Great Canadian Board Game Blitz: Toronto - 2011 Recap

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.

Great Canadian Board Game Blitz Recap

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

WBC 2010 Days 7, 8, and 9 Summaries

A little late, but I came down with something towards the end of the week and into my first week back in Toronto and wasn't really up to doing much of anything but lying around and sleeping or watching BSG. At any rate, brief summary time!

Friday

Le Havre Finals - You may note from my initial schedule plan that the Le Havre finals were Saturday morning and I was slated to play Stone Age in this slot. Well, it turned out that the schedule online and posted at the door to the room said Saturday but the schedule in the program said Friday. Thankfully I double checked with the GM after I noticed the discrepancy or I'd have shown up very confused Saturday morning.

The game itself was a 4-player game, featuring two Dans and two Nicks. I got off to what I felt was a pretty good early start, buying the marketplace and the cheap building firm. I made 12 bricks in the midgame and was able to use the first special building to convert bread + grain into a bunch of money to buy/build the coilery and the cokery. I also had the wharf (vendored at one point though to kick someone out so I could build a boat) and used the 12 brick to build a lot of good buildings. I decided to use my iron with the bricks to build the buildings instead of building iron ships with it like I normally do and it ended up costing me big time.

The special building came out that lets you turn 1 iron and 15 energy into 2 steel, which both Nick H and Dan E used to build the first two steel ships. I was too busy futzing around with buildings to get involved and it cost me. I only had a wooden ship so I needed a ton of food each turn, and I'd turned my bread and grain into bucks earlier. As such I had to slaughter my cows and eat them, which goes against my general game plan which is to ship them to Spain. I didn't have any boats though, so it wasn't like I had anything to ship them on anyway...

The game came to an unexpectedly quick end after that. I spent the last few turns robbing the local court and ended up with all my loans paid off and a lot of good buildings. I had the storehouse so I didn't need to throw stuff over the bridge or try to ship a lot on my useless wooden boat, though I think I did ship coke at some point.

I ended up finishing third after the two guys who built early steel ships. (Dan E won the only plaque as it was a trial event.) They also completely avoided loans, though I think my loan plan would have been good enough if I'd not wasted all my iron on buildings and instead had actually built ships. Taking loans is good because it lets you avoid feeling like you need to eat your cows, but you do need ships eventually so you don't eat your cows later on anyway.

In retrospect I think part of the problem I had was how fast the game progressed because it was a 4 player game. Both my heat and my semi-final were 3 player games and they play a lot differently. (For one thing, you get 43 actions in a 3 player game and 36 in a 4 player game.) I had played a 4 player game earlier in the week in open gaming with Dan E, Robb, and Pounder and got blown out of that one too. I think I need to play more 4ers going forward to try to get a handle on the game.

I was a little bummed out about losing, but I'd clearly screwed up and hadn't played nearly as much as my opponents so it wasn't much of a surprise. We were hoping to get done in 2 hours so people could go play Tikal but that didn't work out, so I had time to burn. I think we ended up going to eat at Applebee's. Afterwards Robb jumped out of the car to play Titan while we looked for a parking spot and took Pounder's badge with him. This resulted in Pounder and I spending the next hour looking for the badge by calling the restaurant and going to all the lost and founds and tearing the room apart. On our way out to the car to search it again we stopped by the Titan room and found Robb sitting there with two badges... If only we had cell phones that worked in the US.

Alhambra - This is a game that came out on BSW way back when we were trying to build a town and my friend Josh took a real liking to it. I couldn't explain why but I really disliked the game then. A few months ago Duncan brought it over to a games day at my place and we played it and I ended up winning and kinda enjoyed it. I played again at the GCBGB event last month and won again. I wouldn't say I really like the game but I don't dislike it anymore, I seem to be ok at the game, and I had nothing else to do. So, I went and played.

My plan in Alhambra is to aggressively buy the two cheap building colours because there are fewer of them. I gladly overpay by a lot to get them since I can lock in guaranteed points if I get just 3 of them and even with overpaying and skipping a money draw they're comparable to the 'best' building tiles cost-wise. Less payoff, but less competition. After buying those I can backfill walls or another colour that I think I can compete in. That's what I did in the heat and squeaked out a close win. I ended up drawing the money that ended ages 1 and 2 I think, which put the hurt on the guy on me left who didn't have a building during the first scoring turn. He almost beat me despite that, so he probably wins if I'm a little less lucky.

Winning put me into the Alhambra semis, which were going to conflict with Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings also conflicted with the Factory Manager semis, and the Agricola semis, and the Race for the Galaxy semis... So I decided to skip it and play Alhambra again.

My Alhambra semi had me at a table with 3 elder ladies and a young Asian guy. Early game I had the choice to buy the second purple building at a huge overpayment (15 for a 9 I think; with the lost money grab I'd be paying more than twice 'market' value for it) or I could pass on it. The guy had the first purple building and had picked up the right amount of money to buy it on his turn for exact cost. The thought went through my head that I should buy it because I was really in a 2 player game and it was worth overpaying by that much to keep it out of his hands. I decided not to, and it definitely turned out to be the wrong choice. He ended up winning by a large margin with me coming very solidly second. All three of the women ended up buying buildings they couldn't place and on a couple occasions bought buildings that were valueless. Not maliciously by any stretch, they were just buying things that they could buy even if it didn't contribute to their 'winning the gameness'.

The game certainly plays out a lot differently if I'd bought the second purple building so I can't say for sure that I'd have won if I'd bought it, but I can definitely say in retrospect that failing to do so did cost me the game. The guy who won played very well the whole game so it would have been tight I think.


I now had a decision to make. Factory Manager is scheduled to last 2 hours. The Agricola semi was 1 hour after the Factory Manager semi. The final was the next day, so winning wouldn't create a conflict. My heat game was done in under an hour, so it's certainly possible to play in that length of time, but my heat game was also the fastest one and every other game took longer than an hour. I'd only played Factory Manager twice and I thought I had a good handle on the strategy and could compete, but I decided not to risk that I'd end up in a slow game.

Just before Agricola started I popped into the Factory Manager room to check on the progress of the games. It turned out they only had 9 people and played 3 3-player games which should be faster than 4-player games. One of the games was almost done but the other two weren't even halfway done. So, probably a good idea to have skipped it, though in retrospect my odds of winning it were likely higher than Agricola.

Agricola semis - Pounder and I both had 2 wins so we were in the top 16. Robb had a win and a second place and found himself in 17th place. One person missing the semis and he was in. We ended up waiting around for a bit to give the people playing the Goa finals a chance to show up... Basically until all copies of the game were set up around the room. Agricola has a fair bit of set-up time, and everyone made it in just in time. I'm pretty sure with that extra little buffer I had a decent chance of getting a Factory Manager game in before it started... Oh well.

At any rate, I was at a table with Randy Buehler (of Magic fame) and two guys I didn't recognize who both seemed like solid players. This round used the K deck and was a draft. (Occupations then improvements both in clockwise order.) I've played K deck maybe twice ever and I've never drafted before. Randy, who was on my right, said he'd never drafted before either, but maybe he was just playing mind games? The guy on my left made a comment at some point about how he plays a lot online and had done tons of drafts.

Before the round the 'experts' at the game were complaining about how there are three 'banned' cards that are overpowered and removed from games with sensible players but were in the decks here. These cards are the lover - occupation that costs 4 extra food but gives you a family growth even without room, the wet nurse - occupation that lets you pay 1 food to get a free family growth when you build a room, and the reed hut - improvement that costs 4 reed that comes with a free family member that you can use immediately but isn't worth the 3 points. My table had all three, as I opened wet nurse, Randy got the reed hut and the guy across from me got the lover. Guy on my left didn't get any of them and whined all game about how he had to play against all the 'broken' cards.

Lefty was starting player and his first action was to play an occupation which allowed him to pay 3 food to play an occupation whenever anyone else did (2 food for the last 3). He picked up some food on his second action (I think) and then played another occupation on his first turn next round which let him play his occupations at random but he got 3 food before paying costs if he did. He then played a minor improvement which gave him 3 food before paying the costs of an occupation. He then proceeded to net 18 food and all 5 of his remaining occupations as the rest of us played out a couple occupations each. As soon as he got all 3 cards in play Randy and I rolled our eyes at his complaints about having to face the 'broken' cards since it was very clear to us that he'd already won the game.

A lot of occupations have the problem that they're just not worth the action and the food to get them into play. When they cost no actions and gain you 4 food they're pretty awesome. The three of us may have gotten one 'extra' guy early game but I'm not sure an extra guy on turn 5 is even worth 18 food total over the course of the game. (He gets to take 9 actions but costs you 10 food. Is 9 actions better than 28 food? (Also, all the 'broken' cards have pretty substantial costs. Wet nurse is the cheapest by far, but I still paid 3 food and an action to get the guy. Lover costs you 6 food and an action. Reed hut costs you half an action, a wood, and 4 reed, which is a big deal especially early game when 2 reed is a first pick.)

A further thing to consider with all these 'broken' cards in play is the demand for the family growth space goes way, way down. Lover boy used it to get his 3rd dude, so he couldn't take family growth until he'd built two more rooms. I never wanted it. Reed hut guy still wants it, but he blew his first 4 reed on the hut so he was going to be way behind on building rooms. As a result, the 4th player gets a huge advantage of basically uncontested family growths all game long.

At any rate, the first two actions my free dude from the wet nurse took were day labourer for 2 food each. Not great. Maybe I should have gone for a fireplace and tried to scoop sheep or something, but that likely delays my wet nursing for a couple turns anyway, and I had a long term food plan. I'd drafted the slaughterman, the house goat, the weaver, the loom, and the milking stool. So I got a food each harvest, a food each round, a food every time someone killed animals, plus food for keeping sheep and cows around. Pretty sweet, but it took a lot of wood to build enough fences to get it up and running and that cut back on abusing the wet nurse. Eventually I got a second use out of the wet nurse and got an early family growth without room to max my family.

All the free food in our game meant we ate a comparably lower number of animals and vegetables which meant our scores were pretty high. I scored 47 which was good for a solid second place, but lefty scored 60 which is a pretty absurd Agricola score.

At one point during the game we had a spectator watching our game and after lefty took a 3 wood square he asked him why he didn't take the 4 wood instead. The answer was that the 4 wood was in fact 4 clay, but I took exception to the question being asked at all. The Agricola semis are not a C class event and the spectator was not the GM, so he had no business giving strategy advice and I asked him not to do so again. A few turns later a different spectator popped by and pointed out that lefty had just bought the well but didn't pay the resources. Lefty paid and then made a comment about how I was going to yell about interfering with the game again.

I then had to stress that there's a difference between enforcing game state and offering strategy advice. In Magic what you'd do is go and get a judge when you thought you saw an inconsistent game state and have them check in just in case you were wrong and it was just an option they chose not to take and by asking about it you'd be giving strategy advice. (When you do X, draw a card VS when you do X, you may draw a card. In the first you have to draw the card and are cheating if you don't. In the second you're allowed to not draw a card and it's just fine if you don't. In both cases you probably should draw the card, but an outside force should prompt you in the first case and should not in the second.) WBC doesn't have nearly the judge manpower that large Magic events do so that's not really an option here. (Especially since the Agricola GM decided to leave the room to rest after Advanced Civ and therefore couldn't be called over for minor things.)

At any rate, he paid for his well and we moved along, and I think he had a better understanding of why I didn't like the first question. The game could have devolved into a tense affair at this point but it didn't and for the most part it felt like the game relaxed a bit. Maybe that was because it was clear the game was over though...


Randy took a bit of time to make a few decisions but despite that we finished the game rather quickly in just under 2 hours and were easily the first table done. Randy and I both had other events starting so we bid adieu to our opponents and ran to try to catch them. I felt a little bad about not helping to clean up fully after the game but it turned out they used that set for the finals immediately afterward anyway and I'm actually a little annoyed when people 'help' clean up my games. I'm a little obsessive compulsive and I have certain ways I like things put away, even if it's "throw everything in the box" like I do with Vegas Showdown. (As an aside, I got some really strange looks when I put Vegas Showdown away like that a couple years ago.)

Randy mentioned after the game that he recognized me from Magic, which surprised me. Woo!

Race for the Galaxy semis - I got to the room a little after the start time, but they were still milling around and I had plenty of time to get signed in. They ended up having 33 people show up, so they ran a quarterfinal round first. They ran 9 tables (6 4's and 3 3's) leading to 3 3 player semis and a 3 player final. I got randomly assigned to one of the 3 player games, with an opponent who was around 11. I proceeded to pick up 5 of the 6 goals and ran away with a large score to two small scores, which put me into the actual semis.

Once there I was paired up with someone I didn't recognize and David Platnick. Platnick is a good guy and an excellent game player who I've encountered several times at WBC over the years. (He beat me in the Notre Dame finals, I beat him in Agricola this year and a Puerto Rico quarterfinals that I can recall.) His first 4 cards were a blue world, a brown world, a green world, and diversified economy. He then started alternating between produce and consume-x2. I tried to end the game as soon as I could but he got to ship one too many times for me. I didn't end up with a single way to ship goods which was my downfall in this game I think. At one point early game I had the choice between settling a 2 cost blue world that drew me a card when it got a good on it and a 2 cost blue world that let me ship for 1 VP. There was a produce called that turn and I went for the immediate card (and Platnick didn't have diversified economy out yet so I didn't know the game was going to be constant producing) but didn't end up with a way to ship after that. The game was very close, I only lost by 4 or 5 points, which may have been enough with the one planet swap. (Though I do end up down a card in that case, so maybe I can't do the rest of what I did...)

At any rate, I can look back and find a mistake I made and Platnick played well so I can't complain about the outcome. Disappointing for sure, but understandable. I don't know how they did 4-6 seeding but since I got second in my game I hope I got one of those spots.

Playing two rounds of Race meant I missed the Wits & Wagers event. Pounder was in the Agricola semis and Robb was passed out so we didn't really have a team anyway. I think Rich Atwater was expecting us to go, which sucked that we abandoned him. 8(

Liar's Dice - I was 'supposed' to be playing the Vegas Showdown finals in this time slot but we all know how that worked out... So I got to take my swing at being the LIAR'S DICE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD! I showed up fairly early and actually found a table before they started unlike previous years. This meant I got to sit around for 15 minutes in a room full of bored gamers, many of whom had been drinking, all of whom had a cup with 5 dice in it. To say there was a bit of a din would be a mild understatement. The room was pretty synchronized, keeping a pretty steady beat with cup shakes. It was a little freaky. Eventually we got ready to start, but first the GM embarrassed a nice lady by getting the whole room (240ish people?) to sing her happy birthday. Then we were off!

My table featured, clockwise from myself, a teenage boy, a crazy guy from Japan, a teenage girl, her boyfriend, and an older man who I believe had been drinking. I knew the crazy Japanese guy from Titan tournaments of years past. The game got into a pretty good rhythm... The man on my right would make some ludicrously low bid like 2-5s. I'd bump it up to around expected value given my roll and the outstanding dice, say 9-4s. The kid to my left would up my bid by one. Then the Japanese guy would slam the die down in a jump shift and stare at the teen to his left. TWELVE SIX! It was awesome! He understood how the game was played! (I may have earned the Nick 'Two-Dice' Page with a similar strategy.) He said it with a lot of confidence and I guess he really convinced the girl on his left because she'd raised his bid by 1. Her boyfriend would then look at her like she was crazy and challenge. The first time she lost 4 dice, the second time she got knocked out.

I eventually lost a die to an exacta bid elsewhere at the table, but managed to get it down to 4-1-1. I was the 4, with the Japanese guy and the teenage boyfriend still alive as the 1s. I then got flustered by a 2 star bid on my right. I had a star... Do I challenge? Raise to 3 stars? Or do I bid 4 of something I have? If you assume a completely random dice split, and that Japanese guy will challenge no matter what he has then I have the following outcomes (out of 36 options):

8 - lose 1 die regardless

2 - lose 1 die if I challenge or bid stars

1 - lose 1 die if I challenge

16 - lose 2 dice if I bid anything

8 - lose 2 dice if I bid stars, lose 1 die if I bid 4s

1 - lose 2 dice if I bid stars

Bidding stars is strictly worse than bidding 4s, so I should exclude that option, simplifying the table to:

8 - lose 1 die regardless

3 - lose 1 die if I challenge

16 - lose 2 dice if I bid

8 - lose 1 die if I bid

1 - win regardless

From a strictly random standpoint, I should challenge. I lose 11/36th of a die instead of 40/36th of a die. But it's not completely random. Japanese guy's die is random, but the guy who bid looked at his die before choosing to jump to 2 stars. So, either he has a star and made a reasonable bid or he doesn't and made a risky bid (but one that put me in a tough spot, to be fair). The tables for each possibility are:

HAS STAR (out of 6)

4 - lose 1 die regardless

2 - lose 1 die if I challenge

HAS NO STAR (out of 30)

4 - lose 1 die regardless

1 - lose 1 die if I challenge

16 - lose 2 dice if I bid

8 - lose 1 die if I bid

1 - win regardless

So if he has a star, I lose a die if I challenge and 2/3rds of a die if I bid. If he doesn't, I lose 1/6th of a die if I challenge and 22/15ths of a die if I bid. Assuming his odds of making that bid without a star is p, then I lose (1-p)+p/6 if I challenge and 2(1-p)/3 + 22p/15 if I bid. Simplifying:

1-5p/6 VS 2/3+4p/5, which has an equilibrium point at p = 10/49

So, if he makes the bid without a star more than 20% of the time, I should challenge. If he makes that bid without a star less than 20% of the time, I should bid on. This ignores the fact that Japanese guy might somehow overbid me. (If I bid 3-4s and he has a 6, he might bid 3-6s. Remember, I think there are 2 stars after all by not challenging, and I have most of the information, so it might be right.)

At any rate I didn't go through any of that in my head. To be honest, I wasn't really thinking at all. I woke up early with not a lot of sleep and played a quarterfinal, 3 semifinals and a final. And the room was very boisterous, so I just went with it. I had a feeling he had a star and bid on. I got challenged, and lost 2 dice. I then lost another die, and got down to 1-all, but then I turned it on. We somehow blew the Japanese guy away and ended up me against the teen, with his bid first. He opened with 1-star. I didn't have a star, and I now knew he was willing to make such a bid without one. He was capable of putting the pressure on me, so I challenged him... And he had a 2! Woo!

Liar's Dice semifinal - They had 30ish winners who wanted to play on, so they had 6 semifinal tables with between 5 and 6 people at each. I was at a 5 player table, and was very quickly the first one eliminated from the semis. The first bid around had the guy on my right make a big bid of something I had a lot of. I raised him one, showed 3, and rerolled. I got challenged and it turned out the guy to my right had a 3 and 4 4s but bid a ton of 5s. I lost 4 dice I think. The next time around he had 5 of the thing he bid and I challenged him. Oh well.

Robb had woken up by this point so I'm pretty sure we went to Waffle House where I had Papa Joe's pork chops. Then we went back and played Beep Beep! and Kingsburg in open gaming.

It turned out the cleaning staff managed to puncture my air mattress this day, as it was flat as a pancake when we got back. Partially my fault since I brought too big of a mattress by accident and had to really wedge it between the beds (which were bolted to the floor so we couldn't even move them). So, I got to sleep on the floor the last two nights. I guess it didn't much matter, since I slept 15 hours this night.

Saturday

I woke up around 6pm and didn't much feel like playing anything. I think I was starting to get sick. I ended up sleeping through Ra! The Dice Game which made me a little sad, but oh well. 8 o'clock featured the Tigris and Euphrates semis and I figured I should go see if I made it with a win. Turns out some seconds advanced I think just to get the field up to 12. We played 3 4-player games with all the winners and the best second advancing to the final. Best second here is defined by number of extra treasures second needs to be given to end up winning.

My game featured a former champion, a finalist from the previous year, myself, and a guy from Oakville. We chose starting position based on seeding, which resulted in my picking 3rd after seats 1 and 3 were taken. (At WBC they play where the first two players only get 1 action instead of 2 on their first turn to try to balance starting positions more.) I decided to go 4th to get 2 actions on my first turn.

We played nice to start, with everyone making their own little kingdom and collecting a treasure. Despite picking 4th I got an area of the board with 3 treasures on it, and scooped up a second one a turn after my first. This gave me a reasonable lead I think, and I just focused on grabbing my current lowest number by playing tiles. Someone built a monument and I ninjaed my way into it, and then suddenly the game ended. The guy from Oakville connected up and grabbed the third last treasure, ending the game. My score was 5-5-5-4, which seems like a really low score. But my opponents score a 3, a 2, and a 2. Low fighting, near negligible monuments, and a very fast end to the game meant very low scores all around I guess. The guy who ended the game came second, and was 3 treasures behind me.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the much higher scoring games were also closer scoring games. They both needed 2 treasures, so my opponent came 6th overall and didn't make the final table.

Seeding for the finals was the round robin standings with the guy who came second forced to pick last. (Mental note: Play both rounds next year!) Due to how things worked out this meant I got to pick second. First choice chose 3rd, which was what I wanted. Now, do I want to go first with 1 action or last with 2? I won both my games from the 4 spot... So I chose 1st.

I made my first placement in the same area I did in my semifinals, thinking I could try to scoop two fast treasures again. The guy who went third (multi-time past champion, won both his heats) placed on one of the nearby treasures and made a bee-line for the third. Due to getting 2 actions he was going to get there the turn before I was going to, basically blowing me out of the game. (Well, the other 3 were going to get treasures and I wasn't. Maybe not blown out, but certainly disadvantaged.) I didn't have any green tiles at all, so I couldn't even hope to defend a merge. As such, I decided my only hope was to thrash around and make him regret attacking me. I used a disaster tile on his most recently played tile, preventing him from getting the contested treasure the next turn. I also edged closer so I could get it myself on my next turn unless he fought back. On his turn he fought back, edging even closer. By this point I had 5 red tiles in my hand, so on my next turn I paratrooped into his kingdom, blew up his green dude, and collected a treasure. All the while both of our opponents were actually establishing their own positions quite well.

Now, before the game I'd commented on how I really wasn't very good at the game and had never won before WBC. This may have been a mistake, as I think it's what caused him to think he could be aggressive against me for free points. Now, I don't really know the right strategies to win, but I can definitely handle small scale tactics. I think I proved this to him, as on his next turn he connected up our small joint kingdom to the 4th players kingdom, giving me a treasure and several green points in the process. He said this was a peace offering, and that seemed just fine by me. Really, what it meant was out joint kingdom was going to devour 4th player and we were going to split the points doing so. At this point my mindset switched from defend myself to score points for myself. I'm sure he wanted me to switch to score points for our team, but I'm mean and don't see any reason to throw points to someone else if I can avoid it.

Speaking of points, the player not involved in any of the attacking had built up a pretty large kingdom of his own. He had a monument immediately adjacent to his leaders, who were in a nice interleave formation. His black leader had 4 temples beside it, and all of his other leaders had 3. If we were going to break in, we were going to have to spend multiple disasters to do so. None of the 3 of us were willing to go first, though, so we let him run around uncontested.

He wasn't fighting though, so he was 'just' picking up 4 cubes a turn. We needed to have big fights on our side of the board to outscore him, or build our own monuments. My nemesis was really into the fighting and the 4th guy built a monument of his own. Unfortunately for him he messed up and wanted to build the same monument that was already on the board. As such, he had to build a monument missing a colour leader in the kingdom. I went next and dropped that leader in. I also dropped the other colour in because I had 5 red tiles in hand again, allowing me to grab monument points for a turn. No one hit me for a round, so I got them a second time as well. We were down to 3 treasures on board and a near empty bag, when the 4th guy made his move, attacking into my monument and blowing all my stuff off the board. In doing so he disconnected himself from the monument so he didn't get those points. He also connected up treasures, giving my nemesis a bonus treasure and ending the game before my turn, with an empty bag. If he doesn't make that play I should get 1 more turn and score my monument again. Also, my nemesis doesn't get an extra treasure.

Final scores? The guy left alone (Eric Freeman, he who beat me in the Vegas Showdown finals last year) - 7-7-9-10. Me? 7-7-7-8. My nemesis was 3rd but a fair ways back, and the 4th guy was last. One more cube of any colour and I win... So close!

In retrospect my opening move didn't have enough flexibility, allowing early aggression on my green leader when I had no green tiles to defend him. Maybe I should have gone 4th too, so I could see what everyone else wanted to do before I went. Tigris & Euphrates was a legacy event this year, which meant it gets multiple plaques despite not having the attendance to justify being more than a trial last year. In this case, plaques to the top 2, so I didn't come home empty handed this year. It joins my ever growing collection of second places, and this time in a game I don't claim to know a thing about.

The game went long, so I didn't get to play Slapshot. Robb, Pounder and I went back to Waffle House for an end of week celebration. Also, I had eaten Poptarts at 7pm as my only food for the day, so I needed calories. I went for the chocolate chip waffle drenched in strawberry campote. It's as bad as it sounds... But yet somehow good too. (Not like the omelette which was just bad.)

Afterwards we returned to the open gaming room and played a game of World of Warcraft: the Adventure Game. Much shorter than World of Warcraft: the Board Game, but not quite as good I don't think. Pounder then went to bed saying something about having to drive 8 hours the next day. Robb and I had no such things holding us back... One of us needed to stay awake to keep Pounder up but there were two of us this year so we could alternate naps!

Robb started playing a game of Hansa Teutonica while I went back to the room to check email and do some preliminary packing. I came down and watched the game finish, acting as gamemaster since the players were a little out of it. (Counting actions, tracking who's turn it was, praying for chicken dinner, etc...)

That game ended, but Robb and I still didn't want to sleep, so we went to the open gaming room and finally got in a game of TOBOGGANS OF DOOOOOOOOOOOM! Robb ran into a snowman and got stopped and I jumped the SHARK ATTACK! so the game did everything I wanted it to.

Around 6 we stumbled back to the room to sleep. I crashed on the floor again and was quickly sound asleep. I had a nightmare of some kind and woke with a start... I looked at the clock and saw it was almost 11am, which is checkout time. Robb and I assumed Pounder had set the alarm and I guess he hadn't...We quickly started a whirlwind tour of showering and packing and checking out. We managed to get packed and out only a little after 11, which was good enough for the hotel. Pounder had wanted to leave earlier so he wasn't going to drive as late, but it wasn't to be. Probably it was a good thing since he got a couple extra hours sleep in the bargain and he still got home around midnight I think.

WBC 'report', Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Summary to follow tomorrow...