Yesterday was the Toronto GCBGB event held in the back room of a pretty nice pub in downtown Toronto. It was definitely a fun time with a lot of new faces in attendance. Overall 21 people showed up to play at some point during the day with a couple people only playing a few rounds. One change to the format this time is they didn't run any 5 player games. I believe the reason was time concerns (many games just take 25% longer with 5 people instead of 4) though I think for scoring purposes it's pretty bad too. Of course with 21 people we ended up playing a lot of 3 player games which have scoring concerns of their own. Oh well. Off to the games!
Round 1 - Bohnanza, 7 Wonders, Carcassonne, Wizard, Dominion, San Juan
I was randomly assigned to pick 5th. We had 18 people to start off so we were going to be playing 3 4-player games and 2 3-player games. When it was my turn to pick I could still pick any game I wanted so I went with San Juan. It is both the game I'd enjoy playing and the game I think I have the best chance of winning so it was the obvious choice. We ended up being one of the 3 player games. A 19th player showed up just before the game start and he chose to join the other 3 player game instead of ours so we were the only 3 player game in the round. One of the other players had played before, the other hadn't. In fact, the guy who had played before was in my game of San Juan last year too. He seemed vastly improved from then when I think he was pretty new to the game.
The game opened with righty going first and building. I played a tobacco storage. I never crafted or sold myself and it remained my only trading related card for the game but just having it in play meant I wasn't falling behind when they were crafting and selling either. I followed it up with a carpenter, a cycled archive, and then a quarry. With the purple building combo in play I went into playing lots of purple buildings and actually ended up building almost all the good ones. Chapel, then library, then prefecture. I didn't end up with a large building but I did build all 3 statues as well as putting 6 cards under the chapel. I ended the game and was multiple buildings ahead of the other players, I think. One had a zumft hall with a good selection of production buildings but it wasn't quite enough as I won by 7.
Round 2 - Alhambra, Ra, Roll Through the Ages, Saint Petersburg, Medici, Glen More
This round featured 2 games I've never player before, one I've played exactly once, and one I really dislike. Picking 5th last meant I might have been in a bad spot but fortunately one of the two games I like and know was still available. I hadn't played it in like 2 years (since WBC2009 I think) but figured I could pick it back up again. The game was Saint Petersburg and featured 2 new players, myself, and the guy from San Juan who seemed like he really knew the game.
I opened up in the noble seat on the first turn and we ended up only taking 1 building off the board in the building phase. That meant I got the only noble on the first turn which was a pretty big boost to my game. I then managed to manipulate the board such that we'd get 6 workers on the second worker turn when I happened to be 2nd. Those two things combined meant I was making 15 gold a turn compared to 12, 9, and 9 from my opponents. After another turn I pretty much stopped generating more income and focused exclusively on victory point buildings, managed to snag the 7 point per turn building pretty early on. I ended up winning very handily 84-65-58-55.
Round 3 - Ingenious, Ticket to Ride, Two by Two, Ticket to Ride: Europe, Thurn and Taxis, Yspahan
I got to pick first in this round which seems like it should be good. Unfortunately there isn't a single game in this selection that I both know and tolerate. If I'd been thinking ahead I would have played some T&T on BSW last week to refresh myself on the game so I could have played it. I don't really like the game though, and since I didn't know it either I stayed away. I ended up picking Ticket to Ride which is the only game from the set that I thought I knew.
I was doing pretty well for myself in the game and was in a good position near the end of the game. I counted my cards in hand and trains left and figured out I could end the game in like 3 actions. Instead I went for more tickets. Now, I had 6 yellow cards in hand and was connected to the 6 yellow and the 5 yellow so I had a pretty good chance of pulling a ticket near my track worth a fair amount. Observant people will note I said I had 6 yellow in hand and there was still a 6 yellow track in play. I could have taken it and ended the game in 2 turns. That seems strong. Instead I went for tickets. One I could do trivially, building just one 3 track. Great! Then there was another I could do with the same 3 track, and the 6 yellow, and a singleton. I decided to keep it as well despite knowing fully well that I could have ended the game in 3 turns and therefore someone else probably could have too. (One guy built a bunch of 6s and didn't go for tickets ever either, so it should have been obvious that I wasn't getting 3 more turns if he didn't want me to.) He then immediately built the 6 yellow, dropping down to 4 trains in stock. The game ended one turn later, so I both only got 2 turns and didn't get to build the 6. I ended up coming a pretty distant 3rd place. In fact I was exactly the negative point value of the route I took, so I could have tied for 1st if I'd just taken the 1 ticket. Probably I just win if I build the 6 yellow myself instead of taking tickets at all. The guy who came last was actually the guy building all the 6s. It turns out he got spited out of a critical piece of track and failed to do all of his tickets.
Round 4 - Egizia, Puerto Rico, Santiago, Stone Age, Settlers of Catan, Container
By this point we were up to 21 people so we were playing 3 3-player games and 3 4-player games. All 6 games were now included. I was tied for 3rd at this point, with Duncan. This round featured 3 games I've never played before, 2 I have played a ton but don't like, and 1 I both like and know. Stone Age time! It ended up being a 3 player game. In fact only 2 people had chosen it when the last person was to pick and she was forced to play it. Neither of them had played before but both seemed interested in playing it and both seemed like they wanted to play again later so that's good. The game itself was less good. There are things about Stone Age that you just can't know until you've played it at least once, like how to properly value the different cards. I ended up winning by over 100 points.
Round 5 - Agricola, Power Grid, Caylus, Tigris & Euphrates, El Grande, Steam
Everyone ahead of me or tied with me lost in round 4, so I was back at the top of the pack. This round had lots of interesting options, and I almost wish I was 2nd going into the round instead of 1st. Someone asked me what I'd do if I was 2nd and I said I'd go to whatever game 1st picked (unless they picked the one game I didn't know). Sadly no one else seemed to feel that way as the top 6 all chose a different game. As for what I was going to pick, well, Steam was out since I've never played it. I think El Grande is terrible with 3 players and didn't want to risk it. I just don't like Caylus and would never pick it over Agricola since I think Agricola solved the problems Caylus has. So it was down to Agricola, Power Grid, and Tigris & Euphrates all of which I like to play and think I'm pretty good at. I went with Tigris & Euphrates since I never get to play it and wanted to practice for WBC. It ended up being a 3 player game with 1 new player which was a little unfortunate. I would have prefered a 4 player game. In retrospect I probably should have gone with Agricola since I like it a lot with 3 or 4.
The game itself featured me beating up on the new player and the 3rd player building an empire with 2 monuments in it. I screwed up a blight and failed to take over one of the monuments when I really needed to, and after that failure (using my last blight) it was very hard to stop him. I managed to set up one chance where we would do an external red fight. Red was both of our lowest numbers by far and the winner of the fight was going to score up 5 or 6 red points. He ended up having enough to successfully defend (I had to attack since he was guaranteed to win since he had a red monument) and as such won by an incredible margin. 16-8-7.
Coming second in the last round meant a lot of people could pass me with a win. It turned out two people did so. Sara and Duncan. Both of whom already have passes to Fan Expo since they're volunteering for the gaming convention. So while I didn't end up actually winning (exclusively to that screw up in Ticket to Ride!) I did get the prize I wanted. And as an added bonus I got to play 2 games on Roll Through the Ages with Sara and Duncan afterwards. Fun game. I'll probably try to pick it up since it's short and similar to Ra! Dice but better.
Showing posts with label Ticket to Ride. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ticket to Ride. Show all posts
Sunday, June 26, 2011
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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