2014 WBC: Day 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012 WBC Day 5 Summary

I went to bed relatively early with the hopes of waking up in time for Race For The Galaxy at 9am and I actually managed to barely get up in time. I had to skip showering and shaving but I figured I'd have plenty of time to do that afterwards. I got down to the room and for some reason someone had turned the heat on so the room was hotter than it was outside. I feel like we got pranked and I want to issue a permanent ban to the prankster. The game itself was played 4 player with no expansions. I was probably the worst starting world (the one that can make a blue good) and my first build was the building that knocks one off the cost of future buildings. I then proceeded to explore into the 6-cost building that knocks two off the cost of future buildings and scores big points for buildings. My next building let me draw a card after building a building. It's not hard to imagine how the rest of the game went for me but I pulled off a stupidly powerful combo near the end of the game. I had the card that lets you play military planets as normal planets. I had the card that lets you play normal non-alien planets for free if you sac it. So I got to play the 7 point for 7 military planet for free! Woo! I ended up winning the game pretty handily.

10am brought the next heat of Race For The Galaxy. I decided to skip Titan-2 this year after musing about being stuck playing against David this year. This time I got the best starting world (the one that starts with a brown good) and ended up building an early building that knocks 2 off the cost of future planets. I went into a settle-produce-sell cycle and finished off the last turn with a 2x ship for 8 points. This game was a little closer but I still won pretty handily. Woo!

11am was Vegas Showdown and I ended up at the same table as the GM Eric and another Eric. Both of them had been in my semi-final game last year and made quite a game of this one. GM Eric and I were both positioned to get the Theatre with a lot of money and a fancy lounge each. It unfortunately came out on bad tempo for me such that we'd both have the same amount of money and he'd get to bid first. I had to audible into the 5-star steak house which meant he got to wait another turn to buy the theatre and as a result had enough money to also get the space age sports book. The triangles from sticking them both together were enough to give him a 2 point victory. Boo!

I ate lunch in the hotel since both Robb and Pounder were still asleep. It was a pretty dry chicken breast on a bun. I threw the bun out and ate it with a knife, fork, and salt. 

2pm had Ingenious which I may have played years ago on BSW but never in person. I got Sceadeau to teach me the game beforehand and gave it a spin. The guy to my left ended up winning which probably means I didn't do a good enough job blocking him but I did finish a very close 2nd (it came down to 2nd number).

I took some time off to play some Theatrhythm, took in an Automobile demo, and almost fell asleep in the lobby. Eventually Robb showed up and we headed to the 5pm heat of Lost Cities which had a stupidly large turnout. I got matched up with a nice teenage girl who commented on my lack of a Canadian accent. Eh? The game itself was a massacre mostly because I drew all the big numbers each round so she frequently got stuck with a negative score after starting an early expedition.

6pm was Titan the Arena in the same room as Lost Cities. I was stuck playing with a set that didn't have the right number of pieces for most of the players. On the plus side I happened to have my Queen's Gambit game with me so instead of colours most of us played with miniatures. I was the Gungans! It got quite a number of comments from people passing by our table and I think it made the game more fun to be using weird pieces. I managed to pull out not-last which is a bit of a miracle for me. I don't know how much seating order matters but the same guy got to keep making kill decisions (a little girl was to his right) and he ended up winning. Apparently I had no chance of winning because I'd put my bets on good monsters and people wanted to kill off their special abilities before I could use them. Doh.

7pm was Ra Dice. My first couple rolls had multiple monuments so I dove head-first into a monument strategy. At one point I screwed up trying to get an extra monument (the age was about to end and there was a pharaoh in my roll for the 5 point tie) and I ended up rolling a complete blank and wasted two dice. I ended up losing by 1 point so those extra 5 points would have been clutch. I actually lost this game to the same Dominic from Quebec who beat me at real Ra the other day. Small world!

8pm brought Queen's Gambit. I ended up paired against Evan who beat me out of the round of 16 way back in 2007. He was a punk teenager then and now is a pretty built University age man. My opening hand had 3 Anakin cards and my wheel of fortune card so I decided to try for an Anakin rush plan. I got all the way to the end and cleared out all his starfighter cards but couldn't quite get the last space done. By the time I got to that point it didn't really matter since Darth Maul was free and all my guards were dead. He just had to kill one of Purple Queen, Red Queen, or Captain P for the win. He did run out of Maul cards with Red Queen at 1 and had to finish her off with a droid so if I'd gotten one luckier with Anakin I might have been able to win. At any rate the game was fun because we didn't take it seriously at all. I haven't won a game of Queen's Gambit since I won the event but I still show up to play it because it's a blast. (Unlike, say, Puerto Rico...)

11pm has Can't Stop. I was 3rd with 1st and 2nd chair playing a stopping early strategy. Implementing the same plan as the people who get more turns that you is a bad idea so I went a different way... Better lucky than good! I ended up falling one space from the top of the 6 on a 6-7-8 rush. Next turn I had a 6-7-10 rush and capped the 7. I was four off the 6 and considered going for it but decided to stop. Of course the 6 was gone by the time it got back to me. As were the 3, 8, 11, and 12. 6 numbers closed out and I only had 1 of them. The two guys on my right again went slow which again meant I had to risk it all. I came close going up 2-4-10 but fell just shy of the 4. The 12 year old kid on my left ended up winning.

Off to Waffle House for Papa Joe's pork chops. Then a lot of sleep.

WBC 2011 - Day 5

I had finals at both 9am and 11pm on Friday so I tried to go to bed 'early'. I ended up lying in the dark not sleeping for a couple hours and kept waking up to check my watch since I was afraid the alarm wouldn't be set properly again. Sleeping through Race for the Galaxy was unfortunate but not disastrous. Sleeping through the finals of my team game would have been just about the worst thing that could happen at a board game tournament. (So not actually that bad in the grand scheme of things but I still didn't want it to happen.) I ended up sleeping for around 6 hours, getting up and showering in plenty of time, and was able to grab a blueberry muffin and a can of Coke for breakfast.

I ended up getting 3rd seat in the 4 player Le Havre final. Dan was first and grabbed 2 wood. I don't even remember what I got but I did buy the 4 cost building firm and got into the loan business. Dan built the marketplace and I got into it first and set up the tavern as the card to drop. I later left and Dan went in himself and made noise about denying the card on top. (He didn't have any grain so it seemed likely he'd want to bury it.) I ended up going back to the marketplace and flipping them back again before it dropped and I believe I then used the tavern to turn wood and grain into a boat, then again for the shipping line, a colliery, and a steel mill. (One of those may have been from shipping.)

I ended up in a bad tempo position when it came to getting the steel boats. I didn't have the steel on the start of turn 15 when I was going first and by the time I did have my steel together players 1 and 2 built their steel ships the moment they hit the board. I've never really looked into the timing of these before and I think I definitely will need to borrow a set from someone and really look into things like this. If the summary card I found online is correct it looks like there are 4 steel ships and the first people to get cracks at them are the people in seats 1, then 3, then 1 again, then 2.

Not getting a steel ship meant I ended up needing to eat some food on the last few turns and wasn't able to ship as many things as I normally would.

I also badly misplayed one action. I set up to build the dock (I needed to get a second brick) by going to the hardware store. (I also needed a 3rd iron so I could make steel for a luxury liner.) Then the town immediately built it on me with nothing weird going on in between. I just totally missed that it was going to get built. Typically we'd been pointing out what was going to get built soon and move it a little ahead of the rest of the buildings but it didn't happen with the dock. It's no excuse since I should have been paying attention to it myself but unfortunate that I let myself get lulled into a false sense of security. If I'd not gone to the hardware store I could have gone to the iron building instead which would have both gotten me more steel to ship for points and would have blocked the building from Dan who went there right afterwards.

The game ended up being both very close and not close at all. Dan won by 40 points but the other 3 of us were within 6 of each other. Something like 191-151-148-145. I was the 148 and surely would have had 2nd place if I hadn't messed up the one turn with the dock. I did manage to win my 4 player heat but the bottom line is I'm just not good enough at 4 player games in general to beat Dan. At least I can take some satisfaction from winning our 3 player semi and will need to study up on the 4 player game for next year.



At 12 I had nothing really to do so I wandered by the Samarkand demo which had just started. It seems like a simple and fast game with some strategy involved so I'd like to give it a try at some point.


The third heat of Agricola was at 1 but Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation was at 2. I skipped LotR for Agricola last year so I figured I should do the opposite this year. Especially since last year 1 win wasn't even enough to advance to the semis. They changed the format this year with a new GM and switched to 5 player games meaning both that there were fewer winners in each heat and more spots (25 vs 16) in the semis. I hung out around the sign up booth anyway since I knew some people who were going to play and tried to help organize a picket line. A bunch of people had 1 win, see, and there were currently 18 unique winners thus far. If you get 7 or fewer tables in the 3rd heat they all advance for sure to the semis. More tables and (assuming unique new winners) you get some old winners getting knocked out. So if you had a win you could either play and hope to not lose or you could sit out and create fewer tables. (At first the GM said a first and a last was better than just a first so Sceadeau wanted to sign up and then not really play and just accumulate negative points with scripted actions so the GM made first and last the same as first.) The picket line ended up falling through and everyone standing around played anyway.

I wandered off to the vendor booth, bought a copy of Innovation, and went to the room. The internet was down again so I read some Game of Thrones and then went to Lord of the Rings.


The format for Lord of the Rings was 4 rounds of swiss with a cut to top 8. We had 30ish people so 3-1 was almost certainly going to advance. The way each round worked was you played 2 games against the same person. Once as evil, once as good. If the same person wins both games they win the round. If you split then the tiebreaker is number of characters you had alive when you won. If you're still tied then you draw the round. This is an interesting format but it seemed to often turn the second game of a match into a race to slaughter people if you won the first game. It also added some silly situations like attacking with Frodo and playing noble sacrifice guaranteeing that you lose the game but possibly killing one extra unit!

One thing I noticed is how young the room was. Most of the players were teenagers and many were girls. I don't think I was the oldest one there but I was definitely way up there. (A similar thing happens in Queen's Gambit too, but mostly it's teenage boys there.)

My first round was against a teenage boy who didn't really seem to have a grasp on strategy. I lost a couple coin flips (possibly by out-thinking myself) and ended up winning as dark with only 2 units left. This meant I had to either win as light side or kill 8 of his dudes in a loss. It ended up really not mattering since he threw out his big numbers willy-nilly and lost his orcs early. Gandalf was then able to obliterate pretty much all of his units. I got to a point where I had a guaranteed win against anyone I play against and almost went into auto-pilot but then I realized he didn't have to have the warg back in Mordor. It might have been the witch king who could attack sideways which would have ended me. I played it slowly and it turned out the warg was way out in the middle of nowhere and I would have lost with my reckless play.

Round two was against another teenage boy who liked to talk about how bad he was and how I was going to beat him for sure. Complimenting my plays and such. Not sure if he was just nervous or if I'm somehow intimidating or if he was playing mindgames with me. He certainly thought I was playing mindgames with him. Whenever he'd reveal a piece I'd say hello to it (because I'm weird, it's just what I do) "Hi Pippin!" and it seemed to bother him somehow. At one point I had a coin flip (eye for his noble sacrifice vs bigger number) in a fight of 'the Gimster' vs Shelob and I wanted to make sure he knew I knew it was a coinflip so I made a comment asking if the Gimster was ready to blow himself up. It caused him to go into this weird double-think feedback loop as he tried to figure out why I said that. We both ended up playing numbers. He then decided that letting me talk before he made a play was a bad idea because clearly I was in his head so he started just playing a card immediately as soon as the pieces were revealed.

At one point we both played our magic cards and I had eye of sauron in my used pile. I said I was magicking for eye to counter his magic and he said that didn't work. I found in the rules where it said evil picks first and he said that just meant my card was worse and that he gets to pick a number after I choose eye. This is totally not how we play it and I said I was pretty sure it worked my way but we could ask the GM if he wanted. He decided not to press the issue and let me counter his magic. I ended up winning this match.

Round 3 I was playing against an older guy. (It seemed like the undefeated people tended to be the older ones.) I started as the good side and lost a couple coin-flips. I kept assuming he was going to try to eye my noble sacrifice so I kept playing numbers and losing. It became pretty clear that I wasn't going to win so I switched to murder mode with the intention of just killing as many of his guys as I could. I used all my guys and then attacked with Frodo with the intention of noble sacrificing him. I again thought he'd eye it though, so I played a number and so did he. In retrospect he probably didn't even think I would do that (maybe I should have made a comment!) and was just guaranteeing the win by killing Frodo with a big number. I ended up running Saruman down one side killing off both Merry and Legolas which pretty much meant I was going to win with more dudes than he did if I won at all. I managed to kill Gandalf with the orcs after losing only 1 dude (several retreats to set it up though) and the rest was smooth sailing.

Round 4 I was up against Rob Flowers and the games weren't even close. He won as the good guys with a pretty robust number (5 maybe?) so I knew I had my work cut out for me. I made a couple risky plays trying to kill units without losing any (not using Boromir up front, playing a 5 in the pippin vs shelob fight, etc...) and they all backfired. He ended up winning with a 7 in the second game.

It turned out they had 2 people at 4-0 and 7 at 3-1. The tiebreaker was strength of schedule and I was a little worried since every single one of my opponents lost all of their games after they played me. On the plus side I did start 3-0 so I had played one of the 4-0s. I ended up 5th overall and was matched against another teenage boy. He seemed to have a decent grasp of strategy but had already conceded victory in the event. I guess Nick Henning is a god among elves, at least according to my opponent, and he was just hoping to lose to him in the finals. (Other Nick brought a hand-made game with him, Lord of the Rings: Shotfrontation, where all the pieces are shot glasses and you drink when you kill a unit.)

At any rate, the actual game. I started as evil and got into a guaranteed win situation. I had Frodo contained and had set up my discard to have my 6 and my eye. I still had my magic card so I was guaranteed to win any given fight and I had one with Frodo coming up. I made the attack, we both played magic, and he said I couldn't eye his magic. This time he did appeal to the GM and somehow the GM ruled in his favour. I had to pick my card first but if I picked eye he could just pick a number and beat me. (I looked up the FAQ on BGG today and they agree with the way we play, for the record. I wonder if I should find the GM's email address and ask about it again?) I shrugged and picked my 6 instead. I still had Frodo contained and would win without losing any other pieces. Unless he picked noble sacrifice here, which he should have, to get the extra tiebreaker point. He took retreat and died a few moves later.

Coming back the other way I ended up in trade-off mode and got down to 2 pieces left on my side: Frodo and Legolas. They were both one space out of the mountains. My opponent had 4 pieces left but most were on my side of the river. If I could get Frodo through I would probably win. But he still had the flying nazgul so it was going to be a guess. I decided I probably couldn't come up with a right solution and maybe he could read me so I did it completely random. He guessed right and jumped Frodo.

So we were tied. In the swiss that would have just been a draw. In the finals we would have played another two games. In the quarters? Coin-flip to advance. He called heads and heads it was.

I tried to get the internet to work for a while, failed, and went to find Robb and/or Pounder. Robb had just lost in the Agricola semis and Pounder was in the process of losing in the Race semis. We went for food (Red Robin I think) and then had an hour to burn before I had to play in the Vegas Showdown finals. We went to Jay's Cafe to try out Lancaster which I had read the rules for the night before.

Lancaster was an interesting and short game. Guaranteed to play over exactly 5 turns and with a few different paths to score points. We cheated in two major ways so what we played wasn't really the actual game but all 3 of us had different plans and came within a couple points of each other so maybe it is a good game. We meant to play it again later but they packed it up before we got around to it.

The Vegas Showdown was a 5 player game with Rob Flowers and some other guys I didn't really recognize. One of them commented at the start about how he didn't really know how to play and didn't know how he possibly beat Randy Buehler (last year's champion) in his semi-final match. He seemed more concerned about not getting to play the colour red than actually playing the game. He kept trying to give red points each time he scored. At one point he put a big bid on a high roller's room and someone pointed out to him that he couldn't place it without a table games. He then undid the bid, but two turns later got into a huge bidding war with Rob Flowers that ended with the other guy paying a lot for a building he couldn't place. He tried to place it and had to be reminded again that he needed a table games.

As far as how my game went I saw that early on both restaurant cards had come out and decided to not build any of them. I started with a slot machine and then a fancy lounge for 21. A few turns later I got a second fancy lounge for 12. I built a normal lounge and then the next turn publicity was banned so I renovated to put my fancy lounges in play. At this point I was up to 3 slot machines (1 from a slot surplus) and had to figure out how I was going to put them on the board. I ended up going to 3 slots along the wall in yellow, lounge from blue door, fancy lounge from lounge, fancy lounge from fancy lounge. I bought a second lounge to fill some yellow space and come closer to connecting. And then I got a 3rd fancy lounge for 18. This let me connect, get 5 triangle points, come a sportsbook/theatre from filling yellow, and have low competition for the theatre. Unfortunately the other fancy lounge was owned by righty so I was going to have to position myself to outbid him. I didn't spend a single dollar for the rest of the game to make sure that would happen. He actually had the lead in cash for a while but kept trying to buy other things. (On one frustrating turn he actually bid 15 on a lounge only to have the 'not-red' guy bust in with 18. I think it connected him so it wasn't actually bad but it was frustrating for my theatre plan.)

Meanwhile the guy across from me was set up to buy the 5-star steakhouse. Instead he did some math and bought a nightclub for 33. (I was actually going to use that and a renovate as a backup plan to fill my yellow but the 33 was out of nowhere.) Then everyone else spent money and he was able to get the steakhouse for like 21. And the dragon room for 25.

Tile after tile was flipped and still no theatre. Not-red guy got to pull strings once and picked pretty much at a random. He didn't pick big but also didn't pick the lowest pile either. I got to pull strings once and got a big one with no theatre. We were down to no flats, no smalls, and 2 biggies. People bought exactly 2 buildings so we were possibly going to get another turn...

First card? Score diamonds and add a biggy. Diamonds were split 5-4-0-0-0. The tile was the space age sportsbook. Next card? Slot builders on strike and game end.

Lounges did pay out points near the end of the game (I got 10 points) but never paid cash. I went through the draw pile afterwards and 5 of the 8 cards were biggies. So I had a 5/14 chance to build the theatre on the last turn. Doing so would have been worth 12 for the theatre itself, 5 for filling yellow, and 2 more triangle points. I'd lose 5 points worth of money for a net gain of 14. The guy with all the good stuff wouldn't have had a good play and I think would have had to publicity for 1 point. We both would have earned a point in money from an extra turn of income, I think. End result? He beat me by 12. So getting an extra turn would have probably been the win. Having the theatre actually come out early certainly would have been.

Sometimes the tiles just conspire against you I guess. Having the lounges eventually pay off points was good enough for second place though.

It looked like I'd missed Werewolf Prom while playing the finals. Pounder and Robb were already asleep when I got back to the room (Settlers in the morning!) so even if I thought sneaking in late was a good idea I couldn't have really found my suit in the dark anyway. Oh well, maybe next year there'll actually be a solid date listed for it so I can plan ahead.

WBC 2011 - Day 4

I qualified for two important (to me) semi-finals on Thursday which were taking place at 6 and 9 in the evening. I decided that since I stayed up all night playing werewolf and that I wanted to be well rested for those games that I would just sleep in. As such, I ended up getting up around 3. I had a Dipps bar and was whisked off to play Hansa Teutonica in open gaming with Robb, Pounder, and Dan. I still don't understand when people are going to displace me and when they aren't and got pounded. People keep saying it's the best game (and maybe the expansion map makes it even better) but I'm still not sold on the game.

That wrapped up but with not enough time to really eat. I went back to the room, had some cookies and another Dipps bar and read a little Game of Thrones since the internet was down.

6 o'clock brought the Le Havre semi-finals. After waiting a bit to see if people would show it was determined that there were 10 people available and they needed to come up with a format. They should probably have one predetermined for each possible outcome but they ended up deciding that they really wanted a 4 player final so they ran a 4 player game, two 3 player games, and would advance the second place finisher who had the highest percentage of first place's score. Given the constraints of needing to use 10 people, needing to cut to 4, and refusing to play 5 player games this seemed like a pretty good format. Personally I probably would have excluded an alternate and played 3 games and a 3 player final but this would be my choice given the constraints and was certainly the one I lobbied for.

Seating was randomly determined and I ended up at a table with Dan and other Dan, two of last years 4 finalists. I made that final as well and the 4th guy didn't even play in the event so I was expecting a tough game and was really hoping for a close second place from our table.

The building piles were really weird with one pile containing, in order, hardware store/black market/colliery/wharf. So for 4 clay, 4 wood, and 2 dollars you could start off with a colliery in play which is really absurd. Other Dan ended up doing just that while Dan collected wood and dollars and built the marketplace. I bought the 4 cost building firm, used the marketplace, and collected some loans. I built a couple more buildings for a clay each and was trying to position myself to have 14 bucks so I could buy a boat. Dan made use of the first special building which lets you convert a fish into 2 dollars up to 7 times. He bought 2 boats with this building and a lot of fish, including a trip to my fishery. I ended up realizing that selling all my buildings for a boat was not going to be a good plan this game after I got a good wood offer. There was a wharf in play and since both Dan and other Dan had spent wood on buildings neither of them could build a wooden boat. Other Dan had the colliery which opened up a wharf for purchase so I just built it and then made 2 wooden boats the old fashioned way. I was the only one with any interest in the marketplace it seemed and I set up the second building to come out when I was going to go first. It was the building you can go to for a coal, a coke, and an iron. I vendored my wharf so that I could buy it and ended up using it exclusively for my coke needs all game. So despite the very early colliery, I didn't use it at all.

Eventually I grabbed a 3 iron offer and used my new building to buy an iron boat. This gave me 3 boats and a coke, so I went to the shipping line to get rid of some cows. (Dan was in the first 2 cow position of the game and let me have them by doing something else.) I had a lot of cows and sent 7 of them off for 21 points which I used to buy the steel mill. Other Dan had made a bunch of bricks and I think he was eyeing the steel mill and the cokery which were one on top of the other so my straight up buying one of them seemed to throw him off a little. I then grabbed another coke, baked some bread, and shipped it off for another 21 points and bought the cokery. Both of those buildings got used a fair amount over the course of the game. I think Dan made coke 3 times. I never actually made any coke myself, instead getting coke from my special building and using the coal from that to bake bread or build boats.

Ultimately I used my steel mill twice in order to build a steel ship and then the second luxury liner. The second time I made steel I think I really hurt other Dan. He was thinking about making steel and then decided to go get some more iron first. I went in immediately afterwards, spent 2 coke for 3 steel, and then proceeded to sit there and take a 20 wood offer. (I needed energy and being able to delay his plans certainly helped.) I was considering making that wood into charcoal but ended up just using it straight up to ship two more times, each with 11 cows/bread. (I took a late 8 grain offer and baked a second time.)

When all was said and done the scores were something like 259, 254, 239. I had the win, Dan was second, and other Dan was third. The other two games apparently weren't close so both Dan and I advance to the finals tomorrow morning at 9am. Maybe sleeping in until 3pm wasn't such a great idea after all...


Our game was a little slow but not so slow that it took more than 3 hours. My next event was in the same room: the Vegas Showdown semifinals. They ended up with 22 winners so they advanced three alternates and played a full five 5-player games. I'm not a huge fan of 5 player Vegas Showdown but it's better than Le Havre or Puerto Rico at least.

My table featured the GM Eric (who beat me in the Vegas Showdown finals 2 years ago and in the Tigris & Euphrates final last year), Carey (who kept coming second in the Notre Dame finals when they were an event), and 2 other guys who seemed pretty competent.

The first turn was interesting: no publicity allowed. I was in first seat and opened with a bid of 12 on slots. It followed with 12 on slots, Eric bids 15 on my slots, 12 on lounge, renovate, restaurant. I hate restaurants so much but I figured if I was paying 15 for something it might as well be the thing that actually costs 15. To make that play a little better the opening 4 buildings were buffet, fancy lounge, fancy restaurant, fancy slots. With everyone spending so much on normal slots (the high bidding continued in future turns) I figured having the only restaurant would mean I could get two of those relatively cheap. I ended up getting the buffet for 12 and was pretty happy with my money situation since I could get the fancy restaurant pretty cheap next turn too. And then the cards were sale and restaurant builders on strike. This knocked it off the board and meant I couldn't get it after all which made me sad.

The cards smiled on me after that, though. Lounges paid out points the turn after I bought a lounge. We got points for connections the turn after I connected. Points for dollars only came out once, and it came out when only one person was able to buy points.

The theatre was the first of the B big buildings to come out (and the second overall after the dragon room). Eric and other Eric had the only two fancy lounges that had come out thus far. They immediately started saving up money. I couldn't see how I could really win without getting it (Carey had bought the dragon room for 25 on me and it looked like the game was going to end before steakhouse was even an option) so I saved up too. When we could finally afford it I had 46, Eric had 50, and other Eric had less than Eric. I bid it up as high as I could and Eric overbid me and got it for 47. I settled for a lounge which connected me.

The next turn I picked up a fancy restaurant as 2 other buildings were purchased. Eric was up and the first card was pull strings. The pile sizes were 1 small, 4 medium, 2 big. I'm not sure his reasoning exactly but he did some math, figured he wasn't going to win if the game ended, and I think if it kept going, and grabbed a big one. The next card was also pull strings. He thought some more and grabbed the last big. The third card was a big and the game ended. A little unfortunate since I was positioned to buy and place the space age sports book soon (I had 39 bucks at the time) but it turned out to be very fortunate for me after all as I was in a tie for first and my 9 extra bucks won the tiebreaker against 5 extra bucks.

I was now qualified for finals occuring at 9am and 11pm the next day so I decided I should try to go to sleep early. A quick detour to the Waffle House gave me my first meal of the day and I went to bed at 1.

WBC 2010 Day 6 Summary

Woke up very early (9am) to get to my Vegas Showdown heat. I think my team game must be cursed, as I once again finished third. This game featured someone buying the theatre on me when I had the only fancy lounge. He tried to build it for 12 points and we had to stop him and show the pre-req chart. He told me after the game if he'd known the rule he wouldn't have bought it and I would have won handily. At any rate, a second fancy lounge was sold on the same turn, leaving 2 left. They both came up at the same time when he didn't have 33 bucks on hand. I bought one for 33 and needed someone else to spite the other one. No one stepped forward (second place paid 42 for a space-age sports book instead) and he managed to buy the other one the next turn for 25. (Even though it was clear he'd pay all his money for it no one was willing to place a high bid just to bump him up.) There was a small but non-zero chance the game would end the turn he bought the fancy lounge (4 flips at 2-2-2 piles, so we needed 3 of a kind with some string pulling shenanigans) but it wasn't to be and he got the theatre placed and won as a result. I suspect the guy who finished second would have won if he'd spited the second fancy lounge.

And as a side note, early on I paid 12 for a high rollers room with 2 table games to go. The guy who bought the first table games paid a combined 46 (I think) for the next two table games to ensure I could never place it.

I ended up not filling either hotel or casino at game end but still came 3rd thanks to a large number of triangles.

Having spited me for choosing a team game the fates decided to smile on me for the rest of the day. I proceeded to play Tigris and Euphrates, Ra!, Race For The Galaxy, Le Havre, and Agricola and won them all. (Well, 2 games of Race of which I won one which is good enough to qualify for the playoffs.)

Tigris featured a game against 2 former champions and someone who made the finals against one of them. I've played Tigris maybe 5 times ever and have no real idea of strategy besides just getting colours I don't have. I ended up camping 3 different monuments for most of the game and scoring 8-9-9-11.

Tigris I at least have a rough idea of how to win... Ra! I have no concept. I don't know that I'd ever won a game of Ra! before in person in my life. I played the aggressive Ra!ing strategy and people kept buying the terrible lots I put up. I only failed in the Can't Stop phase once over the three epochs!

More details to come later, maybe. I also remembered I played Lost Cities against Eric Brossius on Wednesday and lost a pretty close and fun match.

WBC 2008 -> Day 1

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

Events started at 6pm, so our goal was to get to Lancaster around 4:30-5 so we'd have time to check into the hotel before games started. It's an 8 hour trip, and we like to eat so factor in an hour for lunch and you're looking at needing to leave (or at least wake up) around 7am. It's the worst part of the week, I assure you. At any rate, I get roused to run into the first snag of the week... My deodorant remained in Toronto. So we got to take a detour via the 24 hr Sobeys (everything else was closed since they're run by sane people) on the way out.

I brought my laptop with me, and had downloaded a spreadsheet from the WBC website with the schedule so I could make plans I wouldn't follow on the ride down. Pounder had printed out directions from either Google Maps or MapQuest and I was in charge of keeping us from getting lost. (A sketchy proposition at best, but without a license it's not like I could do anything else!) We hadn't even reached the border when we were forced to deviate from the plan as a gas tanker had fallen over or something on the highway and they closed it down. Pounder has a map of southern Ontario in his car and we decided to try to find another route instead of waiting for the highway to reopen.

I came up with a crazy plan that involved driving through sidestreets in a residential area, but it ended up working and we eventually got to the border much faster than if we'd waited on the highway listlessly. I'd like to see a GPS do that! (Machines will never replace me! MWAHAHA!)

Anyway, we stopped at Arby's for lunch on the other side of the border and then continued on for an uneventful rest of the trip. We arrived at the hotel with plenty of time to spare before events started and tried to get in touch with Robb to no avail. Pounder and I both have the cheapest cell phones we could find, and they just don't work in the US it seems. Pounder managed to get his to send text messages, but we couldn't receive them back, so while we told Robb we were around we didn't get his message back about where he was. Stupid technology.

I said earlier that events started at 6pm, but that's not entirely accurate. You see, there is a type of event called a demo which is an hour long period of time where the GM (game master?) teaches the rules for a game. Frequently these take place immediately before a round for the game, so you can go to the demo and then play a game. Demos can be a great way to learn a game and get a chance to try something new, but not all events have them.

Events are run with one of three classifications. 'A' events are for experienced players, they don't run a demo and they expect everyone who shows up to know the rules. Very few events are run as 'A' events in my experience, it seems to mostly be used for the 6+ hour wargames. 'B' events allow beginners. These events have to run a demo and the players expect newbies to exist in some of their opening round games. 'C' events are coached, these are events where they're willing to teach the game during the round itself. These events tend to be for games with simpler rulesets, things like Liar's Dice and Can't Stop. It's trivial to get into a game in a 'C' event and there's always a demo at some point for the 'B' events, so all events which are 'B' or 'C' are free to be learned at the event if you're into playing new games.

At any rate, 5 games had demos at 5pm but we had no interest in attending any of them. (I own 2 of the games and the other 3 were wargames.) 6pm brought 8 more demos and 23 actual events with a pretty good mix of war games and euros. Now, on the ride down I'd identified that I really wanted to play something at 10pm, so I couldn't try to get into a long game at 6 or I'd miss it. Both Robb and Pounder wanted to play El Grande and I find the game interesting so I went along.

El Grande - 6pm - This is an interesting game where you want to control territory on specific scoring rounds, and you bid for turn order within each round with benefits for going early or late in a round. It also has a ton of player interaction, with one player a round basically getting to choose someone to screw over. My notes for this game simply say that I was winning until I was 'randomly spited' but I'll be damned if I remember what that means. I expect it hurt the person who did it since it wouldn't have been random otherwise!

The round took 2 hours, which brought us to 8pm. There were 2 demos at 8 (both of which I've played) and 5 events (none of which I'd played) so I didn't really have a lot of options. One of the games was class 'C' and listed to only take an hour, so it seemed like something to do.

Medici - 8pm - This round left a really bad taste in my mouth. It's a class 'C' game, so I should be able to learn the game as we go. The GM imposed a strict time limit of an hour, though, and the game probably takes 50 minutes if everyone knows what they're doing. There were also 3 of us who didn't know how to play and they assigned all 3 of us to the same table. (And the 3 of us knew each other, and generally at WBC they try to split friends up so you play events with newer people.) The quick rules explanation also failed to explain the distribution of the deck so we didn't know what a certain card did when it came up.

At any rate, we obviously didn't finish in time (Robb + rules explanation + new game = long time) but we also pretended not to hear the end of the round and kept playing. Or rather, I wasn't sure what was going on and the guy who gave us our demo said to keep playing. In retrospect I'm pretty sure we cheated to do so. I ended up coming 2nd, and probably would have won if we'd ended on time. (Not by design, but because I'd finished the round and other players hadn't, so they got to score more points than they legitimately should have had if the round had had enough time.)

The game itself was actually reasonably interesting. It didn't have many rules, and it had some good decisions to be made. The problem is it's really not long enough to justify a 2 hour round, but it's too long for a 'C' 1 hour round. If it was an 'A' event, fine. A 'B' event with a demo before the first round probably would have worked too, but there's no way it should have been a 'C' event with such a harsh time limit as there's no way to realistically expect someone to get taught the game and play it in less than an hour. This coming year it will also use 1 hour rounds but it will be a class 'B' event which really is enough to make me content. Robb will still have to make an effort to play quickly, though. 8P

Because we cheated and went over time to score we couldn't get into anything at 9. Fortunately we wanted to play Vegas Showdown at 10 so that wasn't much of a problem!

Vegas Showdown - 10pm - I play games with some pretty good gamers at home and my record in this game against them was something like 24-1 going into WBC so I had high hopes about being able to win this event. They were running two preliminary heats but both of them conflicted with other things I wanted to do. I decided my plan was to play in one of the heats of Vegas and then one of the other game and just win both of them. Alas...

I was winning until the last turn of the game, when the random event awarded 3 points for every restaurant, giving one of my opponents a 9 point gain on me. He ended up barely winning, but he played a good game so I'm not too bitter. Due to my previous plan of only playing one round my dreams of becoming Vegas Showdown world champion looked to be dashed. Oh well!

After the round ended we decided to hit up the demo tables and try out a new game...

Ming Dynasty - After midnight - This is a game where you draft face-up cards which you will then play to move around a map with a bunch of movement restrictions and goals to achieve. Because you're drafting face-up you can plot out what your opponents are going to do. Because one of the rules prevents you from moving into a square occupied by an opponent you can block them. Because of the very weird movement it's quite possible to blow someone out if you manage to block them. As such, the feeling we came away from the game was that it would take too long to play once we knew what we were doing. You'd need to make sure you were drafting enough cards to come up with alternate routes in case someone else blocked you accidentally or on purpose. I didn't like it very much and I think even if people weren't trying to screw you eventually someone would which would make the game not great for casual gamers either.

Titan starts in the morning and Robb hadn't slept in a day and a half so we went to bed at the sane hour of 2. We had to be at Titan for 10 and wanted to eat/shower first, so I think we started waking up at 8:15... Ugh.