown despite not winning my first pod, but he misspelled my name! It seems so easy, what with only having 8 letters and all, but he stuck an i into Page. Grr! I believe I finished 2-1 in my pod, but someone went 3-0 so he advanced and I didn't. (I might have been 1-2, I don't remember. Not that it matters!) It was pretty fun, and the round robin format is a pretty fair one I think. It makes sure you get 3 games in at least for signing up, which is good since it can be a pretty fast game.

Friday night has a lot of finals on it, which I wasn't a part of, so I didn't have much to do until later in the evening. I don't remember what exactly I did but I know I skipped playing the 10pm Acquire game for fear it wouldn't end by 11pm. Why does 11pm matter? Because at 11pm the single most important tournament at the convention was held. I am, of course, refering to crowning the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! Liar's Dice had 195 people show up, and they claim to have been the most attended event. Ticket to Ride made that same claim, and had 191 distinct people show up, but they had multiple rounds so maybe they're both right. At any rate, that's a lot of people! They had enough copies of the game to get everyone seated at once, and they made sure no one started until everyone was ready... Then in one fell swoop 975 dice were rolled and slammed onto tables in unison. That, my friends, is a lot of dice.

Now, I'd told people before I left that I was going to be the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! so I had my work cut out for me. Remember, I'd woken up at 3am that morning, so I was up for over 20 hours at this point. Regardless, my first round was a cake walk, I was clearly the most skilled player at my table and I'm sure I won handily despite not remembering how many dice I had left. I do remember I won pretty fast as I had what seemed like a looooong wait before the next round.

The semi-finals made me rue the creation of the exacta rule. You see, if someone calls a bluff and the bid makes exactly not just the caller loses... Everyone at the table loses a die. Three straight times around the table went bid from the girl on my right (my Queen's Gambit opponent from my second game) huge raise by me, raise by 1 by the girl to my left, call... Exacta! Everyone lose a die. After the third one of these the girl on my left (who was 14 years old and playing with a Pirates of the Carribean cup) had 5 dice left and everyone else had 1 or 2. I've blocked the rest of the game out of my mind but suffice it to say she didn't find a way to Bung up that position and won handily. And thus, my dreams of being the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! were crushed.

A word of warning to all... Next year I will back, and next year I will fulfill my destiny. I will prevail. I will be victorious. I will be the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!

Pounder, Robb, and Lin had gone out to a nearby 24/7 breakfast diner and had picked me up some bacon to eat after my disappointing loss. At this point I'd been up almost 24 hours... So we sat down and played one of the demo games set up in the hall. I believe this time we played a coffee plantation game where Pounder shipped a ton of white coffee on a ton of white boats with a ton of white slaves for big bucks. I remember not particularly liking the game but that may just be because we didn't know what we were doing. I know Robb and I tried to collude at one point by selling brown coffee together but colluding with someone else just seemed worse than playing for yourself as Pounder crushed us.


The Settlers of Catan tournament started at 9am Saturday morning. Robb had won this event in 2005 but I don't think he had any interest in playing in it. I know I sure didn't! It turns out they expect Settlers to be a big draw (132 people played) and most of the other games on Saturday are finals from other events. I didn't want to play Settlers and was exhausted... So I just didn't get up. Around noon I finally got up, and headed over to the site. 11am had a Puerto Rico round that I would have played in if I'd been up, but oh well. 12pm had nothing to do.

1pm saw the start of the Carcassone single elimination event along with another Risk round, a Saint Petersburgh round and a Titan:The Arena round. I kinda wanted to play both of the last two games and decided to go with the Titan spinoff. It doesn't actually have anything to do with Titan other than it uses some of the characters from that game on the cards. I ended up in an ok position, but was forced to reveal my hidden bet at a bad time in order to not lose. That put a bullseye on my head which everyone but one guy took aim at. I had to work with that guy to keep from losing, but it turned out he also had a hidden bet on the same monster and had better overall position so I ended up just helping him win... Or so I thought. Our opponents finally pulled off a coup, killing our dragon, and thus we were both screwed. Oh well, still a pretty fun card game and I really wasn't expecting to win.

3pm had either another round of Lost Cities, or another round of Manifest Destiny, or a round of Monsters Ravage which is a game where you control a monster and a branch of the military and you try to use your tanks to kill other monsters or something. I wanted to play it, but I'd missed the demos and didn't really feel like trying to pick it up on the fly. (Also, as a B event, they don't really let that happen. Attend the demo!) Lost Cities lasts an hour, Manifest Destiny lasts four, and I had nothing I wanted to do for five hours so I went with Manifest Destiny. I was kinda bitter at myself for getting blown out of my previous game and I wanted to vindicate myself.

I think the GM was happy to see me come back. (He's also the game designer.) Having someone come back for more means good things for your game, I would think! I don't remember much about this game other than that it was a lot closer than the last one and I ended up cheating to my disadvantage by not knowing the rules. (You reshuffle decks of cards, but you're supposed to leave some out. I got one of those cards which was useless at that point in the game, but didn't know I wasn't supposed to get it. Oh well!)

At both 7pm and 10pm there was a 'Wits & Wagers' game show being held. It's a party game where the host names a category and everyone writes down a numerical guess. The guesses are given odds and then you bet chips on which answer you think is closest without going over. You win chips for giving the right answer and chips for betting correctly. We wanted to play at the same time and both Robb and Pounder had a Puerto Rico semi-final at 7 so we decided to try for the 10pm session. A grand total of one event started at 8 or 9pm for me to play in (I ate leading up to 7pm so missed that start time) and it was Ticket to Ride and 8pm. Ticket to Ride was fun the first time and being the only option helped, so away I went! I played a different variant than the first time but the end result was the same. Just building long routes preferentially gave me a pretty large victory. I think the game is probably a pretty good strategy game when everyone is on the same page but man are the early rounds ever soft.

10pm and both Robb and Pounder were ready for Wits & Wagers. They had a TON of people show up, so they had everyone play on large teams if possible. Robb, Pounder, Lin and myself picked up Rick Atwater (the Titan GM) and someone else Lin met during the week and formed team Canadian Bacon. The way the game works is they ask questions that have an exact numerical answer and everyone guesses what the right answer is. For example, one of the questions asked for what year the Queen first sent an email. Another asked how many pounds the world's largest lobster was. On the lobster question in particular we thought differently than the rest of the room. Our answer was laughed at for being so small compared to everyone else's, and Robb made a joke about how we're from Canada and don't know what a pound is. Of course, it turned out we were way closer than anyone else and had bet all our chips on the 'long-shot' that it was, giving us a massive chip lead. On the final round the question asked what percentage of the US population had voted in the last election, which supposedly had a big turnout. Being mostly Canadians we had no clue, but Rich had a pretty good idea. Of course, our answer depended on if the question counted people who lived in the US but couldn't vote for citizenship/age reasons. The GM said it was complete population so us, along with everyone else in the room but one team, were way wrong with our bets. We answered the question asked, but not the question they wanted an answer to it turns out. Oh well, it was a silly event with no real prize, not even a plaque, so it didn't really matter. We still think we won though!

Unfortunately this event went beyond 11pm so we missed the silly game for the night which was Slapshot. I don't know much about the game but from listening to people talk about it it sounds a LOT like Bloodbowl on ice. I know you build teams and play people and your goons could permanently injure the other team, which sounds like the Bloodbowl I knew and loved! (Ken Rootsevear going to crush your head!) We ended up learning a really complex game in the foyer that eventually was abandoned due to Lin not liking the game and everyone being hungry. We went out to the breakfast diner which I gather is the only thing open at that hour and had a decent meal. We came back, Lin went to bed, and Robb, Pounder and I met up with a guy they'd met earlier to play a game of Notre Dame.

I don't remember his name, sadly, but he was a really nice guy. He was on his way to bed when we came back from food but all it took was the question 'game?' and he aborted sleep to play Notre Dame. He even went up to his room to get it! (Mental note: staying at the center itself means you can store games there without needing to cross a highway and spend 20 minutes getting them!) Notre Dame is a pretty fun game with a draft component to it, where you draft roles and then perform the actions you drafted. It's a euro-game so you're trying to score victory points while managing the resources that will let you score more victory points later. A unique aspect of the game is that there is a 'rat count' in your segment of town and if you let it get too high you get plagued. You can draft cards that let you reduce the rat count... But then you're not making moneys or scoring points! It's a delicate balance, as all good euro-games are, and was a lot of fun.

After that Pounder went to be claiming something about having to drive home the next day. Robb and I had slept in that morning and as such had NO interest is sleeping. There was a werewolf game in progress that we watched and then tagged into. Apparently this group had been playing every night all week and the game was getting a little inbred as it seemed like the same people were yelling at each other the whole time. I've played the game a few times in online forums but never in person before. I must say it's kinda fun but I'm really horrible at it. I'm much better at keeping cool under fire and debating online than in person. Oh well, it was still fun and there really wasn't any other options at that hour of the day. Eventually the game broke up so Robb and I went and had breakfast at the hotel (yay still being up at 7am?) and then passed out. There were only 5 non-final games being run on Sunday and while I've played 3 of them before I didn't feel like not-sleeping to play them. (They were Diplomacy, Ticket to Ride, and Transamerica.) At 11am was the Ticket to Ride final which I was qualified for I'm sure due to winning the first two rounds but Pounder wasn't terribly interested in staying until 3pm while I won that event and I didn't really want to play in it either. I'd had to solo pack the hotel room on not much sleep before checkout time since Robb and Pounder were playing in finals and Lin just talked on the phone and watched as I packed everything. *frowns* At any rate... No gaming on Sunday but still fun times.


As far as things I know I did but forgot when they happened...

I attended multiple demos for games I wasn't interested in playing after seeing them in action. I watched demos for 3 stock-car racing games... 2 of which were designed so you couldn't get too far behind which ultimately meant the first N-1 turns of the game were irrelevant and the third of which was basically just a math game in a formula-1 disguise. I kinda wanted to play that one, liking math as much as I do, but it conflicted with something else I think.

I also attended the GANGSTERS! demo, which was a game I'd read about beforehand and was trying to convince Robb and Pounder to play. The demo convinced us that there's no way we wanted to play it in an event though. I kinda still wanted to play it for fun with just people I know though. For some reason I'm think Dave would have a lot of fun with that game.

There were two different fishing games in the demo area and I know I played both of them with Robb, Pounder, and random people who were passing by as I read the rules. None of them were very good.

I saw some people playing World of Warcraft: The Board Game! I think one team had both warrior and druid on it and hence was completely dominant.

Rich Atwater taught us to play a weird trick taking game at some point. Basically you deal out the cards and then there's a round of bidding. When you bid you play cards from your hand face up on the table, going in a circle having to pass or beat the previous bid. Eventually everyone but one person passes and they are declarer. They have to call a trump suit from the cards they played as their bid. They name either colour or rank as trump. (So all the 4s could be trump!) Then the person who was #2 in bidding names one of their bid cards as second trump. Second trump beats normal cards, Main trump beats second trump. Then declarer picks someone (not the second bidder) to be their partner. Those two play against everyone else, with the goal being to take the most 'points' worth of cards very similar to TICHU and 200. It was fun but we only got to play a couple hands.

Speaking of Tichu, I also played a few hands of that with some Titan players while waiting for a Titan game to start at some point. Fun game. Must play more of it on BSW!

Lin, Robb, Pounder and I also played an archaelogy game where you move around the board spending time researching to become 'good' at digging, and then go to dig sites. Once there you can spend turns 'digging', which means reach into the bag for that site and pull out X items. The items are either points, stat boosts, or nothing. After you finish digging keep all the stuff, put the nothing back in the bag, and pass the turn. So there's a delicate balance in trying to get a lot of pulls from the bag but also making sure you get there before someone takes all the treasure. It was an interesting mechanic though Robb was pretty bitter at how much rubble he kept pulling out. He'd focused on a couple different colour ruins and Lin and I cleaned them out before he got there I think. Meanwhile Pounder just hung around in Europe giving lectures about things while the rest of us actually did dirty work digging... I enjoyed the game but didn't think it was terribly good. I would play it again though!


Summary to follow tomorrow...