I don't think I played very many games on Lounge Day, but I definitely spent a lot of time playing games. I got in games of 10 Days in Asia, Eminent Domain, Titan, and Innovation.
The Titan game was a 6 player affair featuring a lot of very rusty Titan players. I believe the game itself lasted 6.5 hours and I ended up coming 2nd. In a game of Titan 2nd place really is the first loser since you were in the game the whole time and didn't get to win. At least Adam got to go play other games after he went out first in less than 2 hours! On the plus side I got to attack with a serpent so that really makes it all ok in the end. Overall I hit the top of every tech tree with recruits of 1 colossus, 2 serpents, 3 hydras, and some unicorns and rangers for flavour. Robb went the other path and recruited entirely points from the other players in the game and ended up with a size 18 Titan. That's ludicrous! And to think, Adam had a decent chance to kill off Robb's Titan in the first couple hours of the game. Oh well! Still fun!
Eminent Domain is a game I've played twice now, and each time I walked away really wanting to play again. I fear it's actually pretty degenerate since there doesn't seem to be a lot of variance between games but for now I really want to try out the different strategies to see how they shake out.
10 Days in Asia I played 3 times this weekend and I think I may be souring on it. It's an interesting idea but it seems to end up having a really random finish. I had I think 9 different tiles I could draw or have discarded by Andrew for the win and turn after turn went by without getting any of them. Eventually Andrew drew one of the 7 tiles he needed and won. I feel like we both made interesting choices early and then sat around waiting for someone to randomly win. It might be a better 2 player game where you can try to control discards for what your opponent needs, and it might be a better game if each player had their own discard pile or something so it wasn't so trivial to bury 'good' tiles. (Eventually you reach a point where 2 of the discard piles have complete trash on top of them and then if your players are any good at game they just use the 3rd pile. In one of the games I got totally screwed because the person on my left drew the tiles I needed and therefore I never got a chance to play them as they were quickly covered up.)
Innovation remains fun. This game was a 4 players game where Adam was my partner and did a lot of cool things and I just sat around scoring points until I could play my one high level card and force the game to end suddenly by drawing out all the 10s.
I missed out on the 'high stakes' Barbu game which wasn't really very high at all because I was playing Titan, but that's ok. There's always next year!
Showing posts with label TITAN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TITAN. Show all posts
Monday, April 21, 2014
Thursday, July 16, 2009
WBC 2008 -> Day 3
Prelude
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap
Titan 2-player - 9 am - I spent a fair amount of time yesterday watching my opponent play in his 8 hour game. The reason it took so long is both players were timid about attacking and always fought when there was a fight instead of fleeing. I knew I could put those two facts to my advantage since I could likely score up big points by making many attacks as he was likely to fight them all.
As it turns out, I ended up killing every single unit he recruited in the game. My Titan stack had 3 warlocks and 2 angels in it, and just went around murdering everything. Woo!
My game took a little less than 3 hours and I went to ask about my next opponent. They were still playing and he said he had an event to play at 1 but would be ready to play me after that. I looked at the schedule and noticed there was a demo for his event starting very shortly and figured I'd go give it a go.
Race for the Galaxy demo - 12pm - I feel the GM did an excellent job with this demo. It turns out the game is very similar to San Juan so I didn't need as detailed a demo as he gave but it seemed to me like he had planned out what he wanted to say in advance and had really worked out a good order to introduce rules to make sure everyone knew what was going on.
Race for the Galaxy - 1pm - Hey, I really like San Juan so a redesign of the game was worth playing in my books. I misunderstood a rule to start the game and ended up building the wrong card entirely which probably sunk my game. It turns out we had a three way tie for first place and after tie breakers I ended up second. It was quite fun and I'm looking forward to really doing better next year now that I have some experience with the game.
Titan 2-player - 2:10pm - I opened this game by rolling a 5 in a tower that only gets one recruit on a 5. I mulliganed it and rolled another 5. My opponent rolled very well for his recruitment early (and I did not) so I made a very questionable attack. Questionable in the sense that it was likely to cause me to lose but I felt I already had lost and needed to do something risky to turn the game around. Certainly if the fight had worked out in my favour I was in a much better way than if I hadn't attacked. (I also didn't know if I was hitting his Titan stack or his Angel stack. If it was his Titan stack then it was a way to win immediately.) Turns out it was his Angel stack (expected, since it did move above me in the tundra) but it was still a good attack. I rolled below average on an attack and didn't kill a unit I needed to kill and thusly lost the game.
After the game my opponent said he thought my attack was too risky and I actually had better odds of winning the game if I'd just run away. I'm not convinced, my only way to win there is to hope I can reverse the massive recruiting disadvantage I was in which means I need to both roll better recruiting numbers than he did and I needed to do so in positions that wouldn't involve me getting attacked and killed by his better stacks. I needed to get a fight in with an angel summon ASAP and especially in a 2 player game if I take out one of his lords when I do that's great for me. It also has the upside that if it fails I lose immediately so I can go do something else!
This game was quite short (it also ended on the first fight, like my first round) so I went and joined a Ra game.
Ra - 3pm – I get assigned to a table with a fairly attractive young lady setting up a board. She mentions in passing to the guy sitting beside her that she’s looking forward to starting high school soon. Yikes! That would make her less than half my age which pretty much means I have no idea how old people are or I’m turning into a dirty old man. Note that that or is not exclusive.
Anyway, the actual game went as Ra normally does. I lost, horribly. I swear I have no idea how to play this game in the slightest.
Monsters Ravage America demo - 5pm - This is a game where you control a monster and a branch of the military and spend most of the game just gearing up your monster to try to win the final battle. I thought this game sounded awesome in the write-ups online so I really wanted to give it a try. This demo was pretty much the polar opposite of the Race demo. The GM didn't even know the rules for the game at this demo, which was a little sad. (Hasbro reprinted the game with an easier rule set. The GM knew the older rules but not exactly what had changed in the easier game.) I left the demo with a rough idea of how things would work but was sure I would screw up the game itself. But whatever, you get to be a giant monster and destroy cities in the US, so I went for it anyway.
Monsters Ravage America - 6pm - I managed to get into a game of the easier version (yay!) and my game had two women in it. The girl setting up the game was rather pretty, and it turns out she’s 17. Double yikes! The other girl was 23 and I’d swear she was the younger of the two, which pretty much just confirms that the previously mentioned or is not exclusive.
It turns out the game has a lot of spiteful strategy that can be employed with your military. (I was the air force, and could just surround monsters with planes preventing them from getting somewhere good to power up. This made my opponents very bitter, as I gather most people just try to defend the best squares instead of preventing you from getting to any squares.) Anyway, there are a couple of different ways to power up and one of the ways is one-shot attacks. You get tokens to burn for extra dice and when you use them they're gone. I ended up being the guy who ended the game which meant I had to kill all my opponents sequentially to win. I chose the girl with the most one-shot items to attack first (probably a mistake) and she ended up blowing her stack to kill me. (Unsurprisingly!) I believe she ended up winning the game.
MRA was definitely a fun game and I'd be willing to play again but it didn't really excite me as much as I was hoping. I think part of the problem is it felt mean to make optimal use of my military. Oh well.
Twilight Struggle demo - 8pm - Twilight Struggle is a 2 player card driven war-game simulating the Cold War which I'd seen played once and was intrigued by. I decided to go to the demo and see what it was actually about. This was the third demo I attended this day and I wasn't a big fan of the format of this one. My main issue was one of the people at the demo kept interrupting the demoer to go into more detail on specific rules. Now it could be that the GM was doing a terrible job or it could be that he had a plan to reveal more information later on in the demo but we never got a chance to find out because of the constant interruptions. I actually got up and left partway into the demo because of how annoying I found the interruptions to be. I explain new games to people around here a fair bit (because I like to buy and play new games) and I always get annoyed when other people 'help' teach. I 'help' as well, its human nature, but since this demo I've started to try to restrain myself until the end and point out oversights then. It's better than jumbling up someone's explanation that just isn't in the same order yours might have been!
Queen's Gambit - 9pm - This is a game I learned last year at WBC by reading the rules 5 minutes before the round started. It's actually a Star Wars miniature war-game simulating the end of Episode 1. I liked it so much I bought a copy on eBay despite it being rather pricy (it's been out of print for some time and is pretty rare). The WBC events actually uses 'owns the game' as the primary tiebreaker so I was happy to have brought my copy down. I was given a 'owns the game' index card to write my name on and set up my board while waiting for an opponent. (The game has more than a hundred miniatures that go into preset locations, so it takes some time to set up.)
The game itself was long and hard fought. I played the 'good' guys and eventually won with only 1 Gungan alive on the battlefield. I think my opponent probably focused too much on killing Gungans and not enough time actually winning the game and might have won if he'd focused entirely on Darth Maul. (Though to be fair, my Anakin had a lot of trouble and that was at least partially caused by his focus on the battlefield, so maybe I'm just way off base here.)
Vegas Showdown - semi-finals - 11pm - It turned out none of Pounder, Robb, or I won our Vegas Showdown games and none of us made the semi-finals. One guy didn't show up though, so they were letting one alternate advance. The alternate rankings? Pounder, then Robb, then myself. Pounder was off playing something else (Agricola maybe?) so Robb advanced. They were short a copy of the game so I went off to get mine. Robb suggested he'd bow out so I could advance since I'd brought a copy and had been talking about wanting to win that event but I wouldn't have any of that. If I deserved to make it to the semis than I would have and that's that!
I didn't have anything else to do so I played the part of the banker in Robb's game. Robb ended up with his income numbers in the wrong spot for a couple of turns (CHEATER!) and called the GM on himself. They decided to ding him the money he likely shouldn't have earned and no other penalty which made sense. I think the game _might_ have gone differently if his opponents had had an accurate count on his money for the couple turns this happened during but I suspect not. At any rate Robb ended up winning by a good margin anyway.
Race for the Galaxy - later - We likely went out to the Waffle House and then came back to play a game at some ungodly hour. Pounder wanted something reasonable short and I saw that the open gaming library had a copy of Race for the Galaxy, a game I'd played for the first time in an event earlier that day and wanted to play again. As we were setting up a random nice lady asked if she could join in and not being completely antisocial we said yes. Robb and I ended up tying for first, Pounder and Cally tied for 3rd. Pounder was a little sceptical heading in since he likes San Juan so much and thought this was just going to be a more random version of that. I think he's probably right, but it's still a lot of fun. So much so that Pounder and I both bought the game and the expansion, as did our friend Duncan. It's cheap, short, relatively easy to learn, and lots of fun. (Relatively easy for gamers to learn anyway...)
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap
Titan 2-player - 9 am - I spent a fair amount of time yesterday watching my opponent play in his 8 hour game. The reason it took so long is both players were timid about attacking and always fought when there was a fight instead of fleeing. I knew I could put those two facts to my advantage since I could likely score up big points by making many attacks as he was likely to fight them all.
As it turns out, I ended up killing every single unit he recruited in the game. My Titan stack had 3 warlocks and 2 angels in it, and just went around murdering everything. Woo!
My game took a little less than 3 hours and I went to ask about my next opponent. They were still playing and he said he had an event to play at 1 but would be ready to play me after that. I looked at the schedule and noticed there was a demo for his event starting very shortly and figured I'd go give it a go.
Race for the Galaxy demo - 12pm - I feel the GM did an excellent job with this demo. It turns out the game is very similar to San Juan so I didn't need as detailed a demo as he gave but it seemed to me like he had planned out what he wanted to say in advance and had really worked out a good order to introduce rules to make sure everyone knew what was going on.
Race for the Galaxy - 1pm - Hey, I really like San Juan so a redesign of the game was worth playing in my books. I misunderstood a rule to start the game and ended up building the wrong card entirely which probably sunk my game. It turns out we had a three way tie for first place and after tie breakers I ended up second. It was quite fun and I'm looking forward to really doing better next year now that I have some experience with the game.
Titan 2-player - 2:10pm - I opened this game by rolling a 5 in a tower that only gets one recruit on a 5. I mulliganed it and rolled another 5. My opponent rolled very well for his recruitment early (and I did not) so I made a very questionable attack. Questionable in the sense that it was likely to cause me to lose but I felt I already had lost and needed to do something risky to turn the game around. Certainly if the fight had worked out in my favour I was in a much better way than if I hadn't attacked. (I also didn't know if I was hitting his Titan stack or his Angel stack. If it was his Titan stack then it was a way to win immediately.) Turns out it was his Angel stack (expected, since it did move above me in the tundra) but it was still a good attack. I rolled below average on an attack and didn't kill a unit I needed to kill and thusly lost the game.
After the game my opponent said he thought my attack was too risky and I actually had better odds of winning the game if I'd just run away. I'm not convinced, my only way to win there is to hope I can reverse the massive recruiting disadvantage I was in which means I need to both roll better recruiting numbers than he did and I needed to do so in positions that wouldn't involve me getting attacked and killed by his better stacks. I needed to get a fight in with an angel summon ASAP and especially in a 2 player game if I take out one of his lords when I do that's great for me. It also has the upside that if it fails I lose immediately so I can go do something else!
This game was quite short (it also ended on the first fight, like my first round) so I went and joined a Ra game.
Ra - 3pm – I get assigned to a table with a fairly attractive young lady setting up a board. She mentions in passing to the guy sitting beside her that she’s looking forward to starting high school soon. Yikes! That would make her less than half my age which pretty much means I have no idea how old people are or I’m turning into a dirty old man. Note that that or is not exclusive.
Anyway, the actual game went as Ra normally does. I lost, horribly. I swear I have no idea how to play this game in the slightest.
Monsters Ravage America demo - 5pm - This is a game where you control a monster and a branch of the military and spend most of the game just gearing up your monster to try to win the final battle. I thought this game sounded awesome in the write-ups online so I really wanted to give it a try. This demo was pretty much the polar opposite of the Race demo. The GM didn't even know the rules for the game at this demo, which was a little sad. (Hasbro reprinted the game with an easier rule set. The GM knew the older rules but not exactly what had changed in the easier game.) I left the demo with a rough idea of how things would work but was sure I would screw up the game itself. But whatever, you get to be a giant monster and destroy cities in the US, so I went for it anyway.
Monsters Ravage America - 6pm - I managed to get into a game of the easier version (yay!) and my game had two women in it. The girl setting up the game was rather pretty, and it turns out she’s 17. Double yikes! The other girl was 23 and I’d swear she was the younger of the two, which pretty much just confirms that the previously mentioned or is not exclusive.
It turns out the game has a lot of spiteful strategy that can be employed with your military. (I was the air force, and could just surround monsters with planes preventing them from getting somewhere good to power up. This made my opponents very bitter, as I gather most people just try to defend the best squares instead of preventing you from getting to any squares.) Anyway, there are a couple of different ways to power up and one of the ways is one-shot attacks. You get tokens to burn for extra dice and when you use them they're gone. I ended up being the guy who ended the game which meant I had to kill all my opponents sequentially to win. I chose the girl with the most one-shot items to attack first (probably a mistake) and she ended up blowing her stack to kill me. (Unsurprisingly!) I believe she ended up winning the game.
MRA was definitely a fun game and I'd be willing to play again but it didn't really excite me as much as I was hoping. I think part of the problem is it felt mean to make optimal use of my military. Oh well.
Twilight Struggle demo - 8pm - Twilight Struggle is a 2 player card driven war-game simulating the Cold War which I'd seen played once and was intrigued by. I decided to go to the demo and see what it was actually about. This was the third demo I attended this day and I wasn't a big fan of the format of this one. My main issue was one of the people at the demo kept interrupting the demoer to go into more detail on specific rules. Now it could be that the GM was doing a terrible job or it could be that he had a plan to reveal more information later on in the demo but we never got a chance to find out because of the constant interruptions. I actually got up and left partway into the demo because of how annoying I found the interruptions to be. I explain new games to people around here a fair bit (because I like to buy and play new games) and I always get annoyed when other people 'help' teach. I 'help' as well, its human nature, but since this demo I've started to try to restrain myself until the end and point out oversights then. It's better than jumbling up someone's explanation that just isn't in the same order yours might have been!
Queen's Gambit - 9pm - This is a game I learned last year at WBC by reading the rules 5 minutes before the round started. It's actually a Star Wars miniature war-game simulating the end of Episode 1. I liked it so much I bought a copy on eBay despite it being rather pricy (it's been out of print for some time and is pretty rare). The WBC events actually uses 'owns the game' as the primary tiebreaker so I was happy to have brought my copy down. I was given a 'owns the game' index card to write my name on and set up my board while waiting for an opponent. (The game has more than a hundred miniatures that go into preset locations, so it takes some time to set up.)
The game itself was long and hard fought. I played the 'good' guys and eventually won with only 1 Gungan alive on the battlefield. I think my opponent probably focused too much on killing Gungans and not enough time actually winning the game and might have won if he'd focused entirely on Darth Maul. (Though to be fair, my Anakin had a lot of trouble and that was at least partially caused by his focus on the battlefield, so maybe I'm just way off base here.)
Vegas Showdown - semi-finals - 11pm - It turned out none of Pounder, Robb, or I won our Vegas Showdown games and none of us made the semi-finals. One guy didn't show up though, so they were letting one alternate advance. The alternate rankings? Pounder, then Robb, then myself. Pounder was off playing something else (Agricola maybe?) so Robb advanced. They were short a copy of the game so I went off to get mine. Robb suggested he'd bow out so I could advance since I'd brought a copy and had been talking about wanting to win that event but I wouldn't have any of that. If I deserved to make it to the semis than I would have and that's that!
I didn't have anything else to do so I played the part of the banker in Robb's game. Robb ended up with his income numbers in the wrong spot for a couple of turns (CHEATER!) and called the GM on himself. They decided to ding him the money he likely shouldn't have earned and no other penalty which made sense. I think the game _might_ have gone differently if his opponents had had an accurate count on his money for the couple turns this happened during but I suspect not. At any rate Robb ended up winning by a good margin anyway.
Race for the Galaxy - later - We likely went out to the Waffle House and then came back to play a game at some ungodly hour. Pounder wanted something reasonable short and I saw that the open gaming library had a copy of Race for the Galaxy, a game I'd played for the first time in an event earlier that day and wanted to play again. As we were setting up a random nice lady asked if she could join in and not being completely antisocial we said yes. Robb and I ended up tying for first, Pounder and Cally tied for 3rd. Pounder was a little sceptical heading in since he likes San Juan so much and thought this was just going to be a more random version of that. I think he's probably right, but it's still a lot of fun. So much so that Pounder and I both bought the game and the expansion, as did our friend Duncan. It's cheap, short, relatively easy to learn, and lots of fun. (Relatively easy for gamers to learn anyway...)
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
WBC 2008 -> Day 2
Prelude
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap
Last year we stayed at the hotel across the street which came with 2 free breakfast buffets, which we made full use of. We decided to hit the breakfast buffet at the event site this year, even though it wasn't free. Despite it not being free it was actually much worse. The selection was smaller, the cereal was stale, and they didn't have an omelette guy. We were not impressed, and I for one didn't go back.
Titan 2-player - 10 am - Titan 2 player is run as a single elimination event with rounds scheduled haphazardly. The goal is to be done by the end, and you're supposed to arrange to play your next match with your next opponent as soon as is feasible without screwing your week. Unfortunately I didn't take this to heart, as we will see...
Anyway, they set things up with seeding such that all previous winners are spread apart on the single elimination bracket. I was matched up with a former winner. I don't remember much about the game but my notes say I won in 35 minutes during the first battle of the game. Short and sweet! What I should have done is looked at the schedule and found something else to do. What I actually did was wait around for the match containing my next opponent to finish. They didn't finish for over 7 hours...
Now I was really annoyed at this at the time, but the problem is really my own. I should have found something to do and let the guys playing know that I'd be back in a couple hours to check in on them. For no good reason I stuck around skipping events I wanted to play in so I could be available as soon as they finished.
The kicker here is they finished and the winner decided he'd rather play the next morning anyway as he'd played enough Titan. *sigh* At this point they were trying to put together some 4 player Titan games and were short some players. I always want to play at least one game of multiplayer Titan each year to boost their attendance numbers. (If you're trying to make the semi-finals you want to play 6 games ideally, less if you win a couple.) After sitting around for 7 hours to play Titan I figured I should get my 4 player Titan game in. The really frustrating part is the ended up with 7 people interested in playing multiplayer Titan and my 2-player Titan opponent stepped in to fill out the games. So, my opponent who didn't want to play more 2-player Titan put it off so he could play 4-player Titan. *sigh*
If I was a more assertive fellow I'd have pushed to play 2-player then and there but because I'm not I didn't.
In the middle of waiting I went to watch the Agricola demo. I should have then played in the Agricola round and I'd probably have been a lot happier with the day. Oh well.
Titan 4-player - 6 pm - I ended up in a game with Robb and there were things on the schedule I really wanted to do at 9 (Queen's Gambit), 10 (Vegas Showdown), and 11 (Can't Stop). I came second in Can't Stop last year and really wanted to improve on that so my plan was QG at 9 and CS at 11. So, of course, I end up in a fight for my life in Titan with Robb around 8. That one fight took 45 minutes. I managed to win the fight but ended up in a position where I was forced to attack a couple of turns later. I was eliminated and it was past 9. *sigh*
I could have aborted to Vegas Showdown but I really wanted to play Can't Stop. So I stuck around watching things until 11.
Can't Stop - 11pm - Last year I made it to the finals and the GM commented that he thought the game was incredibly random and he didn't expect to ever see the same people make it to the finals year after year. Now, I think Can't Stop has a lot of skill to it, and I think most people are very bad, so I really wanted to prove him wrong and make it back to the finals. I started off by winning the first round, but that incredible random part bit me in the butt for the second round. The guy who ended up winning stopped literally every 5 rolls. That gives your opponents so many turns to win its ridiculous. I, on the other hand, kept getting really terrible rolls, things like trips and quads only a couple of rolls in. I'm convinced my opponent's plan actually only gave him a really small chance to win as he needed both me and the third guy to consistently fail with good odds to succeed. Oh well! I'll be back next year!
Nefertiti - 12pmish - Robb also lost in round 2 and I don't think Pounder played at all. We headed back to Cafe Jay and looked for a new demo to play. We ended up playing Nefertiti which is an odd little auction/collection game. I set out to collect the rare stuff worth the most and got almost all of them. It was an interesting game, the costs of the auctions changed as time went on so it had a bit more variance than something like Ra and I'd consider playing it again.
Quo Vadis - later - We headed back to the room but for some insane reason decided to play Quo Vadis instead of going to bed. We ended up losing a piece but found it under the bed 3 days later. (Doesn't say much for the cleaning staff!)
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap
Last year we stayed at the hotel across the street which came with 2 free breakfast buffets, which we made full use of. We decided to hit the breakfast buffet at the event site this year, even though it wasn't free. Despite it not being free it was actually much worse. The selection was smaller, the cereal was stale, and they didn't have an omelette guy. We were not impressed, and I for one didn't go back.
Titan 2-player - 10 am - Titan 2 player is run as a single elimination event with rounds scheduled haphazardly. The goal is to be done by the end, and you're supposed to arrange to play your next match with your next opponent as soon as is feasible without screwing your week. Unfortunately I didn't take this to heart, as we will see...
Anyway, they set things up with seeding such that all previous winners are spread apart on the single elimination bracket. I was matched up with a former winner. I don't remember much about the game but my notes say I won in 35 minutes during the first battle of the game. Short and sweet! What I should have done is looked at the schedule and found something else to do. What I actually did was wait around for the match containing my next opponent to finish. They didn't finish for over 7 hours...
Now I was really annoyed at this at the time, but the problem is really my own. I should have found something to do and let the guys playing know that I'd be back in a couple hours to check in on them. For no good reason I stuck around skipping events I wanted to play in so I could be available as soon as they finished.
The kicker here is they finished and the winner decided he'd rather play the next morning anyway as he'd played enough Titan. *sigh* At this point they were trying to put together some 4 player Titan games and were short some players. I always want to play at least one game of multiplayer Titan each year to boost their attendance numbers. (If you're trying to make the semi-finals you want to play 6 games ideally, less if you win a couple.) After sitting around for 7 hours to play Titan I figured I should get my 4 player Titan game in. The really frustrating part is the ended up with 7 people interested in playing multiplayer Titan and my 2-player Titan opponent stepped in to fill out the games. So, my opponent who didn't want to play more 2-player Titan put it off so he could play 4-player Titan. *sigh*
If I was a more assertive fellow I'd have pushed to play 2-player then and there but because I'm not I didn't.
In the middle of waiting I went to watch the Agricola demo. I should have then played in the Agricola round and I'd probably have been a lot happier with the day. Oh well.
Titan 4-player - 6 pm - I ended up in a game with Robb and there were things on the schedule I really wanted to do at 9 (Queen's Gambit), 10 (Vegas Showdown), and 11 (Can't Stop). I came second in Can't Stop last year and really wanted to improve on that so my plan was QG at 9 and CS at 11. So, of course, I end up in a fight for my life in Titan with Robb around 8. That one fight took 45 minutes. I managed to win the fight but ended up in a position where I was forced to attack a couple of turns later. I was eliminated and it was past 9. *sigh*
I could have aborted to Vegas Showdown but I really wanted to play Can't Stop. So I stuck around watching things until 11.
Can't Stop - 11pm - Last year I made it to the finals and the GM commented that he thought the game was incredibly random and he didn't expect to ever see the same people make it to the finals year after year. Now, I think Can't Stop has a lot of skill to it, and I think most people are very bad, so I really wanted to prove him wrong and make it back to the finals. I started off by winning the first round, but that incredible random part bit me in the butt for the second round. The guy who ended up winning stopped literally every 5 rolls. That gives your opponents so many turns to win its ridiculous. I, on the other hand, kept getting really terrible rolls, things like trips and quads only a couple of rolls in. I'm convinced my opponent's plan actually only gave him a really small chance to win as he needed both me and the third guy to consistently fail with good odds to succeed. Oh well! I'll be back next year!
Nefertiti - 12pmish - Robb also lost in round 2 and I don't think Pounder played at all. We headed back to Cafe Jay and looked for a new demo to play. We ended up playing Nefertiti which is an odd little auction/collection game. I set out to collect the rare stuff worth the most and got almost all of them. It was an interesting game, the costs of the auctions changed as time went on so it had a bit more variance than something like Ra and I'd consider playing it again.
Quo Vadis - later - We headed back to the room but for some insane reason decided to play Quo Vadis instead of going to bed. We ended up losing a piece but found it under the bed 3 days later. (Doesn't say much for the cleaning staff!)
Sunday, January 06, 2008
WBC 'report', Part 1
This all happened five months ago and the only notes I have are little pencil marks in my guide book indicating what events I thought I wanted to go to so this won't be an incredibly detailed report. It should, however, serve to demonstrate just how much gaming there is to be had at WBC.
We drove down to Lancaster on Tuesday morning, stopping to pick Robb and Lin up in Cambridge and then at a diner in some small town in rural PA, but beyond that it was straight through. It took something like 8 hours all told, and we ended up in Lancaster around 4-5pm. Our hotel ended up directly across the street from the convention center which was convenient. However, it is a major highway so crossing it was exciting to say the least. We didn't bother to pack any games so we didn't have to cart anything across the street ever, just cut and run when the coast looked clear.
Once we'd finally crossed the street we had to go register. Robb and Pounder had been to WBC a couple years earlier so they didn't have to have their pictures taken, but Lin and I had to so we got to wait around for a bit while that happened.
(I look like a farmer in mine!)
5pm is the start of demos, but 6pm is the start of actual events. 22 different games had rounds start at 6pm, many of which I wanted to play but I didn't really know my way around and didn't particularly want to try something new for my first event. Robb and Pounder were going to play El Grande and I don't detest that game so I followed along and gave it a spin. I almost won my game, finishing a close second, but I believe both Robb and Pounder won their games. Robb ended up winning the entire event!
They only had 2 hour rounds for El Grande which is a little tight, and we ended up missing the 8pm start time for other events. 9pm didn't have any games we wanted to play but did have the Titan demo so we wandered over to that. We'd met quite a few of the main Titan players a couple years ago when we stormed US Nationals down in Maryland, which Robb also won. Every night at 11pm they have a less serious game which tends to have a large turnout due to nothing else going on, and these games often lend themselves to drinking. The 11pm game on Tuesday was Win, Place & Show which was a horse racing game that didn't sound very interesting so we played the 10pm Ra round instead. Now, Ra is a pretty fun game but I'm abysmally bad at it. I have this real problem with wanting to play "Can't Stop", getting all the other players out so I can pull tiles against the sun clock. I've had games where I didn't purchase a lot in the first 2 rounds! I think I scored positive at WBC but I could be wrong, I certainly know I came last in my game. It was fun though!
We'd gotten up pretty early to drive down (I think Pounder and I got up at 7am) and at the time I worked the graveyard shift so I was _really_ tired. So we went to the demo lounge and taught ourselves to play the Caylus spin-off they had set up. Yeah, we're smart guys alright...
Wednesday started off with a bang as the single elimination 2-player Titan event kicked off at 9am. With our 4 person hotel room we got 2 free breakfasts, and all three of Robb, Pounder, and myself were up in time to eat so we ended up having to buy an extra breakfast. This was the last day that would happen as people started sleeping in longer... Or staying up later? At any rate, off to the wargaming room which is where Titan was set up in the back. Most of a ginormous room was filled with wargames, many of which stayed set up overnight. One of the games had a 60 hour round! Two of the five games actually finished last year which I gather is a larger than normal number. (The game simulates WW2 on both the European and Pacific fronts.)
At any rate, TITAN! I honestly don't remember my 2 player game very well at all. I lost, and I remember being unsatisfied, but I don't know why. Oh well. With so many people having just lost 2 player Titan games they had a main Titan round kicking off an hour later. Titan-2 was single elimination but Titan-N is a Multiple Entry Swiss Elimination variant which basically means you can play as many rounds as you want but only your first 6 count for points or something. (I may be mixing up the rules from Titan nationals and WBC.) For scheduling they basically let you start a game whenever you have 4 people who want to play, with 'expected' starting times 3 times a day.
My game featured a young boy who was pretty new to the game but clearly having a blast and a couple of seasoned veterans. Eventually the kid got into a completely unwinnable position and was quite bored so he withdrew from the game rather than wait for elimination. Hopefully he doesn't get discouraged and keeps on gaming. I followed soon thereafter, though I went down kicking and screaming. I have a philosophical issue with withdrawing from a game of Titan when you're about to die. I think the person who hunted you should get the points for killing you!
At any rate, I hadn't really played Titan much in the previous year and was more interested in playing other games than more Titan. I added to the attendance figures for Titan (to try to ensure it stays an event) and had fun, but it was time to move on. 1pm was approaching, and I again had multiple choices. I could go play Empire Builder (a game I'd like to think I'm pretty good at), or I could play Power Grid (a game I'd like to think I can pronounce the German name for), or I could go to a demo for a 4 hour game I'd never heard of. There wasn't anything I really wanted to do for the next 5 hours, and I like to learn new games, so demo time!
Manifest Destiny is a Civ style game centered on North America dealing with the period of time from the colonization of the US until modern time. It has tech trees you research with money ala Advanced Civ, it has wonders you can try to build by rolling dice, it has city building on the map, attacking other players, cards you can play to make special events and payouts happen... Tons of cool, complicated things that all work together. The hour long demo restarted a couple times as stragglers showed up so really there was about 25 minutes of rules explanation and then we took off to the wargaming room to play. I didn't really know what was going on but I wanted to try and they didn't seem to mind that I didn't know what was going on, so away we went!
I ended up getting demolished (unsurprisingly) and lost by a very large margin. I picked up some strategies by watching the other players take their turns and decided it was at least an ok game. I basically butchered my position on the first turn when I didn't build enough settlers to do anything, so my income was about 60% of everyone else's for the entire game. I didn't really have a chance to win but I played to maximize my own score, which made for some sketchy plays later in the game in order to secure a wonder for bonus points. One of the other players seemed a little annoyed that I'd made that play but it was the only way I saw to score points from my position and it worked, woo!
The other players at my table were pretty fast, and I ended up playing quickly by virtue of having no money, so my game ended before the 4 hours were up giving me enough time to make it to a 6pm event if I wanted. Titan:The Arena was the only game I knew the rules to at 6pm but Robb convinced me I could learn how to play Queen's Gambit in the 10 minutes before the round started, so I signed up for that and borrowed a rule book to start reading. I gathered this was a pretty popular game amongst the Titan players in previous years and they said the Jedi battle was the only thing that mattered...
So, knowing kinda how the pieces moved and the ultimate goal of the game, it was time to play. Queen's Gambit is a game that simulates the final battle of Star Wars Episode One, and takes place on four fronts. You have Anakin flying through space trying to blow up the mother ship, you have the gungans getting killed en masse by droids, you have Amadala storming the palace, and you have Darth Maul fighting Obiwan and Quigon. The Naboo win if Anakin blows up the mother ship and you get a majority in the throne room at the top of the palace. Evil wins by killing all but 2 Naboo people in the palace.
With the strategy of 'play Jedi cards' I set out to play my first game. I was the Naboo, and my opponent told me a rule that it turns out doesn't exist that at the time really seemed like it screwed me. (You can jump up floors in the palace with the Naboo people on some cards, he said one droid on the middle floor could block jumping up to the top.) This prevented me from running guys to the top floor which was something I wanted to do. After all, I have cards that let me do it, so I should, right? Wrong! Having played the game a few times now I don't think you should go up to the top without a good reason to do so, and I really didn't when I tried to. Luckily, my opponent took actions with 'prevented' me from doing so, which were pretty much wastes of time. If I don't want to do something, and you take turns to stop me from doing it... I profit!
At any rate, by focusing on playing Jedi cards, and cards that dug me to more Jedi cards, I ended up winning the Jedi battle. From there I ended up winning the game, having learned to play not 10 minutes before the game. My opponent didn't seem too unhappy though. We did have fun, which is the main thing.
There wasn't anything we wanted to play for a couple hours which made it the perfect time to go get food. Next door to the convention center was an Amish diner that had pretty good food. The four of us went out and ate, with plans to come back for 9pm and another round of El Grande.
I wasn't really feeling up for El Grande, but there was another game being played in the same room at the same time, Ticket to Ride. Pounder convinced me over supper that it was easy to learn and promised to explain it to me before the round. He gave me a rough overview, and said the winning strategy was to ignore making your routes and just buy long stretches of track, but didn't explain specifics of the game.
I signed up, got assigned to a table, and during setup asked if I could read the rules. Ticket to Ride if a 'C' level event, so you don't need to know the game or attend a demo to play. (Supposedly they were supposed to teach me how to play during sign-ups but there were a TON of people and the GM was swamped.) So, I again asked to see the rules as the game was being set up. It turns out the game is really simple. You have two types of cards, routes and cars. A route lists two cities and at game end if you own track between those cities you get bonus points. If you don't you get negative bonus points. The further apart the cities are the more points you get or lose. The second type of card is train cars, which all have a colour.
You start the game with a few route cards and some cars. The board is set up with a bunch of cities (we played in the US) and track between cities. The tracks all have distinct colours and number of cars. (New York to Boston might have 2 pink cars, for example, and Los Angeles to Denver might have 6 black ones.) On your turn you either draw more route cards, or draw 2 cars, or build a section of track. To build track you play the number of cards that are on the segment from your hand, so I'd have to play 2 pink to build New York to Boston. Once I build it I put my cars on top of it and then no one else can build it.
Scoring is done with routes at end game, some bonus points for longest track and most routes done, and then points for building track. You get points via the triangle method, so a 1-length piece of track is worth 1 point, 2 is worth 3, 3 is worth 6 and so on. Note, it takes a full turn to build track if it's size 1 or size 6. Also, you only get 1 or 2 cards a turn. (When you draw cars there's a pool of face-up cards. You can draw a face-up, or from the deck. If you draw a wild-card face-up you only get the one card, otherwise you get two.) So at worst you could be turning 2 turns into 1 point (draw a wild and play it for a length 1 track) and at best you couls turn 4 turns into 21 points (draw 6 of a kind over 3 turns and build a size 6 track). It doesn't take a math degree to figure out that 5.25 points a turn is better than .5 points a turn... And yet many people were drawing wilds to build short pieces of track.
Now, depending on the routes you have this might seem like a good idea. I had one route that was worth 20 points, so the difference between building it or not is a 40 point swing. That's worth a couple mediocre building turns to pull off, to be sure. The trick, though, is that there's actually lots of ways to get from New York to Los Angeles. Someone might build the 2 pink from New York to Boston, but there's still a 2 orange from New York to Boston... Or I could go via Philadelphia or Portland instead of Boston...
In all it seemed like a pretty good game, you have to balance taking turns to score points with taking turns to secure your routes, and you have to know when you need to build the short routes that other people want. Ultimately though it seemed like the optimal strategy was to just draw 2 cards every turn building up a huge hand to give yourself the most options, only building when it looked like someone else wanted something. (Or when you could score 21 points with 6 of a kind.) It was actually pretty easy, having never played the game before, to work out what other people wanted. The other people in my game were picking up cards to build specific routes, sometimes from both ends, and building the tracks as soon as they could. So if someone build up to both ends of a given piece of track... They probably want the middle one and I should take it first if I wanted it. This is what I did, eventually connecting things up with smaller, less desired tracks to get my 20 point bonus at game end. I ended up with over 150 points with the next closest person being just under 100... Not bad for not knowing how to play before I sat down! (Ticket to Ride was the most attended game at WBC last year, it attracts a lot of people who aren't gamers.)
The 11pm silly game for Wednesday was... Can't Stop! WOO! This is a game you can play on Brettspielwelt and believe me, I have! Dave Nicholson and I used to play several times a day one month when he was trying to win a medal. All told I've played it 156 times on BSW, and I suspect I had the most experience in the game of anyone at WBC. That said, it is still a dice game and you do need to not get unlucky in order to win! I ended up finishing second overall, losing in the finals to someone who took a gamble and it paid off for him. I had closed out 2 numbers, and he had closed out 1. Chances are reasonable good if I get another turn I win, so when he completed a number he didn't stop. He had to go up a couple more on the other number with no leeway... And pulled it off. It was fun, but I did have one gripe... The GM said during the finals that the game is all luck and that he'd be surprised to ever see repeat winners in the event if he ran it for many years. That's hogwash I think! There's a fair amount of skill to the game and while it's certainly hard for someone to win a 100+ person event multiple times it won't be because there's no skill involved! If I have a single goal for this coming year it's to at least make the finals again to try to show him wrong! (Setting out to win Can't Stop of all games seems a little silly, but I'm going to do it!)
The finals didn't end until around 1-2ish, but Pounder and Robb were still around so we did the only thing you should do after playing games for 17 straight hours... We went to the open gaming area and taught ourselves to play Vikings! (A game which sadly didn't involve raping or pillaging. There were diplomat vikings, and canoerowing vikings... All in all, a pretty disappointing theme for such a great title. It was an ok game though.)
More to follow at a later date...
We drove down to Lancaster on Tuesday morning, stopping to pick Robb and Lin up in Cambridge and then at a diner in some small town in rural PA, but beyond that it was straight through. It took something like 8 hours all told, and we ended up in Lancaster around 4-5pm. Our hotel ended up directly across the street from the convention center which was convenient. However, it is a major highway so crossing it was exciting to say the least. We didn't bother to pack any games so we didn't have to cart anything across the street ever, just cut and run when the coast looked clear.
Once we'd finally crossed the street we had to go register. Robb and Pounder had been to WBC a couple years earlier so they didn't have to have their pictures taken, but Lin and I had to so we got to wait around for a bit while that happened.
(I look like a farmer in mine!)
5pm is the start of demos, but 6pm is the start of actual events. 22 different games had rounds start at 6pm, many of which I wanted to play but I didn't really know my way around and didn't particularly want to try something new for my first event. Robb and Pounder were going to play El Grande and I don't detest that game so I followed along and gave it a spin. I almost won my game, finishing a close second, but I believe both Robb and Pounder won their games. Robb ended up winning the entire event!
They only had 2 hour rounds for El Grande which is a little tight, and we ended up missing the 8pm start time for other events. 9pm didn't have any games we wanted to play but did have the Titan demo so we wandered over to that. We'd met quite a few of the main Titan players a couple years ago when we stormed US Nationals down in Maryland, which Robb also won. Every night at 11pm they have a less serious game which tends to have a large turnout due to nothing else going on, and these games often lend themselves to drinking. The 11pm game on Tuesday was Win, Place & Show which was a horse racing game that didn't sound very interesting so we played the 10pm Ra round instead. Now, Ra is a pretty fun game but I'm abysmally bad at it. I have this real problem with wanting to play "Can't Stop", getting all the other players out so I can pull tiles against the sun clock. I've had games where I didn't purchase a lot in the first 2 rounds! I think I scored positive at WBC but I could be wrong, I certainly know I came last in my game. It was fun though!
We'd gotten up pretty early to drive down (I think Pounder and I got up at 7am) and at the time I worked the graveyard shift so I was _really_ tired. So we went to the demo lounge and taught ourselves to play the Caylus spin-off they had set up. Yeah, we're smart guys alright...
Wednesday started off with a bang as the single elimination 2-player Titan event kicked off at 9am. With our 4 person hotel room we got 2 free breakfasts, and all three of Robb, Pounder, and myself were up in time to eat so we ended up having to buy an extra breakfast. This was the last day that would happen as people started sleeping in longer... Or staying up later? At any rate, off to the wargaming room which is where Titan was set up in the back. Most of a ginormous room was filled with wargames, many of which stayed set up overnight. One of the games had a 60 hour round! Two of the five games actually finished last year which I gather is a larger than normal number. (The game simulates WW2 on both the European and Pacific fronts.)
At any rate, TITAN! I honestly don't remember my 2 player game very well at all. I lost, and I remember being unsatisfied, but I don't know why. Oh well. With so many people having just lost 2 player Titan games they had a main Titan round kicking off an hour later. Titan-2 was single elimination but Titan-N is a Multiple Entry Swiss Elimination variant which basically means you can play as many rounds as you want but only your first 6 count for points or something. (I may be mixing up the rules from Titan nationals and WBC.) For scheduling they basically let you start a game whenever you have 4 people who want to play, with 'expected' starting times 3 times a day.
My game featured a young boy who was pretty new to the game but clearly having a blast and a couple of seasoned veterans. Eventually the kid got into a completely unwinnable position and was quite bored so he withdrew from the game rather than wait for elimination. Hopefully he doesn't get discouraged and keeps on gaming. I followed soon thereafter, though I went down kicking and screaming. I have a philosophical issue with withdrawing from a game of Titan when you're about to die. I think the person who hunted you should get the points for killing you!
At any rate, I hadn't really played Titan much in the previous year and was more interested in playing other games than more Titan. I added to the attendance figures for Titan (to try to ensure it stays an event) and had fun, but it was time to move on. 1pm was approaching, and I again had multiple choices. I could go play Empire Builder (a game I'd like to think I'm pretty good at), or I could play Power Grid (a game I'd like to think I can pronounce the German name for), or I could go to a demo for a 4 hour game I'd never heard of. There wasn't anything I really wanted to do for the next 5 hours, and I like to learn new games, so demo time!
Manifest Destiny is a Civ style game centered on North America dealing with the period of time from the colonization of the US until modern time. It has tech trees you research with money ala Advanced Civ, it has wonders you can try to build by rolling dice, it has city building on the map, attacking other players, cards you can play to make special events and payouts happen... Tons of cool, complicated things that all work together. The hour long demo restarted a couple times as stragglers showed up so really there was about 25 minutes of rules explanation and then we took off to the wargaming room to play. I didn't really know what was going on but I wanted to try and they didn't seem to mind that I didn't know what was going on, so away we went!
I ended up getting demolished (unsurprisingly) and lost by a very large margin. I picked up some strategies by watching the other players take their turns and decided it was at least an ok game. I basically butchered my position on the first turn when I didn't build enough settlers to do anything, so my income was about 60% of everyone else's for the entire game. I didn't really have a chance to win but I played to maximize my own score, which made for some sketchy plays later in the game in order to secure a wonder for bonus points. One of the other players seemed a little annoyed that I'd made that play but it was the only way I saw to score points from my position and it worked, woo!
The other players at my table were pretty fast, and I ended up playing quickly by virtue of having no money, so my game ended before the 4 hours were up giving me enough time to make it to a 6pm event if I wanted. Titan:The Arena was the only game I knew the rules to at 6pm but Robb convinced me I could learn how to play Queen's Gambit in the 10 minutes before the round started, so I signed up for that and borrowed a rule book to start reading. I gathered this was a pretty popular game amongst the Titan players in previous years and they said the Jedi battle was the only thing that mattered...
So, knowing kinda how the pieces moved and the ultimate goal of the game, it was time to play. Queen's Gambit is a game that simulates the final battle of Star Wars Episode One, and takes place on four fronts. You have Anakin flying through space trying to blow up the mother ship, you have the gungans getting killed en masse by droids, you have Amadala storming the palace, and you have Darth Maul fighting Obiwan and Quigon. The Naboo win if Anakin blows up the mother ship and you get a majority in the throne room at the top of the palace. Evil wins by killing all but 2 Naboo people in the palace.
With the strategy of 'play Jedi cards' I set out to play my first game. I was the Naboo, and my opponent told me a rule that it turns out doesn't exist that at the time really seemed like it screwed me. (You can jump up floors in the palace with the Naboo people on some cards, he said one droid on the middle floor could block jumping up to the top.) This prevented me from running guys to the top floor which was something I wanted to do. After all, I have cards that let me do it, so I should, right? Wrong! Having played the game a few times now I don't think you should go up to the top without a good reason to do so, and I really didn't when I tried to. Luckily, my opponent took actions with 'prevented' me from doing so, which were pretty much wastes of time. If I don't want to do something, and you take turns to stop me from doing it... I profit!
At any rate, by focusing on playing Jedi cards, and cards that dug me to more Jedi cards, I ended up winning the Jedi battle. From there I ended up winning the game, having learned to play not 10 minutes before the game. My opponent didn't seem too unhappy though. We did have fun, which is the main thing.
There wasn't anything we wanted to play for a couple hours which made it the perfect time to go get food. Next door to the convention center was an Amish diner that had pretty good food. The four of us went out and ate, with plans to come back for 9pm and another round of El Grande.
I wasn't really feeling up for El Grande, but there was another game being played in the same room at the same time, Ticket to Ride. Pounder convinced me over supper that it was easy to learn and promised to explain it to me before the round. He gave me a rough overview, and said the winning strategy was to ignore making your routes and just buy long stretches of track, but didn't explain specifics of the game.
I signed up, got assigned to a table, and during setup asked if I could read the rules. Ticket to Ride if a 'C' level event, so you don't need to know the game or attend a demo to play. (Supposedly they were supposed to teach me how to play during sign-ups but there were a TON of people and the GM was swamped.) So, I again asked to see the rules as the game was being set up. It turns out the game is really simple. You have two types of cards, routes and cars. A route lists two cities and at game end if you own track between those cities you get bonus points. If you don't you get negative bonus points. The further apart the cities are the more points you get or lose. The second type of card is train cars, which all have a colour.
You start the game with a few route cards and some cars. The board is set up with a bunch of cities (we played in the US) and track between cities. The tracks all have distinct colours and number of cars. (New York to Boston might have 2 pink cars, for example, and Los Angeles to Denver might have 6 black ones.) On your turn you either draw more route cards, or draw 2 cars, or build a section of track. To build track you play the number of cards that are on the segment from your hand, so I'd have to play 2 pink to build New York to Boston. Once I build it I put my cars on top of it and then no one else can build it.
Scoring is done with routes at end game, some bonus points for longest track and most routes done, and then points for building track. You get points via the triangle method, so a 1-length piece of track is worth 1 point, 2 is worth 3, 3 is worth 6 and so on. Note, it takes a full turn to build track if it's size 1 or size 6. Also, you only get 1 or 2 cards a turn. (When you draw cars there's a pool of face-up cards. You can draw a face-up, or from the deck. If you draw a wild-card face-up you only get the one card, otherwise you get two.) So at worst you could be turning 2 turns into 1 point (draw a wild and play it for a length 1 track) and at best you couls turn 4 turns into 21 points (draw 6 of a kind over 3 turns and build a size 6 track). It doesn't take a math degree to figure out that 5.25 points a turn is better than .5 points a turn... And yet many people were drawing wilds to build short pieces of track.
Now, depending on the routes you have this might seem like a good idea. I had one route that was worth 20 points, so the difference between building it or not is a 40 point swing. That's worth a couple mediocre building turns to pull off, to be sure. The trick, though, is that there's actually lots of ways to get from New York to Los Angeles. Someone might build the 2 pink from New York to Boston, but there's still a 2 orange from New York to Boston... Or I could go via Philadelphia or Portland instead of Boston...
In all it seemed like a pretty good game, you have to balance taking turns to score points with taking turns to secure your routes, and you have to know when you need to build the short routes that other people want. Ultimately though it seemed like the optimal strategy was to just draw 2 cards every turn building up a huge hand to give yourself the most options, only building when it looked like someone else wanted something. (Or when you could score 21 points with 6 of a kind.) It was actually pretty easy, having never played the game before, to work out what other people wanted. The other people in my game were picking up cards to build specific routes, sometimes from both ends, and building the tracks as soon as they could. So if someone build up to both ends of a given piece of track... They probably want the middle one and I should take it first if I wanted it. This is what I did, eventually connecting things up with smaller, less desired tracks to get my 20 point bonus at game end. I ended up with over 150 points with the next closest person being just under 100... Not bad for not knowing how to play before I sat down! (Ticket to Ride was the most attended game at WBC last year, it attracts a lot of people who aren't gamers.)
The 11pm silly game for Wednesday was... Can't Stop! WOO! This is a game you can play on Brettspielwelt and believe me, I have! Dave Nicholson and I used to play several times a day one month when he was trying to win a medal. All told I've played it 156 times on BSW, and I suspect I had the most experience in the game of anyone at WBC. That said, it is still a dice game and you do need to not get unlucky in order to win! I ended up finishing second overall, losing in the finals to someone who took a gamble and it paid off for him. I had closed out 2 numbers, and he had closed out 1. Chances are reasonable good if I get another turn I win, so when he completed a number he didn't stop. He had to go up a couple more on the other number with no leeway... And pulled it off. It was fun, but I did have one gripe... The GM said during the finals that the game is all luck and that he'd be surprised to ever see repeat winners in the event if he ran it for many years. That's hogwash I think! There's a fair amount of skill to the game and while it's certainly hard for someone to win a 100+ person event multiple times it won't be because there's no skill involved! If I have a single goal for this coming year it's to at least make the finals again to try to show him wrong! (Setting out to win Can't Stop of all games seems a little silly, but I'm going to do it!)
The finals didn't end until around 1-2ish, but Pounder and Robb were still around so we did the only thing you should do after playing games for 17 straight hours... We went to the open gaming area and taught ourselves to play Vikings! (A game which sadly didn't involve raping or pillaging. There were diplomat vikings, and canoerowing vikings... All in all, a pretty disappointing theme for such a great title. It was an ok game though.)
More to follow at a later date...
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