2014 WBC: Day 3

Monday morning could have had the San Juan tournament or the 3rd heat of Through The Ages. I like San Juan more than most people do, and I'm pretty good at it, but I wasn't confident in my advancing to the TTA semifinals with just a win and a good but not great second place. So I got an extra hour of sleep and went to TTA instead of San Juan. My table this time had me up against the replacement on my old team (Rich Atwater) and Chris Senhouse who's name I recognize from Magic coverage and who I've played in Le Havre before. Both people who are good at games so this should be my 3rd straight good game of TTA. Hurray!

The game itself was a little anticlimactic. I got aboard the C-bus (Christopher Columbus) and found a good territory. Chris made a mistake on an early turn likely due to playing online. He ended his turn without a juggler so his empire was in revolt. We offered to let him undo his turn to fix it (by perhaps not turning his last guy into a warrior?) but he decided he was going to corrupt if he didn't spend those rocks so he wasn't really missing much by skipping a turn of production and wanted to get the strength to not get attacked again. (Rich had hit him early already and got his only defense card.) I think losing his 4 science production was probably game losing, but it is what it is. Anyway, I saw that I was going to be able to grab James Cook early in Age II so I seeded a territory and snagged navigation. Then it turns out that at least one of the other two players had been seeding territories all game and I ended up with 6 territories total and 12 points per turn off Captain Cook. Couple this with a dominating military lead and the game was all but over by the midway point. I spent some time beating up on Rich (we had a scientific cooperation pact so I went over and raided his scientific method; then I annexed his territory; then I hit him with a war over culture). Rich managed to topdeck the one copy of Fundamentalism during the war after calling it so he was able to revolution into it via Robespierre and only lose the war by 13 instead of 18. It still dropped him down to single digits of points while I was making 12 per turn from Cook alone, so not good. I ended up winning by a large margin, something like 229-142-109.

This game was also super fast (probably the other players had checked out because of my board position and stopped parsing moves as much as normal but it may just be that we're all fast players) in that I think it ended in a little over 2 hours. I normally estimate an hour and a half per player for people who aren't super experienced at the game so getting a 3er done in around 2 hours is very fast. This gave me time to go play the mulligan round of Innovation where I played badly and lost to a fast achievement plan. I could have stopped it with a card I had in hand and probably won from superior board position but I had so many cards in my hand that I didn't bother to read them all fully. Oh well! I did find it interesting that my opponent had really sweaty/clammy hands after the game. Maybe I'm an intimidating presence? I certainly try to project an air that I know what I'm doing in a game even if I don't...

Off to Red Robin for more food. I'd decided after the last time that I didn't get enough food so I was thinking about ordering a second burger. But it turns out when you take almost everything off of a burger anyway (including the bun) and when the side is bottomless anyway you're really better off paying $2 for an extra patty in the burger than spending $9 for an extra burger. The math just doesn't work out for the second burger!

Then it was time for the TTA semifinals. They ended up with 2 people who won all 3 heats and 13 other people who won 2 heats. This means a first and a close second was good enough for one person, but only one person, and really you needed 2 wins to advance. Good thing I skipped San Juan! My table ended up featuring Nick Henning again along with a couple guys I recognized as being good at games but not necessarily as being sharks at TTA. (None of them had laurels in TTA before this year for example. Neither did I!) We were definitely considered the 'soft' semifinal by the sharks.

My game got off to a pretty good start as I was able to be starting player and start with Aristotle and pyramids as my leader and wonder. I got a lot of good things like alchemy and iron and a bunch of yellow cards. I missed out on an Age I leader as the other players got Leonardo, Michaelangelo, and Donatello the C-Bus. We got a lot of free food and no one could really handle it and I almost feel like someone should have run Barbarossa and steamrolled everyone militarily. We went a few turns around the table with everyone refusing to seed an event because we were all scared of rats. Then Age I ended, we were all sitting with 2 jugglers, and we continued to refuse to seed as we were all scared of rebellion. I ended up dealing with my happy faces by 'spite drafting' St Peter's Basilica from Mikey and building a theology, but doing so is what let Nick snag the C-Bus out from under me. I ended up drawing all the Age II territories very early on which made me sad. I hoped it was also making Nick sad, but when I said all I meant fertile, inhabited, wealthy, and strategic. I missed developed, which he got very early, and it was off to the races for him. He was the only one able to keep making guys because he had yellow dots and we didn't.

As the game progressed people kept talking about how I was in a great way but I didn't really see it. I was in a good way for sure, and the player on my right made a real mess of his game so I looked fantastic in comparison, but Nick was quietly putting together some very good things too. I set him up by offering him the military protection pact (I got a point, he got 5 strength) but somewhere along the way the board got bumped and he got reset to X points per turn, not X-1. I suspect he was actually running at X even before the board got bumped since I think one of the other players probably moved the token at some point by counting his board and adjusting without saying anything? But maybe not. We decided to just dock him a point from his last turn and move on which seemed pretty fair. He was able to use that strength to get off an attack (which was defended by 3 defense cards) and to stay the strongest through a bunch of events. I got the points which was nice too. Later on in the game I saw an opportunity to make him lose the 5 strength and knock him down to last in strength by offering a different pact to another player. I chose the guy on my right who was in last and the weakest and offered him a peace treaty. We each get a point per turn and can't attack each other. The table was convinced I was winning so he didn't want to give me a point. After he rejected it and used that as his rationale I pointed out that I wasn't actually gaining a point because I was already getting one from Nick. All I was doing was giving him a chance to earn the point too and stop being the weakest by subtracting 5 from Nick's strength. (Nick had actually disbanded part of his military to drop from way ahead to barely ahead in order to build a journalism and start making a lot of points and science. A good play, but one that probably should have been punished by losing the pact.) I still had nothing good to do on a future turn so I once again offered the peace treaty to the guy in last. He again rejected it because I was winning and he didn't want me to earn points. *sigh* I ended up later playing Gandhi and sending the pact at 3rd place. He took it for his point, so I never actually went a turn without scoring a pact point. Some times you want to hurt yourself to hurt the leader... But in this case I feel like this guy was really hurting himself to not hurt me at all. Oh well.

As the game wound down I built my military up by changing tactics cards and switching gears with 10 free rocks from yellow cards and 2 free guys from an inhabited territory II, but in retrospect I paid too much. Guy in last had really bid me up and I should have let him have it. I ended up having to sac too much and needed to spend some real rocks along with the free ones and those real rocks could have been used to good effect elsewhere. Especially since the response to my building some strength was for Nick and 3rd place to make a military pact for 4 strength each. Nick then declared a war over culture on last place using the 4 strength from 3rd and the 5 strength from me. Last place thought a bit and decided not to withdraw and give Nick a bunch of culture. He also 'let' 3rd place beat him up with an attack of some kind (raid I think) and seeded an event (no idea which impact) and I was worried that because I wasn't playing the 'whack the loot pinata' game I was going to fall from my supposedly dominating position all the way to 3rd since I wasn't really set up for end game scoring and other people really were.

The end result had Nick surge past me by quite a lot and 3rd place put on quite a run but ultimately he fell just a little shy. The war over culture was only actually worth 13 points and Nick beat me by 20 so it wasn't actually the deciding factor but it sure felt like a big swing at the time. I tried not to let it get to me mostly by checking out of the game mentally and just waiting for it to end. It didn't help that my intestines were acting up a little bit and I'd really rather have been in the bathroom instead of at the slowest semifinal table. Oh well.

On the plus side the difference between Nick and I ended up falling into the sweet spot where I was the second closest second place. This means I came 6th overall in the tournament. Top 6 get laurels in every event, so that's something, but the key is that Through The Ages is a level 6 event. Which means that all of the top 6 get a plaque! Every plaque place is a different colour and the 6th place one is pink. It's the rarest of all the plaques since not many events get 6 prizes. (By my count only 12 of the ~140 or so events get that many.) I've always wanted a pink plaque and am probably happier to have finished 6th in the tournament than I would to finish 2nd. At least this one time, anyway... Next year will be different!

I went to the room to cool down after the semis and eventually decided I'd go play Vegas Showdown at 11pm. I decided as long as I didn't really care about winning I could go have fun being silly in Vegas Showdown. I got into a table with John Corrado, Steve LeWinter, and another Steve I recognized from Innovation. John and Steve used to play Blood Bowl with me in Sceadeau's Cyanide league back in the day and are both very good at games. Steve has won Vegas Showdown before (in 2011, when I came 2nd...) and he won this game too. The game was a lot of fun. I went hardcore green since both restaurant cards came up very early and we got lots of big tiles early but we never saw the theatre. John actually ended the game by filling up his board with lots of base tiles like extra restaurants and lounges and the like. It certainly accelerated to game end, but since he ended up in last it probably wasn't beneficial to his cause to do so. Detrimental to mine since the theatre never flipped (I was sitting on 54 dollars so I was going to be able to buy it the turn it came out) but what are you going to do? Still a fun game and I regret nothing!

After the game I bumped into Greg (4th from my TTA semi) and apologized if I'd made him uncomfortable in any way about his decisions in the game but he said it hadn't been a problem. He'd also discussed the situation with John after the game and came to the conclusion that since he was guaranteed last if he let the war resolve he probably should have resigned instead of letting the person who was eliminating him reap the rewards. I'm actually fine if someone believes either way on this issue and that there is no 'right' answer but certainly my personal beliefs are to spite the one who kills you if possible. (Which may actually be a change from years past... I know I've stayed in Titan games at WBC before to let the person who hunted me down get the kill... Maybe there's a difference because the stated purpose of Titan is to kill people while military in TTA is more of a balancing mechanism? I'll need to think more about that...)

Back to Waffle House, this time with a small army in tow. The poor waitress was a little overwhelmed when 13 or so of us showed up randomly at 1am on a Monday night. My order came last and included the toast I'd explicitly asked to not get for allergy reasons so that got sent back and they had to try again. They didn't want to just throw out the food so they gave it to Ian. Score? But having the slowest eater get food significantly later than anyone else did impact how long we ended up staying at Waffle House. Which may have been bad for people who happened to have a TTA final at 10am the next day but it was fine for me since I got to sleep in on Tuesday!

2014 WBC: Day 2

Sunday, Sunday, someday... A day for more wargame tournaments and some really long civilization games. Advanced Civilization and Through The Ages in particular. I've only partially played an AC game but I play a lot of TTA online so that was my game of choice for the day. The last two years I've been prevented from really giving the tournament a try because it conflicted with A Few Acres of Snow but since I gave up on GMing AFAoS and no one else stepped up it died off. Now there's nothing to stop me from winning TTA!

The first heat was at noon. Many people like to bring their own copy of the game in order to avoid being stuck playing with other people who own the game in a heat. The theory being that the set of people who own the game rate to be more sharklike than the set of people who don't own a copy of the game. This is great logic if you want to advance to the semis. I'd rather play good games now, and to me good leans more towards one that is interesting and challenging and less towards one where I dominate the competition. So even if I had a copy of the game I wouldn't bring it! Pair me with a shark! So my first heat is of course against Robb and Jason. My former teammates... Jason always picks TTA as his team game and has won multiple times. Good game, woo!

I ended up going first and took pyramids to start. My first real turn got Caesar for 1 so I played him and made a bronze. From there things really went my way and I ended up with all of the good Age I cards. Knights, iron, alchemy, theology, irrigation, Leonardo, medieval army... I then transitioned that board state into most of the good Age 2 cards. Eiffel Tower, Napoleon, constitutional monarchy, classic army, strategy, riflemen... Leonardo's free rocks made it so I was able to exactly jump from 10 strength to 31 in one turn. I also ended up grabbing all of the Age I and Age II copies of breakthrough and revolutionary idea. An early Age III air forces sealed the deal. In all I hit Robb with a war over technology (for 2 bulbs total, not the best war ever), then I raided Jason's science buildings away (he never made another bulb for the rest of the game after that), then I hit Robb with a 38ish point war of culture drawing a concession. I followed that up with a war of culture on Jason and he responded in a way I didn't expect. He took Churchill, disbanded every single building he owned, and stuck them all into army. I was still ahead, but it was a sticky situation since I have to choose if I want to sacrifice first and I get less from sacrificing since Napoleon's 18 point bonus doesn't come along for the ride.

I went through some scenarios and decided that if I didn't sacrifice and Jason didn't sacrifice that I would just win. I'm ahead in strength and I'm still making food and rocks and science and points and he's making nothing at all. I also decided if I sacrificed everything and so did Jason that I would also win for the same reasons. It would be even more secure since he wouldn't be able to even rebuild a building if he wanted to if he sacced his entire population. If I didn't sacrifice and Jason did then he'd actually have a big point lead on me that I might not be able to make up over the last 2 or 3 turns in the game. Unless I had another war in which case I would win for sure. But I knew my hand and it didn't have any more wars. So this scenario is one where I might lose. If I do sacrifice and Jason doesn't then I score up a TON of points (something like an 80 point swing) and he almost certainly can't win. If he has a war to declare back he has a chance since I won't have any strength but in that case I can disband all my buildings too and rebuild up to a decent strength total. I felt like in this case the 80 point swing coupled with Eiffel Tower would be enough to win me the game. My only losing scenario was if I didn't sacrifice so I went all in. Jason didn't have a war of his own so he also went all in. He won the war by 2 points but could no longer play the game. I got Sid Meier and computers rolling and scored a ton of points by the end of the game to win something like 117-74-WITHDREW. So I got revenge on my old team for kicking me out? And beat a former champ? Woo!

Went out to eat at Red Robin I think. Yum! They took steamed carrots off the menu and replaced with steamed broccoli. Whoever made that decision should be shot. They also added in a fruit salad though and I figured it probably wouldn't kill me so I went with that instead. It turns out to be mostly cut up apple with some bonus fruit but it was good enough.

6pm brought the next heat of TTA. Fresh off a win I was looking at likely needing a close second to advance to the semis. I ended up getting a table for this round with Randy Buehler and Nick Henning. Hurray for not getting stuck with soft tables this year! Randy is the GM and has won the event multiple times. Nick hasn't really played the event before (the last two years at least he was playing A Few Acres of Snow with me) but he's apparently been playing online and is really good at games in general. He made a few mistakes in the game I think but he actually ended up winning the whole tournament (spoiler alert!) so definitely not a pushover at this game! Randy ended up being start player and got off to a good start with Michaelangelo piloting 8 happy faces thanks to St Peter's Basilica and a pair of theologies. Neither Nick nor I was set up to punish him for scoring 12 points a turn and that was very unfortunate. Randy and Nick snapped up both knights so I was stuck playing great wall as my military 'strategy'. I actually ended up being the strongest at some points in the game with 7 warriors! I think I played this game entirely on bronze. The midgame featured Randy still happily scoring 12 points a turn while Nick and I got in each other's way militarily. Nick got Napoleon but only drew tactics using archer cards and kept saccing his medieval armies to colonize territories. I was great wall so I kept taking archer cards in the hopes of eventually drawing a tactic to use them. Really we needed to find some way to share and then beat up Randy who was amassing a ludicrous point lead. At one point Randy was making 2 rocks and no food and offered Nick a pact so that Randy could make a 3rd rock per turn if Nick made his 5th or 7th food. Nick snap accepted which felt wrong to me, but then I was in the 3rd seat and have a hard time making an impartial call there. It felt like Randy was going to win if we didn't do something to stop him and giving him 50% extra rock production was going to give him more of a chance to recover his infrastructure and be able to keep playing after Michaelangelo died. But maybe Nick needed the food to set up a good play?

At any rate, I ended up drawing the classic army and eventually decided to play tanks and run out a 7 warrior and 2 tank army. Randy also bumped up his strength and Nick did other things. I attacked Nick with an 8 strength lead for 7 points, then Randy attacked Nick with a 6 strength lead for a raid. This would kill all of Nick's science production and blow him out and he didn't have a defense card. He decided to sac a medieval army to defend. Then he resigned from the game since he decided the best he could do on his turn was get back to the same board state and then get pummeled by the two of us for more stuff over and over. I'm not sure I agree with that (since I was actually out of attacks I couldn't have hit him again) and maybe he can keep saccing to hold off Randy? But even then he's really spending every turn to take out 2 or 3 of Randy's red dots and I might draw another attack and Nick is not winning this game regardless. So I can see withdrawing. He considered letting Randy's attack through since he let mine through and wanted to be fair but I feel like that would have been poor. He wasn't going to resign after my attack and it was strong enough he couldn't have realistically defended. Randy's attack knocked him out of the game and would have done so even if I hadn't attacked. I don't like rewarding the person who knocks me out so I like defending and then withdrawing rather than giving up free stuff and then withdrawing. It's the same logic for why I was fine with Robb withdrawing in the first heat. I played a card that said Robb can't win. Then Robb got to take an action to deny me a reward for eliminating him.

With Nick gone I seeded an event which punished the new weakest player, Randy. This made him very bitter. I then went all in on scoring points (again with Sid Meier I think) and tried to close the massive point lead that Randy had. It came down to the wire but Randy managed to stay ahead by a mere 7 points with something like 162-155. I could map out a way the game could have played out that let me win and part of me wants to say that's what should have happened. Gang up on the leader! Michaelangelo for 12 points is insane and everyone else needs to drop everything to beat them up. But that line of play likely results in Nick still coming 3rd so I'm trying to argue he needs to kingmake for me instead of Randy. I do want that, I guess, but it sucks. I don't know. I just hate when someone gets an early lead and gets to ride it to victory. I feel like I expect everyone to gang up on me when I do it! But then everyone certainly should play their own game and this game was fun so it's all good. This second might or might not be close enough to advance so I probably need to come back for the 3rd heat to try again. And get more practice? People keep doing well without iron... Maybe I need to stop putting such a priority on it.

The rest of my team had shown up by this point so we hung out for a while and then went to Waffle House once Robb finished playing his slow game of TTA. Waffle House didn't make me sick so hurray!

2013 WBC Day 2

Sunday starts off with Through The Ages at noon. All of last week I'd been going to bed around 9pm, so Saturday night I ended up going to bed earlier than Robb or Pounder. Again, maybe that was to get away from Space Alert, but I was also rather tired. I think I went to bed around midnight or so, which was going to leave plenty of time to wake up for noon so no alarm was set. I ended up waking up much earlier than that, since it turns out the hotel room was set to refrigerator temperature. I woke up with the chills and a bit of a sore throat. I assumed that was just because the room was so much dryer than I'm used to, drank some Sprite, and took my standard tactic for dealing with a low body temperature: hot bath! I settled in with my book (Shadow of the Giant) but didn't really warm up much despite a very high water temperature. Eventually I gave up and got up for good. I went to register while Robb and Pounder got up and showered and stuff. I got a nice collared shirt for being a GM. Woo!

In an attempt to bribe the WBCers to keep us from finding a new location (the AC dying last year was a mighty big straw on our little camel's back) the hotel gave everyone a free breakfast buffet for each day they were staying. This sounds pretty typical I would think (the place we stayed across the street in 2007 had free breakfast) but this hotel didn't have it before so one would think it was a step in the right direction. Unfortunately the buffet is really, really bad. The orange juice was so watered down I found it offensive. The bacon was rather cold and slimy. The honeydew was actually decent though, which was a bit of a surprise. Cutting up fruit isn't hard, but I would have thought they'd have found a way to fail. I stayed away from the eggs as I was worried of gluten contamination but Robb told me I wasn't missing anything.

Eventually off to Through The Ages. Randy changed the format this year to get rid of the conceding shenanigan I used last year with only your top two finishes counting this time. Not that it mattered for me, since I would only be able to play one heat anyway thanks to needing to GM A Few Acres of Snow. I showed up because there was nothing I could actually win at the same time, and because I really like the game, and because I was hoping to get put on Sceadeau's table so I could beat him. Unfortunately to use Daniel's term I was up against two stuffed animals. I ended up winning by a really large margin, and it could have been even more if I'd been focused on scoring points at the end of the game instead of on just making it to the end of a slow game without going crazy. One of my opponents had a hard time with making legal plays. I really don't think she was trying to cheat, just that she was sloppy or absent minded or felt rushed by the third player but she kept failing to spend food, resources, or actions to do the things she wanted to do. I had to pay close attention to maintain the game state. That's the sort of thing I like to do anyway (I hope to be able to learn from good plays if I watch the plays as they're happening and try to analyse them) but this game was pretty slow and it wore on me as the game went on. I'd also failed to bring my thermos down to the room with me, so I ran out of water, and my already dry throat from earlier was starting to really get to me. I got Sceadeau to do a water run for me which was awesome of him and helped some.

Despite my game being pretty slow Robb's game was nowhere near done. He was going to play in the next heat and wouldn't have time for food so Pounder and I went out for food just the two of us. Pounder wanted to go somewhere else but I decided I didn't want to risk gastro-intestinal issues while GMing a game so I pushed for another trip to Red Robin. I got the same thing, with a different drink. Burger hold most of the toppings. It's pretty great to start from a menu item and just list off most of the stuff as things to take off. Aaaaand the bun. During the meal I drank a lot of the melonade drink (lemonade and Sprite combined with some watermelon chunks) and discovered it wasn't making a dent on my throat. I had time to stop and think in the restaurant and came to the conclusion that this wasn't just a dry throat. I was sick. Super sore throat, stuffy nose, a bit of a cough, a headache, and a really warm forehead (which probably just meant a really cold hand) to go with the chills from the morning that just wouldn't go away. I haven't felt like this in a while, but it feels a lot like when I used to get throat infections as a teenager. Maybe it's the flu, maybe it's an infection of some kind. I've decided it's actually the plague, and Sceadeau has labeled me Patient Zero. Everyone is going to get to go home from WBC with my plague. I don't know if I picked it up here, or on the trip from Toronto to Kitchener, or what. Maybe I had a bad baked PoTaToE at Wendy's after all. But the bottom line is I felt terrible and didn't want to do anything but find a warm place to sleep.

So... Off to GM my event. Sunday night had the mulligan round for A Few Acres of Snow and I had to be there to run it. Pounder came along to help out and I talked to Nick Henning who agreed to also help out on Monday. Running the event started with a bit of a snag. Each game has a big triangular prism which contains things like the history of the event and a big picture of the event so people who walk into a room have a beacon to know where to go in order to sign up. They were all in the big row outside the demo area as expected... Except mine. The big concern was the registration sheets get stored with the kiosk, so not having it was going to be a real problem. Andy Lotto told me I could steal the one out of Innovation if I needed to in the short term because Don would surely fix things when he found out. A Few Acres of Snow was missing, and registration was closed to go eat. There was a sign saying they'd be back in an hour or so, which would be an hour before my round would start, so no need to panic yet. We had time to kill so Pounder went and got Innovation and we played a couple games without expansions. He blew me out both times. He plays a lot online so he knows what cards are good and which ones are not. I do not.

Eventually registration opened and it turns out my kiosk was just sitting in registration. In order to help out the events being run that day they'd set aside those kiosks in the registration room. Which would have been great, if it hadn't been locked when we wanted to pick it up. Oh well! I was able to collect it in plenty of time before the event started so no harm done. I was a little stressed out about it, so maybe a little harm done, but it all worked out in the end.

The mulligan round ended up attracting only 8 people which was a drop from last year's 16. A 9th person did show up, but they didn't know the rules. Rather than let them play I told them to come back tomorrow morning for the demo and maybe the real first round. There was nothing else the guy wanted to do, so he just stuck around to watch games. 6 of the 8 people had copies of the game which was pretty great. I wrote people's names on index cards and used those to generate pairings. I ended up playing against Kevin Lewis, who came 3rd last year. He was not happy to have to play me until he thought about it a bit more. Because I don't want the 2nd best person to get knocked out by losing twice to the best person I said I'd split up people who played in the mulligan round onto opposite sides of the bracket. If we were to play again it would be in the finals.

The game itself was over in very short fashion. He let me be the British with a bid of 5, but then forgot to use any of the bid tokens. That or he was saving them for a big flourish at the end which is entirely possible. He bought a very early settler card and I was quite scared that I he was going to be able to settle out before I could kill him even with him putting up next to no effort to stop me at all. He even let me ambush away his starting regular (though he later said that was a mistake)! Unfortunately for him the first card in my deck after my first military victory was the Port Royal card which let me attack Louisbourg quickly. He had fortified it (and Trois Rivieres) but I was still able to take it out in short order. And then my first card on the next shuffle was Louisbourg, so I was able to hit Quebec and win. The game took maybe 15 minutes from start to finish since we both had a plan and knew what each other was doing.

After that the guy who was watching asked if I'd play him a game for fun to teach him the rules. I had to stay until all the mulligan round games finished anyway so I didn't see why not. Rather then blow him out the same way I went a full British expansion strategy and ended up barely winning. Against a complete newbie who took many random actions, and had no bid tokens. Yeah, that's not actually the way to win a real game. Conquer or lose!

One game in the mulligan round went pretty long and one of the guys suggested I could just leave and he'd tell me the result later. That seemed super sketchy. I stuck around until the bitter end, and they ended up running right into the 2 hour mark. The guy who made that suggestion is someone who had emailed me a bunch of times with rules questions in the months before WBC, which was interesting.

Anyway, mulligan round over. Attendance down, but there was still the next day to boost that back up. I think Robb and Pounder wanted to play games (Hanabi I think) but I'd given in that I was sick and therefore should go to bed. The room was still cold, and I was still shivering outside the room, so Pounder gave me the blanket off of his bed. Sheet, comforter, super warm blanket, extra hotel blanket... Would that be enough to keep me warm through the night?

Through The Ages: Wonder Choice

The most recent wave of games just started in the 2 player TTA league. In one of the games I was going first with the opening card row featuring Pyramids, Hanging Guardens, and Moses. Neither Caesar nor Aristotle were visible further down the card row. Pyramids and Moses were both going to fall off before my first turn if neither player took them. What is the right play?

I can take Moses, letting my opponent have Hanging Gardens and a yellow action card worth a rock. Pyramids will fall off, meaning I don't get a good age A wonder. If either Aristotle or Caesar show up then my opponent will get the better leader and the better wonder, which feels like it's pretty bad for me. Alternatively I can take one of the wonders, letting him have Moses and the other wonder. This way I should end up with the best wonder, and I get the better leader too if either Aristotle or Caesar show up.

I decided to go the second route, and took Hanging Gardens. My opponent took Moses and Pyramids. Caesar did show up, so I'm pretty happy with the result.

But I'm not terrible good at the game. Is my evaluation here correct? Is Hanging Gardens better than Pyramids? Are Ceasar and Aristotle better than Moses? Does anything change when you consider this is a 2 player game instead of a 3 or 4 player game? My feeling is Caesar is the best age A card period, with Hanging Gardens definitely the best age A wonder regardless of number of players, but I'd like to hear other opinions and why so I can potentially learn new tips!

2012 WBC Days 1 and 2 Summary

Saturday started off with the long drive to Lancaster from Waterloo. I don't know if it was leaving earlier in the morning or that the civic holiday is next weekend instead of this one but the drive was pretty smooth. We ate at Cora's, Arby's, and Rita's which specializes in ice, custard, and happiness. I got a watermelon ice and was quite happy. We got in to Lancaster around 7:10 after a small detour where we couldn't remember the right road to take and went straight to the Texas Roadhouse. Robb even called ahead to reserve a table so we got to skip the long line. Woo! I wasn't famished so I just had a small steak but it was quite good. I was definitely happy I brought along Gas-X, though.

There were no events we wanted to play on Saturday so once we got in we played a 3er of Puerto Rico and then a 3er of Innovation+expansion. I should have won PR but made a terrible play by building a late wharf instead of the obvious guild hall I'd been setting up for. Innovation was fun and we had lots of people from WBC's past stop by while we played.

Sunday started off with a Through The Ages heat. People who brought a game get to play at their table and everyone else gets split up which has the minor issue that the good players tend to end up split up and not playing each other. I don't think there's a solution to this issue but it does exist. I don't have the game so I was off to play with a shark. Fortunately for me, I was not placed with a shark. The guy who owned the game I played with didn't even really know the rules and I had to correct him on multiple occasions. The third guy had never played before. I won by a mile.

Next up, food. We went to Fuddrucker's with Rich and Jason. I'd never been there before and didn't feel like a burger so I ordered the fish and chips in honour of the Olympics. Then I found out they didn't have vinegar. What! How you can have 15 barbeque sauces and no vinegar baffles me. It was passable and I'd consider eating it again though I'd want to smuggle in some vinegar.

Next up, heat 2 of Through The Ages. A Few Acres of Snow was 4 hours later which should be good enough and I decided to risk it. I was not at an easy table this time as I got to play with a game owner who knew what he was doing and Winton who I know is good at games in general. This game was very close and devolved a little into beating Winton like a pinata and scrambling to get the candy that came out. The game owner had Napolean and a modern army. I had an air forced conquistador. Winton had a transcontinental railroad and a warrior. Both other players spent the whole game commenting on how I had the game in the bag but I didn't see it. The problem was I was still a despot in age III and didn't have any food. I did have ocean liners and was the first to iron. I didn't draw a single good age III scoring event and the end result was the game owner won by a single point. All 4 final events scored him more points than me. 3 of them were seeded by Winton. Sigh.

The game was done in 3.5 hours which left plenty of time for A Few Acres of Snow. I tried to convince Sceadeau to learn it but he didn't like the sound of the game (I think it's auto-win for the British) and played Eclipse instead. They ended up with 16 people for AFAoS and I got paired up with an older gentleman who had played maybe twice before. He let me have the British for a bid of one. I promptly took Port Royal, Louisbourg, and Quebec. The game took an hour which was about 3 minutes my turn and 57 minutes his turn. My game was by far the first one done. I looked around and saw only one other game with a British player taking a military strategy, and he wasn't doing it well. No French players were going military. Maybe people were playing soft for the mulligan round. Maybe the sharks are all hiding for tomorrow. Or maybe this event is an auto-win for me. We'll have to wait for tomorrow to see. The GM told me that he figured the best way for him to find the ringers was to see who finished their games fastest so he pegs me as a ringer. I hope he's right!

Through The Ages 3 Player League

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that there was a 2 player Through The Ages league starting up on the asynchronous website. I don't think there was much interest but maybe that's because it was 2 player and it was a 10 game commitment. This time around you're only signing up for 6 games total and they're played in two groups of 3 which should be a pretty manageable number. If you're interested signups end tomorrow at the following link.

Through The Ages League

I've been playing a fair bit of Through The Ages online recently but only just bothered to really check out their message boards. (I posted once when I first started playing to get a bug fixed but didn't bother reading anything else.) It turns out they're constantly running a league for each of 2, 3, and 4 player games. When one season finished the next one starts up and it turns out the last season of the 2 player league just ended. They run their leagues sort of like European football runs their leagues with people getting promoted or relegated between the different tiers of leagues based on their previous results. All new players get lumped into a starter league which is where I'll be playing. Hopefully I can string together some wins and get a good promotion in a month and a half!

The reason I mention this is I suspect a few of the people who read this might be interested in signing up as well. The interface on the site for playing the game is pretty smooth and the game itself is well suited for asynchronous play so it's really worth checking out if you like the game. All they ask for a commitment to the league is that you're willing to log in pretty much once per day to make a move. Sign-ups are open until May 16th. I'd think it's worth signing up even if you think you'll lose a lot to at least get out into a tier. I wish I'd known about these and had signed up when I first started playing!

About Iron

I posted a couple days ago about a Through The Ages challenge I was issued by a guy who was upset that he didn't get an iron card. He said the game is bad because you simply can't win without getting an iron. I'd disagreed that it was impossible to win without iron and he said he'd play 5 one-on-one games with me and doubted I could win even one game. He was so confident he even volunteered to spot me 30 points (about 20% of a winning score)!

We played one game and he ended up conceding on turn 12. (Games typically last around 20 turns.) I don't think I was guaranteed to win the game by any stretch (though if you take the 30 point buffer into account I probably couldn't lose) but I was certainly in a strong position. Knowing I wasn't going to get an iron meant I had to play a little differently, and I ended up focusing heavily on getting more actions and stockpiling research for age II. I used the actions to pick up extra cards which generated minerals themselves so I was able to function pretty well without iron. Coal (the upgrade to iron) came up very soon in age II and I'm pretty sure my opponent had a chance to grab it for 3 of his 4 actions but didn't.

He then started up a second game. This one was a little weird in that both of the iron cards were near the bottom of the age I deck. He picked up an iron card on turn 7 and played it on turn 8. I picked up and played coal on turn 9. So really, we were both playing the game without iron, but I'd been planning on not having an iron and was better positioned since I had focused on other ways of making minerals with actions and leaders. I had Leonardo as my age I leader and he gives you a research per turn and a mineral every time you play a tech card.

He stuck out the second game a little longer but eventually conceded it as well. In this game I don't blame him though as I don't think he had a chance of mounting a comeback. I'd built a really ridiculous military lead (Napolean was my age II leader and I got an early air forces in age III to go with my hussars tactics card. My military was 40 to his 15.) He also got a very powerful age III leader himself but I had the assassinate card and immediately killed off Sid Meier. When he scooped I was up 60 points, was making 5 more points per turn, and was making more research and food than he was. The turn before he gave up I also played an attack to steal all 8 of his minerals for the turn!

He ended the game with this parting shot...

"thanks, I won't be playing with you ever again. please do not ever join or contact me for a game. all the best bye"


Ouch! I wasn't taunting him or even saying anything at all in chat in either game. All I did was argue with him in the initial game that you didn't need an iron and then beat him twice at his own challenge. Oh well!

So, do you need iron? Clearly the answer is no, but I'm not sure it's as clearcut as these games showed. Both games were a little weird in terms of when coal showed up. We were also playing with an expansion and in both games I made good use of an expansion card. (The first game I played an age A leader which made all action cards better and I generated a fair number of 'free' resources that way. The second game I played an age A leader that got buffed so he was just straight up a civil action every turn. My tactics card at the end which let me get such a huge military lead was also expansion only.) Also, in both games I built the pyramids as my age A wonder and it really feels like it's just the best. (It gives an extra civil action every turn for the whole game.) Especially when you won't get an iron that extra action a turn helps with playing more cards.

Perhaps most importantly I'm just better at the game than this guy is. In the second game he took Genghis Khan as his age I leader. Genghis makes all your mounted units stronger and makes them generate points. (I'd used him in our first game to build up my lead.) But after he took Khan both of the knights cards were on the board. One was going to cost me 1 action and disappear if I didn't take it. The other was going to cost me 3 actions. So I took the one that cost me 3 actions and then Khan was useless for all of age I. It also made most of the tactics cards in the deck useless for him as well since they mostly need mounted units. 

Through The Ages feels like it should be random enough that anyone can win any game but the more I play the less I believe that to be true. There is some randomness, sure, but it really feels like one of the more skill intensive games around. I still haven't beaten Robb yet! 

Do you need iron to win? Not if you're better than your opponent, that's for sure. I'm less convinced if you're on equal footing... 

I recalled they posted statistics about the game at WBC and went to check last year's write-up. Unfortunately it only broke down the winning percentage of leaders, wonders, and governments but not techs. On the other hand I read the recap of the final and the winner, Randy Buehler, was the one person in the finals who didn't get an iron. But that may just be more evidence that you have to be better than your opponents to win without iron? I do hear he's pretty good at games...

The Necessity Of Iron?

I've been playing a lot of Through The Ages online recently. In one of my current games one of my opponents had the following to say:

"wow not having iron is so brutal. Gl to you guys, I am not longer really in this. cheers"


The 3rd player in the game gave an example of someone winning without iron. Which prompted the following responses:

"lol, i am not wrong, not having iron is perhaps the only real weakness in the game. play a few more games and then tell me what you think."

"i will probably resign rather than finish the game. I will see how next 2 rounds play out."

"hey nick, if you like I can prove my point. We can play 5 1 on 1 games. Use any strategy you like taking into account that you will not be using iron. I would be surprised if you could win just one game. But it would be fun to try it out."

He then challenged me to a 1 on 1 game which is currently in progress. I found this exchange a little amusing as in one of the first games of TTA I played (with Pounder, Sara, and Duncan) we came to the same conclusion. There are 3 iron cards in the deck and 4 players. All 3 iron cards were grabbed the second they appeared for max cost (cards start off costing 3 actions to take and you get 4 actions each turn). Someone (Sara I think) didn't ever get the chance to pay 3 actions for an iron and she fell far behind and lost. 

For those who don't know, the game is a simulation of the Civ computer game series. There are a few different resources you have to balance out (food, minerals, science, culture, actions, and military strength) and you start off making bronze which is worth 1 mineral. Iron is worth 2 minerals and the only cost to upgrade is a one shot cost of 5 science and then 3 minerals per mine you upgrade. So in a pretty short period of time you can end up doubling your mineral output. Minerals and actions are all it takes to build wonders and pretty much everything in the game needs minerals to get up and running...

I remember talking with Robb about iron at WBC this year and he told me he's seen Jason win games without getting iron. (Jason being our 4th teammate at WBC. His team game is Through The Ages and he is a two-time champion so I guess he knows a thing or two about the game.) Robb said he thinks knights might be almost as important (without knights you're probably going to be last in military strength and therefore end up getting hammered by attacks and events). In the games I've played so far it seems like alchemy is also way up there as well. (Turns minerals and actions into research per turn.)

At any rate, I am now in a game trying to prove that iron isn't needed. In the chat for that game was the following:

"concept of your game is to win with no iron, anything else goes. If you get within 30 points in endgame I will still concede defeat. That should be a nice handicap."

Now, 2 player games are a little different. In a 4 player game there are 3 iron cards, so someone misses out. In a 3 player game there are 2 iron cards, so someone misses out. The fact that someone is going to miss out means the cost of iron goes way up. Assuming iron is that important you need to pay 3 actions to get it which somewhat mitigates the power. In a 2 player game there are 2 iron cards (and you can't take both copies to punish your opponent) so you can get an iron cheap in a 2 player game. But still sometimes you'll pay extra for the first one as there might be 5 or 6 turns between them. Under this challenge where I can't take iron even that restriction is gone. He gets the first iron for as cheap as he wants it. And he also gets a knights and an alchemy. 

But whatever! I like playing games, and I like challenges, and he's even spotting me 30 points (winning scores tend to be in the 130-200 range, so 30 is a really big deal). Going into the game I liked my chances to win at least 1 of 5 games. We're currently about halfway through the first game and I actually have a lead. I make 4 food, 5 minerals, 5 science, and 4 culture per turn. He makes 3 food, 6 minerals, 3 science, and 1 culture per turn. We have comparable military strength, I have a 21 culture lead, and I have 4 extra military actions per turn. The outcome is certainly still up in the air but I'm definitely not blown out by giving up on iron. (It helped that 2 of the first cards out of the age II deck were constitutional monarchy and coal and I got both of them. But I was able to do that because I had a lot of early research by not spending any on iron...)

Through The Ages Online

Through The Ages: A Story of Civilization is a board game which simulates the video game series, Civilization. (Which itself simulated the board game, Civilization.) It's a fun, if lengthy, board game which abstracts away most of the city micromanagement of the computer game. Instead you have a finite number of actions to take each turn which you use to build up resources and score points. You have food, production, and research. You use the food to make workers, then you use the production to turn your workers into buildings which make more resources or into military units which can help you attack other players.

Robb showed me a website which allows you to play the game online. Many online board game sites are set up such that you play in real time as though you were all around a table. This one is different. Because most actions require no immediate response from other players you're able to log in, play a turn, and then wait for the next player to come play. It seems like it will take an awfully long time to finish a game but at the same time it won't take up too much time in any given sitting.

Anyone up for a game?