WBC: Expected Laurel Case Studies

During this week's Agricola stream we had a bit of a side discussion going about laurels at WBC based off of my last post. Of particular concern was that I may not be properly considering the time invested in making it to the semis which dovetailed into the idea that even if we can use the butt-hour formula (which determines prize levels) to approximate available laurels that it may not hold across different tournament formats. By this I mean that maybe a single elimination tournament is just more efficient than a heats into semifinal tournament. Or, as Randy suspected, the opposite may be true. Twilight Struggle was the game that was brought up as a particular example. My gut feeling is that Twilight Struggle is an excellent game to play, if you are good at it, because it is a skill intensive game with a ton of laurels on the line. Randy thought that the amount of time you need to invest in a day long tournament (it's 5 3-hour rounds all in one day with a final afterwards) would be a huge problem.

I suspect it would probably be a problem because losing an entire day probably kills off a bunch of other tournaments. But my gut feeling is that that's only a problem for someone who plays other games and would be looking to add another and not something intrinsic to the single elimination format. So it's probably a terrible game for Randy or I to pick up in a quest for Consul, but that someone could build a Consul plan around it. But I don't want to just go on gut feelings, I want to crunch some numbers!

Another game that came up was Advanced Civ. It was brought up as being way too much time for the potential payout and my response was that it was likely true, but only because the formula caps at 6 and that Advanced Civ was probably worth about a 10 because of how many hours get invested and therefore it's a bad play because of formula inefficiency. So I wanted to check into that... Turns out I definitely have egg on my face here because it only has a 5 prize level! Having to sink 16 or 24 hours into a game is a really big investment, especially compared to Stone Age only needing 10 hours. But actually, maybe your odds of earning laurels could be a lot higher? (Keven Youells has earned laurels in it for 14 straight years...)

So I want to crunch some numbers for a few games to see how things line up with a couple assumptions. After that I'll decide if I care enough to go through all of the games or maybe if I'll learn some shortcuts that can be used to make assumptions about the rest of the games? Who knows!


Twilight Struggle

This game is run swiss style, but they play until they have 2 undefeated people and then only those two play in the finals. So it's basically single elimination when it comes to 1st or 2nd, but for 3rd-6th you can keep playing after a loss. I'm going to assume you enjoy the game enough to keep playing with a single loss but will drop out with 2 losses. (Actually, the say they use strength of schedule to determine 3rd-6th, so probably I should assume a loss in one of the first 2 rounds is a drop.) The last couple years have seen attendance swing up barely above the magical 64 number so I'm actually surprised they've been able to finish in only 6 rounds. From the recap they had only 3 undefeated players after 4 rounds last year which really doesn't make sense. That implies only 48 people were really playing but they had 70 sign up. There were also only 2 draws in the whole event, so it isn't like that was eliminating people either. So there must have been quite a few people who showed up, won a round, and dropped. So I'm going to assume there are only 48 people in the tournament even if 70 show up, which will inflate the laurel numbers a little because in reality you could be the person who loses to someone who drops.

(Alternatively it could have gone 70->35->17->8->3 if one of the draws was between undefeated people in round 3. I'm not sure which is more likely to be honest. I should hedge a little and assume more like 54 people show up.)

Here are your potential outcomes, assuming a 50% chance to win each game.

50% - drop after 3 hours (0-1)
25% - drop after 6 hours (1-1)
6.25% - drop after 12 hours (2-2)
6.25% - drop after 15 hours (3-2)
3.125% - make finals
9.375% - make top 7

Twilight Struggle has 5 prizes, so you're looking at...

50% - 3 hours for 0 laurels
25% - 6 hours for 0 laurels
6.25% - 12 hours for 0 laurels
6.25% - 15 hours for 0 laurels
1.5625% - 18 hours for 50 laurels
1.5625% - 18 hours for 30 laurels
1.3393% - 15 hours for 20 laurels1.3393% - 15 hours for 15 laurels
1.3393% - 15 hours for 10 laurels
1.3393% - 15 hours for 5 laurels
1.3393% - 15 hours for 0 laurels


For a total EV of 2.1875 laurels earned for 6.65625 hours invested. Or .32 laurels per hour.

Your odds of winning are not going to be 50%, though. This is where a little bit of art needs to seep into our science. If we're looking at someone who is actively good at the game what are there odds of winning a game? Those odds would need to get worse as you got later in the tournament as the worse players would get removed from the pool. Looking at the laurel list the top player has a massive 443 laurels with second place having 161. There are many people with a significant number of laurels which makes me think this is a very high skill game. I think I want to start our mythical great player off with a 90% chance of winning in round 1 and linearly trend that down to 60% in the finals. That changes the above numbers to:

10% - 3 hours for 0 laurels
14.4% - 6 hours for 0 laurels
4.66% - 12 hours for 0 laurels
9.69% - 15 hours for 0 laurels
16.8% - 18 hours for 50 laurels
11.2% - 18 hours for 30 laurels
6.65% - 15 hours for 20 laurels6.65% - 15 hours for 15 laurels
6.65% - 15 hours for 10 laurels
6.65% - 15 hours for 5 laurels
6.65% - 15 hours for 0 laurels

For a total EV of 15.09 laurels earned for 13.2 hours invested. Or 1.14 laurels per hour. Better, but that actually doesn't feel very good...


Advanced Civilization

This game plays two heats and then advances the top 8 players to a final. Each game is 8 hours in length and you can't leave partway through. They get around 40 players total, so if every player played in both heats you'd be looking at somewhere between 10 and 12 winners. I don't know how likely that is to happen. The recap for last year says they only had 9 people play in both heats, with 28 people in the first heat and 16 in the second heat. So they only had 6 games total, with one guy winning in both heats. Two of the winners didn't even show up for the finals, so they advanced 5 people who hadn't won a game. By the sounds of it, showing up for the finals after playing a decent game advanced you. But two years ago they had 8 games in the 2 heats with one double winner with all winners showing up and a very tight battle for closest 2nd...

To be safe, I think we need to assert that you need a win or a very close second to advance. If that isn't true, and it turns out to be a 'soft' game, then enough of us will show up to make it become true for future years. It seems like games in the heats are often 7 players, but they could be anywhere from 6 to 8.

This means that it's likely that the breakdown for this game is going to be:

1/7 - 8 hours to make finals
6/49 - 16 hours to make finals
36*2/49/8 - 16 hours to advance as a close second (assuming you play both heats and that 2 of 8 2nd placers advance)
55% - 16 hours for 0 laurels

Then once you're in the finals you need to commit another 8 hours for a 1 in 8 chance at each possible result. It's a 5 prize event, so 50-30-20-15-10-5-0-0. The math churns out to be 7.29 laurels for 18.4 hours, or .395 laurels per hour. Better than Twilight Struggle when the games are coin flips!

But Advanced Civ games are _not_ coin flips. There is definitely some randomness, but since there's a guy who laureled 14 years in a row I think it's pretty safe to say that someone who is really good at the game is going to be really good at the game. But how good is really good? Are they going to be 50% to win a heat against 6 other players? More than that? What about their finals odds?

I think I want to give the good player 50% to win a heat, 25% to come a close second. Finals odds I want to be 20-20-20-20-5-5-5-5. Advanced Civ is a game that ends at quasi-random times, especially in a final where people can be playing for best position as opposed to a heat where I wouldn't anticipate a lot of playing for 3rd or 4th.

This puts the EV at 22.2 laurels in 19.5 hours for an overall laurels per hour of 1.14. I swear I didn't cook these numbers... They really do round to the same as Twilight Struggle.


Thurn & Taxis

This game is run with 3 heats of 2 hours each. Winning a heat is good enough to advance to the quarterfinals but if you do particularly well you can earn a bye into the semis. This leads to two different possible plans... You can try to win a single heat and then sit the rest out or you can play every heat in an attempt to earn that bye. If Thurn is the game you care about you definitely want to try to earn that bye but if you're trying to maximize total laurels it likely depends what you could be doing with those time slots.

Last year had 36 people play in 3 heats, 51 people play in 2 heats, and 61 people play in a single heat. That means something like 70 games were played. I believe 4 people got byes to the semis which means 2 wins is not good enough for a bye. I don't know how to track things forward to future years, but I suspect a decent assumption would be that 3 wins is worth a bye to the semis and everyone else has to play the quarters. So my player is going to play at least two heats but only commit to playing the third heat if they have 0 or 2 wins.

1/64 - spend 6 hours to make semis (WWW)
3/64 - spend 6 hours to make quarters (WWL)
3/16 - spend 4 hours to make quarters (WL)
3/16 - spend 4 hours to make quarters (LW)
9/64 - spend 6 hours to make quarters (LLW)
27/64 - spend 6 hours to cry (LLL)

From there it's a bunch of number crunching because of the different number of hours that can be spent on each branch, but my spreadsheet spits out that you expect to earn 1.27 laurels after spending 6.77 hours, for .188 laurels per hour. Which makes T&T a worse use of time than the previous two games when every game is a coin flip! I suspect the reason for this is that no-skill semis are actually a real bad use of time and no-skill quarters are even worse. 94% of people not earning any laurels at all is pretty rough! I guess that's the downside to 150ish player fields compared to 40 player fields!

Anyway, how good can you be at T&T? This is a harder one for me to estimate because I simply don't grok the game at all. It has had repeat winners, I recognize the names of the winners as all being quite good at games, and the laurel list has some big numbers on top so there's definitely skill there. The TrueSkill list on Yucata makes me think it's more random than Stone Age, but still has a pretty high skill component. So I'm going to say our good player wins 45% of heats, 40% of QFs, 35% of SFs, and 30% of Fs.

Swapping in those win rates to my spreadsheet spits out 5.07 laurels in 8.27 hours, for .613 laurels per hour. Much worse than either of the last two games! Is that my being unfair to skill factors in the games, or is it just that the big Euro heat game is not a very good play for laurels? (Heats do get punished by the WBC butt-hour formula, for what it's worth.)


Innovation

Innovation is a super short single elimination tournament. Heats are scheduled for an hour but it's pretty likely 4 rounds will get compressed into 3 hours. I think I need to keep assuming every round is a full hour though, because sometimes slow people play... At any rate, I'll be considering it to be a mulligan + 6 rounds, with everyone who makes it to the 4th round getting laurels. (The game historically has had 6 people make it that far.) I'm also going to assert that if you win the mulligan you don't show for round 1, but if you lose it then you do.

In coinflip land, this means:

1/4 - out after 2 hours (LL)
1/4 - out after 2 hours (W-L)
1/8 - out after 3 hours (LWL)
1/8 - out after 3 hours (W-WL)
1/16 - out after 4 hours (LWWL)
3/16 - top 6

From there it actually gets a little tricky because of issues with byes/eliminators and that potential extra hour from the mulligan and round 1. Eugh. I'm going to assume the eliminator always loses, which is not true historically so maybe you should bump the numbers up a bit. With that assumption, off to the spreadsheet... (Oh, and Innovation is a trial, so it's only worth 20 laurels for 1st place.)

It pans out to earning 1.5 laurels for an investment of 2.95 hours. This means .508 laurels per hour which is our best coinflip rate so far! I suspect this is because not enough people play so first place shouldn't be worth 20 in a perfect world. So the people who do play get extra value for doing so?

How about a skill factor? Well, one person (Pounder) has made the finals in each of the last 4 years. We've played quite a few times for fun over the years and he routinely smashes me. I beat him once that I can remember (in the finals in 2015, hah!) but other than that I'm not sure I've ever beaten him. There are 7 rounds, so we need 7 win percentages. Round 1 should be the highest number since all the mulligan winners are taking that round off. I feel like I want the finals odds for our great player to be 60, so we'll use a similar scaling backwards thing that we did in Twilight Struggle? With the mulligan round being the same as round 2? So 84%-90%-84%-78%-72%-66%-60%.

Doing that gives us 7.13 laurels in 4.39 hours, or 1.63 laurels per hour. Unsurprisingly the highest coinflip game thus far is also the highest skilled game thus far. Is it fair to say Innovation is as skill intensive as Twilight Struggle?


Vegas Showdown

I want to do at least one more Euro, so let's do one that I think is more random than T&T or Stone Age. The reason I think Vegas Showdown is more random is that you have to pick a strategy pretty early on in the game but the winning strategy can't be known without knowing the order of the card deck. There are certainly still edges that good players will eke out over the course of the game, Showdown isn't on the level of Can't Stop or anything, but I think even the best players are going to win less frequently at this than at some other Euros. (It probably doesn't help that the elimination games are 5 player games.)

There are 3 heats of Vegas Showdown cutting 25 players to the semifinals. The last 2 years have each had 39 games played across the heats so there are likely to be a couple people with a win who don't make the semis. Last year had 7 double winners, leaving 25 more single winners, so 7 winners didn't advance. As such I think you definitely need to play at least 2 heats, and should probably play the third unless you already have at least a first and a second. Heats tend to be 4 player games and this is a 4 prize event.

It ends up being one heck of a spreadsheet, but it churns out 1.89 laurels in 6.21 hours or .303 laurels per hour. Which puts it ahead of Thurn, but behind all of the other games looked at thus far. It feels like games where you need to do better than win a heat to advance are bad deals.

We need to pick some skill numbers for Showdown. I think it'll be fair to pick numbers a little lower than Thurn because Showdown feels more random to me. I'm thinking a 40% chance to win a heat, 30% chance to come second in a heat, 30% chance to win a semi and finals odds of 25%-25%-20%-15%-15% for the different places.

Plugging those numbers in gives us 4.84 laurels in 6.87 hours, or .705 laurels per hour. That doesn't change where it lands relative to the other games.



I am getting very tired, and it turns out to be a fair amount of effort to do individual games. I'm more than happy to discuss methodologies if people disagree with these numbers, but I don't feel like my mind has been changed by looking at these games. Needing to do better than a win in a heat feels really bad to me now. You're getting dinged in the butt-hour formula for having heats but you don't get to save any time by taking heats off. Trials do feel good though, since they're probably heavily overvalued by being worth 20 laurels for a win.

The MVP of WBC

In the last few months my main streaming game has become Blood Bowl. There's a decent computer implementation of the board game (which I have been playing off and on for 18 years) and it turns out I'm pretty good at it and people like to watch good but not perfect play. (It gives them a chance to spot better plays and feel smart!) One of the mechanics of that game is that each team gets assigned a random MVP after a game which is worth a bunch of experience to help level your players. One of my viewers from the pre-Blood Bowl days saw a discussion about the MVP and asked if I'd ever won MVP of the World Boardgaming Championships.

Now, he was being silly, as many Twitch chat people are, but the question has festered in my mind for months. There is an MVP of sorts at WBC. It is definitely not assigned at random, though. Every event at WBC awards points to the top 6 finishers based on size of the event. Sum up all of these laurels and whoever has the biggest number is the MVP. They actually have two such awards. Caesar is awarded to the person who earns the most laurels over a 12 month period, Consul is awarded to the person who earns the most laurels at WBC. They care more about Caesar because they want to encourage people to play in events outside of WBC (a bigger deal when they actually ran a second convention) but I don't much care for play by email tournaments of wargames so for me Consul is the interesting thing.

Looking at the totals needed to be Consul in the last 10 years we see 130, 129, 100, 151, 133, 133, 108, 128, 120, and 156. The most you can get from a single game is 60 and that's for winning one of the 11 biggest events. Available laurels peter off pretty quickly, with second place in a huge event being worth 36 and winning one of the next 12 biggest events being worth 50. Something like 3rd place in a 4 class event (24-53rd biggest events) is only worth 12 laurels. So to get Consul you're looking at needing to win 3 events, or maybe 2 with some other good finishes.

I did come close once, when I earned 99 laurels in 2008. I won a 6 event, won a 3 event, came 4th in a 2 event and 6th in a 3 event. That was good for 3rd place that year (and 16th for Caesar, to show how many points could be earned outside of WBC) with the winner having won 4 different events and an extra 4th place thrown in for fun. I also came 9th in 2012 where I had 2 1sts, a 2nd, and a 6th all in 3 events. That was good for 81 points where first had 133 with 3 wins, 2 seconds, a 4th, and a 6th.

So it's not outside of the realm of possibility that I could have a really good year and come out on top, but it's not actually very likely if I don't make some sort of change. In recent years I've been spending less and less time at WBC actually playing in tournaments or expecting to do well when I do. Moving to New Brunswick meant I both didn't play any games and cared more about hanging out with friends at WBC than playing in events. So while in previous years I may have done things like randomly played a heat of Tigris & Euphrates (in which I somehow came 2nd in 2010) to boost my laurels I wouldn't have done so the last couple years. Which did mean that last year was my first year in 10 where I didn't win a single plaque. I'd averaged 46 laurels per year for my first 9 years; last year I got 2. It felt a little bad. I should be better than that.

Now, I've been playing more games in the last year and in particular I'm hyped about my ability to play a new game for the first time in a long time. The format for Star Wars Rebellion sucks, which has dampened my enthusiasm, but I still have reasonable hopes of being able to win. So maybe I can just use that as my motivation for this year, but I want to think more on trying for Consul. At least think about how to best position oneself for doing so even if I don't end up actually doing it.


There are a couple of variables at work when trying to max out opportunities for laurels. Generally speaking the prize level of an event is based on the hours spent by all players on the event. So if an event takes longer it'll earn you more laurels but cost you more time. If an event has more players it'll earn you more laurels but the competition will be stiffer. These should all even out in the wash so that where you spend your time isn't terribly important... Winning one of those 11 6-prize events is a huge boost, but they should be a large time investment with a small chance of pulling it off.

Stone Age, for example, is one of the 6-prize events. It gets around 160-200 players, has 3 heats, and runs a quarterfinal. If you wanted to put in the best chance at winning the event you're probably looking at playing at least 5 games. (Either play all 3 heats to try to earn a bye through the quarterfinals or play 2 heats to get a win and then win the quarters and semis to make the finals.) So you'd be looking at investing 10 hours to get a smallish chance at the 60 laurels.

Stone Age is actually a fairly skill intensive game I think, and one I'm decent at, so I'd probably give myself a 40% chance at winning a 4-player semi and maybe a 30% chance at winning a 4-player final. So if I asserted I could get a bye I'd be looking at a 12% chance at getting 60 laurels for 10 hours. With some smaller payouts down the line too. Probably not a bad idea.

What might make it a bad idea is when those 10 hours take place. The scheduling game at WBC is not an easy one! The first heat of Stone Age conflicts with History of the World (one of the other 6-prize events) and the single elimination tournament for Innovation (an event I've won in the past). The second heat conflicts with Empire Builder (another 6-prize event), Castles of Burgundy, and Concordia. The third heat conflicts with the single elimination tournament for Star Wars Queen's Gambit (an event I've won in the past). The elimination rounds for Stone Age conflict with all kinds of other semis and finals since they start at 9am Saturday morning.

Which leads to one revelation... Find games that have no conflicts. If the thing that matters is spending time playing games (that you can play through to the finals) then playing games with no conflicts is a good plan. So things that start at 11pm and go past midnight aren't going to have any conflicts and are basically a freeroll. Play Slapshot because it doesn't cost you time you could be spending on a higher payoff event. *sigh*

Certainly one way to gain a big edge in terms of laurels earned is to play a game where you're much better than the average player. Back when Le Havre was an event at WBC I made the finals all 6 times. Even with a smaller prize level than Stone Age, that would be a much better play for me.

The flipside to that is avoid games where you're significantly worse than the average player. My chances of winning a semifinal of Agricola are likely to be in the single digits. They use extra cards that don't ship with the game and with which I have played exactly one game. If I'm trying to earn laurels I'm probably much better off playing Seven Wonders, Love Letter, Scythe, Ra!, and Las Vegas all in the time I'd have to spend playing 3 heats of Agricola. Then the next morning I could play San Juan instead of playing the Agricola semi.

Some events are basically random. If no one is better than average then you just need to understand the game enough to be average and show up. Someone has to win Can't Stop. Why not Zoidberg?

One other thing to consider is advancement conditions. Some events advance plenty of alternates or don't require you to even win a semifinal to make the final. (Top second in a semi has advanced in plenty of lesser attended games over the years.)

Then there's also the fact that prize levels are quantized. Around 50 of the events are going to be at the 2-prize level, but some of those games are going to have significantly more player-hours than others. The ones with fewer player-hours are likely to be more efficient uses of your time than the others. They may only be worth 20 laurels, but if it only takes a couple hours and there aren't many people to compete against, well, it could be a good idea.


I think if this is something I want to do the next step is to go through all the events and estimate the hours it would take to do well, and estimate the chances of actually doing well. Use this to identify a few events to focus on and then build a schedule filling in the gaps with other events that won't have elimination rounds that conflict with the core games.

World Boardgaming Championships: Beginner Rules

I have been looking forward to this year's World Boardgaming Championships more than I have in a long time. I've been obsessed with a game that came out last year, Star Wars Rebellion, and it got voted in to be a trial. It hits all of my buttons: a two player asymmetric card driven wargame with a fantastic theme. It's long, with small numbers of dice, but it has a lot of intricate details where player skill can make a huge difference. It's like Twilight Struggle, except I get to get in on the ground floor of strategy and tournament results.

They just released the event previews which explain the tournament format in detail. They're running continuous single elimination with adjudication after 3 hours and 45 minutes. That feels too short but maybe my games with Byung take longer than average because we're evenly matched and he's a tad slow. That said, there are plenty of people at WBC who are also slow... On the other hand, I was expecting to have to play 2 and a half full days if they were running 5 hour rounds, so that at least is potentially a welcome change.

Ending in an adjudication is a scary prospect though. How good is the GM at this game? The preview lists a bunch of things he'll look at to decide who wins, and they all make sense, but which things will get the edge in a close game? The proper side to bid on can change depending on how the GM rules in his adjudications and I have no way to access that information right now. This is a little frustrating and curbs my enthusiasm a little bit.

But that's not the worst part. The game comes with a 'first game setup' to help new players ease into the game. There are a _lot_ of great strategic decisions that happen in the initial setup and new players will have no idea how to make those decisions. The game definitely needs to ship with those rules. Unfortunately the default at WBC for every round is going to be using this initial setup. If both players agree they can play the real game, but the default is to play the initial setup.

Now, I think WBC brings in a wide spectrum of players with a wide variety of skills. I think it is important for games at WBC to have demos and to try to accommodate new players. But I also think it's important that a tournament work to test the skills of the players to the utmost. It's a spectrum, for sure, in terms of how much you want to encourage new players versus how much you want to fine tune the games for the experts. I've argued against Agricola using decks that didn't come in the box, for example. I've been against banning cards in Agricola because I think there's value in having people play the game they can buy in a store and not a modded version of it. But the experts don't want to lose to someone with a wood hut extension, and they won that fight. Maybe this is the same sort of thing? But Star Wars Rebellion ships with rules for setting up the game that aren't the initial setup, so I think it's in a different spot on the spectrum. Oh, and the rules for 'First Game Setup' explicitly state 'for future games, use the "Advanced Rules" on page 18'...

I think a fair compromise would be to default the first round to the base game (that's where the people learning the game at the demo are going to be playing anyway) and make the mulligan round and all future rounds default to the advanced game. If two newer players win the first round and meet in the second round and want to base game it up, let them, but forcing experienced players to play the base game just feels awful.

How bad is the initial setup in the base game? I've never played it, so I wanted to dig it out and see...


The advanced setup randomly assigns 3 of 5 systems to the rebels, and 5 of 7 systems to the empire. The base game assigns specific systems, and those systems seem to favour the empire. The rebels don't get to start in Mon Calamari, the empire gets loyalty in both Corellia and Mustafar. It's not an ideal start for the empire, but it isn't one of the disastrous ones either.

The unit mix for each side is the same in either setup, the difference is that they're preset in the base game and you get to make decisions that shape your future plans in the advanced game. The base game spreads out the empire units, which in my experience with the advanced game is a horrible plan. You don't have enough actions to move 6 different forces around, and the rebels have enough units to pick off 1/6th of your forces in any given spot. Spreading out just gives them more targets without really giving you more options.

On the other hand, the reason the empire needs to worry is the rebels are supposed to see the initial setup and then pick any space on the board to deploy their smaller force. You get to split between the rebel base and any system, and then the rebels get to take the first action in the game so they can attack the empire in any poorly defended spot. In the base game they force the rebels to split up their forces in a truly terrible manner, and they force them to be placed away from ANY of the 6 empire spaces.

How awful is the split? Well, my experience has shown that the rebels only really care about their fighters and their speeders. They start with 2 of each and you want to save them for a crucial time because they're very useful and hard to come by. The basic setup splits them down the middle with 1 x-wing, 1 y-wing, and 1 speeder in each of the two spots. You can't realistically get them back together to make use of them without wasting an action on turn 1. And that action will only consolidate them into the rebel base, not somewhere useful where they can do anything to harass the empire!

The worst part is they start those units in one of the 3 rebel systems, so the empire now has a single place to go in order to both remove rebels builds and to destroy rebel forces. There aren't many rebel units ever (they start with only 14 bits and probably build 4-6 every 2 turns), so having 8 of them start in a vulnerable, worthless space is terrible!


Our feeling is the rebels are the better side, but everything about the base game setup screams advantage for the empire.


Maybe there's some play in the base game that I'm missing? Maybe saving the time from doing an initial setup and by restricting opening strategies is worth playing a worse game? Maybe I'll calm down in time? But right now, after looking at the base setup, I am not really very keen on playing the game. and by extension, not nearly as excited about WBC as I was earlier in the week.

Seven Springs Lodging Options

The World Boardgaming Championships are moving locations starting next year. It's moving from a self destructing hotel an hour from Philly to a ski resort an hour from Pittsburgh. From the sounds of things the ski resort is under newish ownership and is working on setting themselves up as a summer convention destination. Convenient that our convention needed a new summer destination...

One of the big concerns people have about the move is the increase in hotel cost. There were a ton of cheaper motels and the like around the old location (as in, the next building over) but a ski resort is more likely to be secluded and cut off those cheaper options as a result. On the other hand the ski resort does have a bunch of different types of rooms but actual information about what is available is sketchy at this point in time. Someone told us there were chalets with bunk beds and pretty low quality buildings but I found pictures of the chalets on the website and there were no bunk beds to be seen.

At this point I suspect the best play is to just get a room in the main hotel for the 2016 convention and then actually see what the other options are in person to make decisions for later. But for anyone unwilling to pay the main hotel price that's not really a good option. Getting to cram a ton of extra people into a chalet of some kind could be a really economical option for large groups of people... But there's a problem here in that no one has told us when we can book these things, or even how much they're going to cost! Waiting to get that info before making decisions is apt to have a faster group yoink your chalet out from under you! So it seems like a prudent thing to do would be to look at what the options are going to be and then it'd be easier to pivot and make a decision when the pricing is actually revealed. I will be listing the default web pricing when I can find it, but I have to assume the convention will have reduced rates.

2014 WBC: Recap

I came away from WBC this year feeling like I didn't really play as much stuff as I normally do. Would that feeling pan out when I look at the numbers? Here's what I played in Lancaster this year...

Hanabi - 4
Through The Ages - 4
Innovation - 5
Vegas Showdown - 1
Splendor - 1
El Grande - 1
Le Havre - 4
Agricola - 4
Can't Stop - 1
Galaxy Trucker - 1
Ra the Dice Game - 1
Liar's Dice - 1
Wits & Wagers - 1
Concordia - 2
Facts in Five - 1
Fast Flowing Forest Fellers - 1
TOBOGGANS OF DOOM! - 1

All told I played 17 different games and brought in a total of 34 plays between them all. Last year (when I was sick) was 9 for 19 so that's a pretty healthy rebound. But the year before that was 23 for 57... This year was way down from those numbers. But I don't really think I spend that much less time gaming this year. Through The Ages is in a 5 or 6 hour time slot and Le Havre and Agricola are both 3 hours. So I may have played fewer unique games and I may have started fewer play sessions but I suspect I actually spent a comparable amount of time playing games.

Open gaming was definitely down for me from previous years. Normally we'd play games after eating at Waffle House but we only did that once this time around. A lot of that was due to playing things at 9 in the morning. (I'm looking at you, Le Havre!) We didn't try out any of the games in Jay's Cafe. (Well, Concordia was there and we did play it, but we played on Sceadeau's copy, not on the loaner.) I also only played one game in the open gaming room all week.

I won my first sand plaque though I am really disappointed at the colour. It isn't pink at all. But then I'm not really sure why I thought it was pink in the first place. Maybe the colour changed at some point? Or maybe I'm just crazy. It is a pretty rare thing, and now I may need to track down a fez so I can pretend to belong to the sand club.

I also won my team game for the second year in a row. Duncan also won his team game which I suspect means we'll place in the top 10 of the team tournament. Bracket busters: I hope you went with the super long shot Dice Loving Canucks!

Galaxy Trucker was very fun despite my worries about how a real time game would be handled at WBC. And I heard decent things about crayon rails, too... Maybe next year will be the year I finally play crayon rails at WBC? If I manage to find my way there at all, anyway.

2014 WBC: Day 9

Sunday morning at WBC features a few short standalone tournaments and the semis/finals of a few events. Our first couple years we played in these tournaments and ran into issues with who would pack the car and what time we ended up back home. Waking up early, playing some games, and then driving until 1am after a week of hotel sleep is not a very good deal. We especially ran into problems playing Puerto Rico because it has both a semi and a final and (at least at the time) the GM ran his event very slowly. I'm pretty sure one year Pounder didn't get home until 2am and that was after he'd gotten up at 9am to play PR. That sucked.

This year our plan was to wake up at 9:30, get the room packed as a group and get out by 10:30 or 11. It worked pretty reasonable with the only diversion being finding a copy of Vegas Showdown in the trunk. It was Andrew's, so I ran it down to him while Robb and Pounder were packing the car. (Duncan was playing PR so I knew where they'd be.) They wanted to set up a big group picture with the 6 of us but they were a little scattered and we were in a rush so I just left.

I'd spotted a Texas Roadhouse in some town a couple hours out of Lancaster (Williamsburg?) and our plan was to eat lunch there. It was open and had a free table so we got in and had lots of meat. Yum. We got back out on the 'highway' and found ourselves somehow behind Andrew's car. We passed them and waved. They then proceeded to follow us for hours. Turns out they really wanted that group picture after all! Eventually they made a sign and passed us to get their intentions across. We pulled off at the next exit that looked like it would sell coffee and got some strange lady in a parking lot to take our picture. Turned out the coffee shop was closed because why would you keep a coffee shop advertised on the highway exit signs open beyond 3pm? We made plans while pulled over to eat at a Swiss Chalet in Niagara somewhere and took off.

There was a traffic jam on the toll highway and then a 2 hour wait at the border. Leaving early actually didn't seem to be much help since it felt like we burned a lot of our saved time just sitting in a stopped car at the border. I feel like we'd probably be better off sleeping through checkout time in order to get extra sleep and dare the Host to notice and care. And then if someone wanted to play PR or Attack Sub or Ticket to Ride they could. I guess another option would be to find a place to eat on the US side of the border and hope the border clears up while we're sitting in a restaurant instead of while we're sitting in a car.

Or maybe it won't come up anymore? WBC is moving in 2016 to a place probably 2 hours closer for us. Also with better airport access, so flying down could make more sense. And it may well turn out we won't be driving regardless since Robb has moved to Seattle and it's looking more and more like I'll end up moving to New Brunswick soon.

Swiss Chalet turned out to have a deal where you could get two meals for a small discount. Andrew and Duncan shared one. So did Robb and Robb. I like Swiss Chalet because they don't make me sick. Hurray not getting sick!

We did get back much earlier than normal even with the border delays. Part of that was undoubtedly because I was staying in Pounder's basement instead of getting dropped off in Toronto which is 'on the way, honest'.

2014 WBC: Day 8

There are people who can spend an entire week playing tournament games with strangers and then still wake up at 9 in the morning to play Diplomacy. I am not one of those people. By the end of the week I tend to be pretty out of it. All I want to do is sleep, and avoid people. Eventually I will wake up and get bored of surfing the internet and head out to play games but I'm way less eager to do it than I am earlier in the week. This time I was also prompted to leave the room by the fact the room was either frigid or smelled funky. (Not because of the people in the room but likely because of mold in the hotel room. Moving to a ski resort is almost certainly going to be a good thing for me!)

The first game I ended up playing was Concordia at 5pm. This was Duncan's team game so I wasn't going to be allowed to play against him regardless of what happened so I volunteered to be the 'owner' of a library copy of the game which forced me to sit at a different table. I ended up at a table with Matt, Steve K, and a 4th guy I didn't recognize. I've only played this game twice. Steve said he's also played twice, and the other people had never played before. One if my plays was in opening gaming earlier in the week with Robb and Sceadeau and Pounder where I had to correct at least one rule that Sceadeau's group was playing wrong. I found out in the heat that we'd played that open gaming game with a different rule wrong! (We all started with 8 coins where the last player is supposed to start with 8 and each subsequent player starts with one fewer coin.) I'd found in the open gaming game that buying one of the Minerva cards for a resource you aren't going to aggressively go after was a bad plan so I decided to avoid doing so in this game. Unfortunately no one told this to the guy on my right who aggressively bought the Minerva cards for resources I was going after and he wasn't. He kept playing them too, for a production of one resource. This feels really bad to me since you should be able to use a normal production action to get more than one resource if you have any cities on the board. I think he just got trapped into thinking he should use all his cards if he could without thinking about if he should use them.

I made some pretty good card buys early on I think though I did feel like I messed up by never building a 3rd colonist. It slowed me down a lot, but I did get to buy some points by not saving those resources? Maybe that was ok. I haven't played enough to know! Ultimately I feel like I got a little screwed by tying my wagon to Matt's and he diverged on me. We start off by building in the same two zones as each other while the other two players went and built two cities in a single zone each. This was fine as long as a given cycle of production included both of our zones but Matt ended up splitting off and never producing for me again after the first turn. This may have been a good move on his part since I did produce for him a couple times after that? On the other hand I think we finished 2nd and 4th so it probably hurt us too much to ignore producing for each other. Steve ended up in a fantastic way as he got the cloth Minerva card and built in all the cloth cities pretty quickly. I feel like that card alone was the difference since it was worth 20 points and it let him take several really good production actions in the mid game which he used to transition into card buys and more cities. The game ended with score around 130-110-103-102. I was the 110, but too far behind Steve. This event was single elimination (a very odd format for a multiplayer Euro) so I was now out.

We went out to eat at Red Robin after this round. We were a group of 7ish, but we were in a bit of a hurry and some of us left without waiting around to see how many we were for sure. Sara, Andrew, Pounder and I walked over and the restaurant was packed. We asked if they had a table for 7 and they looked at the 4 of us and looked a little confused and indicated that they didn't so we just took a table for 4 and left the other people to fend for themselves when they arrived. It was the first time Andrew had been to Red Robin and he decided to make a bit of a mockery of the place by ordering a cheeseburger and having the waitress list all the possible cheese options. Then he got them all. Red Robin burgers are pretty greasy to start with (AND SO GOOD) so bumping the cheese up to 5 times as much as normal made a real mess of things. He had to eat it with a knife and fork since the bun sure wasn't built to absorb that much grease.

9pm was Facts in Five, a trivia game of sorts with a GM who goes all in on making it entertaining. I'm never going to win this event, but it's an hour and a half of good times. I'd complained last year about how too many of the categories were US centric so this time around they dedicated an entire round to countries of the world. Canada was a correct answer three times! Hurray! And thankfully more than half of our little Canadian contingent knew Canada had a female head of government at one point... Shame on those who didn't! SHAME!

11pm was Slapshot, but I headed off to play TOBOGGANS OF DOOM instead of Slapshot. There aren't many games that are objectively worse than TOBOGGANS OF DOOM but Slapshot is definitely one of them. We decided to play teams this time since we had 5 people. Robb and Pounder ended up scoring the most points but since Sara, Duncan, and I successfully jumped the SHARK ATTACK I think we were the real winners.

Robb and Pounder then had a El Grande good players only game scheduled so I went back to Andrew's hotel with him and Sara and Duncan to play games over there. We played Fast Flowing Forest Fellers but the other three pretty much fell asleep on the board as we were playing. I smoked them, probably due to actually being awake and alert. So no more games after that as they went to bed. I wasn't tired so I went and got my book (The Heist by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg) and read in the lobby for an hour or two. This let me say goodbye to a few people who wandered through the lobby but also meant I got to read in peace (and not-frigidness) for a bit too.

2014 WBC: Day 7

Friday morning brought the finals for my team game, Le Havre. I was up against Pounder and a 3rd guy I didn't recognize. Thanks to the format for the tournament I again got to start in first seat due to my 2 wins in the heats. Pounder was the next highest seed so he was in second chair and I would again be fed by a 3rd guy who didn't have a history of success in the event. The first tile again had a wood on it and I got to start with 3 wood and the 4 cost building firm into marketplace. Unfortunately this time I was playing with someone else who really wanted to vendor the sawmill for half a wooden boat so Pounder jumped right into the marketplace. I think he'd first picked cash to buy the 6 cost building firm too, so he even got 3 things. In retrospect I now think maybe it's right to not build the marketplace, especially if someone else buys the 6 cost building firm. Maybe I should be first picking clay so I can grab a single iron and build the sawmill the hard way?

Anyway, the colliery was pretty easy to access in this game (under both the clay mound and black market) and I set up to get it. Pounder build the building on top of them, righty bought the clay mound, and I was able to buy the black market and construction firm up the colliery and the local court. Which I vendor shortly thereafter for a wooden boat of my own! Pounder is all in on operation use the colliery, and so is the 3rd guy, actually to the exclusion of taking what had always seemed like a required grab of 2 iron. Twice during the mid-game I got to take 3 iron offers... Now this does mean I was also turning down at least 2 shots at 2 iron, so it's not like people were going crazy. But I definitely had a ton of iron. I'd also managed to pull off a couple of big black market grabs (2 iron, 2 cows and 2 iron, 2 wood, 2 francs) which may have made the other players leery about taking 2 iron and giving up another black market play?

At one point I'd made 6 bricks because I had a bunch of clay and there were some good buildings available and then I made a double build of cokery and steel mill. I'm not sure how right that was. They are worth 40 points combined which is a pretty good action, but it also meant I was going to be at the end of the line for converting coal to coke and then iron to steel. The coal totals were something like 21 for Pounder, 17 for me, and 9 for the 3rd guy? (One of the special buildings let you convert food to coal and charcoal and Pounder killed his cows in order to use that building while I did not.) The iron totals were more like 2 for Pounder, 3 for 3rd guy, 6 for me so I felt like even getting to make stuff 3rd it would probably still work out ok for me. Then the town built a special building (I never once used the marketplace so I didn't know what could be coming) and the steel works hit. 15 energy and one iron for two steel. Pounder now suddenly had a really good way to get the stuff for multiple steel ships. This felt like a real problem for me and I went into the tank. I ended up deciding I had no way to handle it and just bought it so I'd at least get some entry fee action back. Pounder went to it and was able to snag the first steel ship. Then he went back for 2 more and could get the second one. I ended up getting to make my coke and decided that rather than wait around for the 3rd steel ship I'd just ship a bunch of coke and buy the second one. I did later build the 4th one as well.

As the game wound down I ended up counting up my symbols and found I had almost all of the bank related symbols and was able to buy it for a profit. I don't think I mentioned it, but I did the same thing in the semifinals with the town hall. Rarely is it ever worthwhile to pay the hugely inflated prices for those buildings but I got to do it two games in a row. Woo!

I ended up breaking 300 for the 3rd game in a row. Pounder came in at around 276 and the 3rd guy was around 200. Victory!

Pounder and I then headed to the Agricola room to play in the noon heat. We arrived and most of the players were already seated even though we were about 5 minutes early. I guess the Agricola crowd is a lot of eager beavers. Unfortunately for us the GM had underestimated how many tables he'd need and we ended up standing around with Sceadeau and it looking like we would all have to play each other despite showing up on time for the heat. This is contrast to the previous heat where they'd started too many tables and I was going to get stuck at a 5 player game until Elaine stepped up for us. This heat ended up having a few more people straggle in and they were able to start 2 tables from those of us standing around. I get the desire for efficiency but it does feel like pre-pairing people before knowing how many games will need to happen is error prone. But I guess for most people it probably worked out great?

I ended up at a table with Pounder, Steve LeWinter, and a 4th I don't remember. I didn't get the guildmaster this game so I didn't know what to do. In fact, I don't remember a single thing about this game. Except that I came 3rd and Steve won.

I could have gone to play Spyrium or Stone Age but the right choice was definitely to eat. Pounder, Sceadeau, and I walked to Red Robin and Elaine met us there with their car. I tried out their salted caramel milkshake because I love salt on everything. Except, it turns out, in a milkshake. It was not very tasty and I didn't drink very much of it at all. The burger was delicious though!

I then could have gone to play Wits & Wagers but decided to chill in the room for a bit. That got boring and I eventually wandered down and found that Pounder, Robb, Sara, and Duncan were a team for Wits & Wagers and there was a spare chair right beside them... Ok, fine, Wits & Wagers it is! I got to the game in time to share my wisdom about fish. The fastest fish in the world definitely clocked in at a massive FOUR miles per hour! We ended up losing everything at the end but that's ok because the rules are made up and the points don't matter!

Following Wits & Wagers was potentially the Agricola semifinals. Would a 1st, a 2nd, and a 3rd be good enough to advance? Turns out the answer was yes! The semifinals were going to use the WM deck mixed in with the E, I, and K decks. This was going to be a problem for me since I've never seen WM cards. Daniel showed me a few of the better ones but then I got thrown into the deep end. I started off by taking a guy that lets you get an extra building resource each time you take building resources but you have to spread them out on the board to collect later. Turning reed+stone+food into reed+stone+stone+food felt good to me, so I decided to run it. I then got passed guildmaster (that guy's good with extra stone!) and then stonecutter! I now had a plan for my game. Collect some stone and try to buy all of the stone things. The minor were passed the other way and the guy passing to me (Rob, the GM) made a comment about how he was really hooking me up with one card in his pack. I looked through the 6 cards and couldn't see anything amazing. There was a baking tray that would combo very well with my stonecutter... But there was also a WM card that looked very confusing. It was a ram that ate food each harvest and cost a sheep to play but counted as a sheep for breeding and scoring. It also let you breed sheep 4 extra times during the game. A single stable would be enough to let the ram and a sheep breed up an extra sheep for 2 food over and over again. Assuming you had a fireplace anyway. I assumed that since it was the card I didn't recognize and that the pack had a 'bomb' in it that it must be that card and took it. It turns out that was a mistake. Maybe I was getting pranked? Rob later said baking tray was the bomb card though it ended up going 4th and went unplayed. I sure wish I'd had it though since it would have been awesome with my stonecutter. *sigh* I then took a card that lets you demolish a built wooden room for 7 fences. You have to build fences before you reno but if you pull that off it feels really good. I used that to get enough space to breed sheep normally and didn't really need the bonus from the ram. I eventually played him because I'm stubborn and it was a minor food bonus (and a point) but taking him over the baking tray probably cost me the game. I also ended up with the cabinetmaker (4 wood if guildmaster is already in play) and the village well. My game plan was pretty clear. Collect lots of resources and build as many majors as I could get my grubby little hands on.

It worked out pretty well, though I misplayed at one point. I had the resources to build the pottery and I wanted to play guildmaster. If I build pottery first and then play guildmaster I get 2 clay. If I do it the other way I get 4 clay. 4 is bigger than 2! Unfortunately I played guildmaster and then Rob snap bought the pottery. I actually needed the 2 food from the pottery to feed myself that round and ended up having to take 3 food off traveling players instead. Doing it the other way safeties the contract and might have been enough in and of itself to win me the game. Certainly if I had baking tray I feel like I'd have won the game. As it is I ended up coming a pretty close 3rd, and then probably only because no one else at the table had read one of the cards played by the guy on my right. It made a single cow into a 4 point play for him and other people could have taken it as a good point action for themselves and screwed him. Considering how close the game was that was probably the difference. The guy on my right (Eric) ended up winning by a point over Rob who was a couple points ahead of me. I do feel like with more practice (and having ever seen the WM deck) I probably win that game. Oh well. There's always next year?

This game finished in time for Liar's Dice so I ran off to play at a table with Robb, Sceadeau, Pounder, Elaine, and Andy Latto. Robb smoked us and then chose more Liar's Dice over Waffle House. Mistakes! Waffle House so good!

2014 WBC: Day 6

Thursday morning brought the second heat of my team game. I knew the format this year for Le Havre had changed to preferentially play 3 player games in all rounds and I wanted to do what I could to make sure the semis and finals got as close to exactly 9 people as I could. The first heat had 6 games, which meant 6 winners. Assuming the second heat had the same attendance that would make 12 winners which sure looks like 4 player games in the semis to me. So I decided that I wanted to play to knock someone else out to limit the winners to 11. I also really like the game and haven't played it enough so I wanted to play it again anyway. It also turns out that the listed format for the event included information on seeding for the semis and finals so winning a second game would keep me from having to play other people who won 2 games in the semis and would actually also guarantee I get 1st seat in the semis unless there were at least 4 double winners. So it was a really, really good idea to play a second heat.

I showed up close to 9 after once again stopping by the Coke machine for some morning caffeine. This time the Coke bottle said I should share a Coke with Nick. I took that to be a good sign! I wander into the room where Le Havre is setting up and Mike Kaltman accosts me for coming in to play. He has apparently already convinced Daniel Eppolito to skip this heat in order to play Ra Dice in the same room. (I wonder if as assistant GM he told Daniel about the seeding plan and how advantageous it would be to win a second heat? He sure didn't tell me.) Mike tries his best to dissuade me from playing which feels like a really bad thing for someone to do. I get why he did it (he lost his first heat and needed to win this one to advance and his odds of doing so go down if Daniel or I get placed at his table) but it really rubs me the wrong way. So when I get assigned a seat and it's at Mike's table I get a grin on my face.

It ends up being a 3 player game and I get 1st chair. I buy my 4 cost building firm and pick up wood. I build the marketplace. I go to the marketplace. I get the sawmill. I sell it with something else (probably wood at the joinery, maybe a franc offer) to get a wooden boat. Pretty standard stuff. I set it up so the first or second special building to drop is the farm. This building has a 1 franc entry fee and pays out 2 wood, 2 fish, 2 grain, 1 cow, and 1 hide. This was still early enough in the game that 3 wood is a near instant grab... Would you trade a wood for 5 things? I would! And did, a couple of different times. I didn't take a grain offer or a cow offer and got set up to harvest that stuff from the farm. No one else at my table was willing to do so. I don't really understand why. Getting 4 extra things to ship (the grain and cows) for an early action is pretty good and it's a way to get some of the extra wood people desperately crave in the early game. Sure, fish suck, but when they come as an add-on it's fine. (I will also note that in Mike's recap of the event he talks about how he thinks the game is stale and boring because everyone does the same things to win and the special buildings aren't important enough. But I thought this special building was important enough and I do think going to it gave me an early edge that eventually snowballed into a bunch of points.)

The early game is also about setting up to be the person who gets to build the colliery. I did some mental math and worked out that I wasn't going to be able to build the colliery until the town built a building to unlock it, and that Mike was going to get first crack at building after the town did so. He had the resources on hand to build it, so things were looking a little bleak for me. But then he took a build action and spent a bunch of his resources... Even worse for him, he built the building that was blocking the colliery. I was now the one in line to get the colliery, and super early too. I did, and I used it a ton while the other players often skipped their chances to use it.

From that point it was pretty much all over. I got all of the things and scored all of the points. I think it was my highest score ever, well over 300. The third player at the table commented on how her 186ish point total was also her highest score ever. I feel like that's what happens when the table essentially colludes to power the colliery out fast. The early colliery action combined with the early farm meant I really wasn't taking offers at the rate you'd normally expect in a game. This let all the offers build up more for everyone which means all the scores are going to go up. The more actions the table takes to earn resources without taking an offer the higher the scores should go. The game was also super fast and was done in under 2 hours. I don't know how much of that was the table giving up from my early lead and just going through the motions? Or how much of it was us all just being naturally fast players?

I considered going to play something like Galaxy Trucker at noon but decided I'd rather tool around a bit on the internet and then go eat. I ended up bumping into Sceadeau and Elaine and baby and we headed off to Red Robin. It was here while Sceadeau was talking to the waitress about sides that I discovered that even though the steamed carrots were taken off of the menu they still exist in the restaurant and I could totally get some instead of the random fruit salad. Hurray!

4 o'clock came around and it was time for two different semifinals. I could play Le Havre, my team game, or I could play Galaxy Trucker. Had to be my team game! I hope next year these games end up scheduled at times that don't conflict with each other so I can do both. It was now that I really figured out just how important it was that I played that second heat. They used a wonky formula to break ties and I'm not sure how relevant it was? It had something to do with percentage of points at the table or something but my numbers were pretty low. I feel like beating Nick Vayn in the first heat should have been worth more than crushing people who really didn't know what they were doing like Pounder did in his heat but his tiebreaker ended up way higher than mine. I'm not sure if there would have been a better way to do it? Randomly amongst people who didn't play a second heat maybe? Really encourage everyone to play twice... Anyway, I ended up being the only double winner so I was the #1 seed and would get to be starting player in every game. Unfortunately for me Daniel E ended up as the #6 seed because he didn't play (and win) a second heat. This meant that we were, once again, matched up in the semifinals. Along with the #7 seed who was not nearly as experienced with the game as we were. As another advantage of the seeding system it was mandated that we sat in order 1-6-7 which meant random guy would be playing immediately before me. Hurray!

I started by taking 3 wood and buying the 4 cost building firm. Daniel took dollars and didn't buy anything. (I figured he was probably saving up to buy a boat.) 3rd player took a wheat. I built the marketplace on my turn. Then the 3rd guy took 3 clay on Daniel's turn. Daniel cracked a sarcastic joke about how he was playing the game. 3rd guy responded by putting the 3 clay in front of Daniel instead of back on the board. This prompted another sarcastic remark about how Daniel might want to make his own moves and then he made a big show of going into the tank to consider all the possible options. Parsing the order of the buildings for colliery plays, that sort of thing. He eventually settled on taking the 3 clay. 3rd guy took some wood and then I went to the marketplace for clay, iron, coal. Daniel immediately remarked that he'd made a mistake by taking the clay and he'd thrown away the game due to rust. 3rd guy would have nothing of it, thinking my position was not very good and saying things about how he routinely crushes people who vendor the sawmill for a boat. This seemed like a ridiculously statement for him to make, especially since he'd commented when he sat down about how he only plays 4 player games and has never played with only 3. He'd asked us for the differences and we'd honestly told him the important stuff. I guess he decided we had to be wrong since I was making a play for the important stuff and he thought I was making a mistake.

To make a long story short... I was not making a mistake. I don't know that I was guaranteed to win after turn 2 or anything but I'd definitely put my odds much higher than those of the other players. And I did end up winning by a pretty significant margin, again scoring over 300 points and winning by 50 or 60 over Daniel and 150 over the 3rd guy.

The game wasn't terribly interesting after the opening. Daniel played very slowly which is a difference from previous years but I think he was trying to find a line of play to dig himself out of the early hole he was in from my early strength. I got the colliery when Daniel parsed out that I was guaranteed to get it and gave up on trying to block my build of it. He instead went to it once and squatted for a long time. He finally moved, told the 3rd guy it was his turn to go in and squat, and that's what the 3rd guy tried to do. Unfortunately for them the next special building was the harbour watch I'd carefully preserved on top of the deck. Daniel said he considered vendoring one of his buildings solely to go to my marketplace to check for a dangerous building because I'd checked to see who got first crack to buy this one. But it wasn't me who had first crack, and I would have first crack next time, so it was entirely possible I'd done it in order to bury something away from 3rd guy. And it would have been costly to give up on his other action and lose a building for a couple goods and some information. It was probably only right solely when the top building was precisely harbour watch. But it was, and it meant the plan of squat in the colliery was thrown out the window. Even worse, 3rd guy didn't understand how powerful the building was and failed to buy it. I did. Which meant I could use my own colliery for 1 franc any time I wasn't personally the one inside. Daniel also made use of the harbour watch to kick me out of the colliery every now and then. Third guy refused to do so. Either because he didn't want to give me stuff or more likely because he simply didn't understand what was going on. He also flat our refused to build a boat. He sat around making food in order to feed himself every round instead of getting a boat. It was baffling. I even reminded him at one point that I had a modernized wharf since he had a lot of iron in front of him but he didn't care. He'd rather pay Daniel a franc to smoke 6 more fish or to slaughter more cows. I actually thought during the game that he was flat out trying to kingmake Daniel because of how much he refused to take actions that were good for him if they would give me anything. Maybe to prove Daniel wrong with his early game assertion that I'd already won? But in retrospect he might just have been _really_ bad. I can't figure out any other reason to refuse to build boats. No boats means no shipping. What are you doing to score points if you never ship? Build stuff I guess, but he wasn't building a lot of things. He was spending all his time feeding himself!

We were really close to running out of time and played the last turns in a frenzy since we all had somewhere else to be. We barely finished in time and Daniel and I took off for the Agricola room. I was a little slower since I stuck around to haggle over moving the finals of Le Havre first. We decided not to move it since I wanted to play Agricola and the only time the other guy wanted was during it.

I showed up to Agricola, pulled a card, and was again assigned to a table with Bill Crenshaw. We were the only two people at said table. I think they'd overestimated how many people were going to show up for the round and ended up starting too many tables. They started consolidating tables on a whim and then decided to just break my table of 2 down and stick us into 5 player games. Bill was uninterested in playing a 5 player game and I was more concerned with the way the tables were being chosen for getting an extra person. Any table that had started fast was getting exempt, which seemed to be rewarding faster people or people who showed up extra early to the detriment of those who'd started later. While a small debate was breaking out over this between the GM and the assistant GM a 3rd guy showed up. I'd have thought that would mean we'd play a 3 player game but now they wanted to form up 3 games of 5. But they'd been convinced it should be random amongst all tables so they were going to force some games to restart with us added in unless a 4th for our table showed up right that instant. Elaine happened to be standing around and while she didn't really want to play she decided to run it in order to make people happy. Yay Elaine!

I opened this draft with guildmaster once again, but this time I was passed charcoal burner second. I'll say straight up I was pretty bad at Agricola until very recently, but one thing I knew back in the day was that charcoal burner was very good. He's guaranteed to be 4 wood and 4 food at the very least and can often be even more than that if people upgrade to cooking hearths. It turns out Sceadeau thinks he's in the top 3 non-banned cards so getting passed him either means righty opened a ridiculous pack or he's bad. I ended up also drafting a slaughterman so I was all set up to get free food from my other players all game long. My minors opened with a house goat which I've long thought to be the best minor. More completely free food and a point to boot on a card you can use to start player early. Run it! My opening pack had a two card combo (ladder and chicken coop I think) and I made a note to take one of those on the wheel if the other was gone to keep them out of the same person's hands. We'd drafted a bunch of cards when Bill stopped the draft to ask righty about what he was doing... Righty had already drafted 5 cards and was looking at a pack containing 3 more. In a draft where you're supposed to get 7 cards. We really didn't know what had happened. Did he take two cards from one pack? Did he somehow pick up multiple packs at once and combine them weirdly? Everyone's draft ended up screwed up and we didn't have a good solution. Rather than call the GM we tried a quick fix Bill suggested which didn't work and resulted in needing another quick fix. Eventually we all got 7 cards and since we were pretty sure the first few picks were fine we were probably good to go... Halfway through the game Bill played chicken coop after already playing ladder and alarm bells went off in my head. I hadn't seen either of those cards back! How did he get both of them? Maybe Bill had cheated? Far more likely righty had taken one of them and then put it back into a different pack somehow. The whole thing was screwed up. Whatever, it wasn't that good of a combo anyway, just keep running it.

Especially since as badly as righty had screwed up the draft... He'd screwed up the play even more. At one point he tried to take 3 clay when there was a 4 clay space on the board. We let him take that back. Later he tried to plow with plow and sow available. We let him take that back. Finally he set up to reno and fenced on turn 14. Then he renoed on 13 and took wood on 14, letting me fence. He couldn't reno anymore because he was stone and he couldn't fence because I took the space. We didn't let him take that one back since it wasn't a strictly wrong choice. Wrong in retrospect once he knows I'm taking fences but if he was getting to fence later he wanted the extra wood. I'm sure he made lots of other misplays along the way which set me up, too.

I ended up winning by a fair margin, but losing fences probably knocks me to second. Since his major screwup should have still let me build fences I didn't lose any sleep over it. He was guaranteed reno+fences so I was safe to snag fences in 14 regardless.

I could have played pro golf but I decided I didn't really want to learn it what with having a final for my team game at 9am the next morning. I tried to go to bed early but Pounder ruined it for me by making me count my calories from the day and telling me I was too hungry and had to go to Waffle House at 11. Him telling me that made me hungry so I had to get out of bed and go eat more pork chops. I'm pretty sure he did it because he was also in the Le Havre finals and was trying to sabotage my sleeping plans! And not at all because I actually needed to eat...

2014 WBC: Day 5

Wednesday marks the first real full day at WBC. Robb was GMing Innovation at 9am and Pounder chose it as his team game so they were both going to be there. Having now beaten two of my old team at their team games I had to come on down and try to take Pounder out at his. It was held in a particularly cold room and made me very sad. I almost went back to the hotel room to get my warm blanket. I'm strongly considering tracking down a Snuggie for next year! It's like the Host took our complaints about no AC too far and went way overboard to screw us. Or just to screw me? Other people were complaining about the cold but it didn't seem like anyone was as bothered as I was. I miss being warm.

Anyway, Innovation at 9am. I was matched up with a nice young woman who is working on her phd. My Coke bottle for the morning told me to share it with Jess and my opponent's name was Jessica. Close enough? Maybe if it was later in the day, but at 9am off of not much sleep that Coke was mine and mine alone. Take your sharing advice elsewhere, bottle of Coke! The game itself featured me drawing Mathematics early on and running it over and over. I never flipped up another blue card until I was all the way up to the 10s. I was behind in score so I couldn't just drain the 10s, but I activated Satellites over and over until I pulled something that put out more 10s that happened to be Self Service or something that said I won. Jessica was stuck back in the 4s. I didn't see any of her cards as being capable of stealing my stuff so I'm not sure what outs she might have had. I don't play much Innovation but I have played a fair number of times online and I generally found that a full Math ramp was just game winning and it sure seemed to be this game.

Round 2 had been blanked out of my mind. I assume I lost the brain cells storing that information due to frostbite. I don't remember how we got to the end game situation but I know I ended up with both Software and Robotics in play and had to draw, meld, and activate another 10. If it was AI then I was going to lose the same way Sceadeau lost in the mulligan round. Fortunately it was The Internet instead which instantly won me the game instead of instantly losing me the game. Hurray!

I won round 3 as well, but really don't remember it. At some point Pounder got a bye (as he should since he was last year's winner) but for round 4 we were down to 5 people and now Robb wanted to switch to using an eliminator instead of using byes. Eliminators instead of byes is preferred, but you're supposed to use them the whole time if you use them at all. I voiced this concern but seemed to be the only one with a problem so off we went. I believe every eliminator used ended up losing so it was a lot like awarding byes anyway? Assuming no one got a second one? I ended up losing in the round of 5 against another competitor so it didn't much matter to me!

I am very frustrated about that loss because I was in such a dominating position and had a play to win but missed it. I got out to 5 early achievements but then my opponent's better board finally took over and he was able to start scoring a bunch of special achievements and was about to score the 6 and put things really out of reach. I had a chance to win by running coal and flipping up a card of any of 3 colours. (I had 30+ points but needed a top card that was a 6 to achieve the 6 and win. I had 3 piles with exactly 2 cards in them and the 5 pile was empty so if I pull one of those colours I win. I didn't. I then had to just draw a 6 and hope to move on somehow. The 6 was industrialization which let me start splaying my limited number of cards. I then set up to get monument by tucking 6 cards in a turn but my opponent using lighting twice the turn before I could do it. He was up to 5 achievements and was easily going to get the 8 on his turn (he had a 8 in hand) and win. I was 3 clocks from an achievement and decided to try a random 'meld a card' action in the hopes of getting them. What I should have done is activated industrialization to tuck 3 cards and hope the 3 cards I tucked had clocks on them. This at least had a chance to work out, because I'd seen a bunch of the 8s and knew some clocks were left. My blue wasn't splayed but I had metric system in play and could have easily splayed it as my second action if I'd hit both blue 8s. It turned out they were both on top of the 8 pile and it would have been the win if I'd tried it. But because I tried the other thing first it didn't work and I lost. *sigh*

I hate losing on my own mistakes so I went back to the room to cool down. I think I stayed there until 3 when I left for Agricola. I've been playing a few games online recently with Sceadeau letting me know how I'm terrible so I've been getting better but I'm certainly not good at the game. I ended up at a table with Bill Crenshaw and a couple of people I didn't recognize. I opened the draft with guildmaster, got a second pick basketmaker (which Sceadeau later told me I likely could have wheeled 6th since he's awful for anyone without a guildmaster) and then a third pick social climber. This gave me a course of action to take since as long as I set up to renovate early and build majors I'd get 6 free stone, 4 free wood, 4 free clay, and 6 free reed from 3 occupations. Felt good! Bill ended up building the basketmaker's workshop on me but I got the other two guild buildings and all the renos fairly early. I built a lot of early fences (I think I used sawhorse to get 15 out for 10 wood) and ended up with a ludicrous number of animals. Milking stool and cowherd combined to let me get 8 cows for 4 bonus points. I thought I'd done really well.

It turns out the two guys I didn't recognize were doing the opposite of well and Bill was reaping the rewards better than I was? Or maybe equivalently to me. He also ended up with lots of animals and a stone house and all the things. He won by 2 points, and I had a completely wasted action in the middle where I built the punner after Bill had used his 2-shot plow once and then conspired to block him from using it a second time. Action and a wood for no game effect makes me sad. What really makes me sad is righty had taken start player that round for no discernible reason that I could see which kept me from playing the punner as an add-on action, and prevented me from playing it before Bill plowed. In retrospect I probably should have just plowed myself? That forces Bill to wait at least a turn on plowing and gives me more time to pun it up. Oh well.

At 6pm I played a heat of Ra Dice because it was in the same room as Agricola and why not? I came tied for second at a table where the winner spent the whole game ragging on how I was going to win by pointing at my monuments and making up ludicrous numbers for how many points they were going to be worth. It left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, but whatever. It was short at least!

At 8pm I decided to give Galaxy Trucker a spin. Sceadeau and Duncan were both talking about how great the first heat had been so I went to give it a shot. I was put into a 3 player game with a copy of the game that included the first expansion. I was up against last year's 2nd place finisher all the way from Russia (Ashley) and someone I didn't recognize. We decided to play with all the things even though I'd never used some of them before and had to have them explained to me. On top of a normal game we all got a hand of 4 extra events to seed into the event deck one per round. Also before each round (but after seeding an event) we flipped up an extra card that modified the rules of the game. It sure made for extra craziness which is a good thing for Galaxy Trucker. Crazy ho!

The first round had the extra card 'if a laser or meteor doesn't do damage reroll it up to twice' which I took to mean I'd really need to defend my ship well. But it was round 1, so how much defending can you really do? There isn't really space for shields... No open connectors was my primary goal. The event I'd seeded caused two large meteors to attack each ship but instead of rolling they'd hit the two outside ends of your ship. So I knew I had to build lasers on my outside columns. I ended building a pretty mediocre ship since it had nothing battery powered at all (no shields or anything) but I'd included a bunch of batteries on the ship. Also no red cargo space. On the plus side I had lots of guns which worked out pretty well. The random guy at my table was down to 5 pieces on his ship when my event went off... It killed 3 of those! He was eventually lost in open space. Ashley hadn't built guns on the outside ends of her ship so my card blew two of her things up (including some cargo). Woo! My guns were still intact at that point so I escaped unscathed. I ended up scoring fewer points for the round than Ashley did since she had cargo space and I didn't but it was fairly close. The other guy had taken the lawyer card so he didn't lose very much. In retrospect the lawyer had died so I'm pretty sure he shouldn't have been able to use it and should have lost a lot of money.

The second round had the extra card 'you can build engines pointing forwards and backwards and after resolving open space you need to rotate your ship 180 degrees'. I seeded an event that caused people to lose 7 flight days or run a gauntlet of meteors. Before flipping a single tile both Ashley and I looked at 75% of the cards in the round to scout for open space. There was one such card... Which meant we would be flipping at least once and if the remaining 25% had an open space in it we'd die if we didn't build some forward pointing engines. This meant our ships ended up being really awkward looking since we had to have guns and engines pointing both ways. Super awkward for me since I'd seeded an event with a big meteor from the side so I wanted guns on the sides of my ship too. In retrospect I should have put a big priority on getting aliens for my ship since they provide +2 to guns or engines regardless of which way the ship is pointing. I ended up with no aliens at all but lots of guns pointing all sorts of ways. I'd included a bunch of ways to spend batteries this time (some shields and a lot of those guns were double guns) but only 4 or 5 batteries total on the ship. Lots of the cards were attack cards and my batteries were quickly drained holding them off. I kept exactly tying the enemies power and not spending the battery to kill them to conserve batteries but it was for naught. I ended up running out of batteries and then getting into trouble because I couldn't power my guns. On the plus side pushing the enemies down the line ended up hurting both other players too, so that was nice. Someone had seeded a card stealing money for aliens. Clearly they'd thought ahead more than I had! Safe due to no aliens! I think I ended up making the most points this round because I picked up a fair amount of cargo and didn't take too much damage. At one point an event resolved that let the person in the back shoot the person ahead of them and then the person in second shoot the leader. But you could name a bribe to not take the damage... I was in the middle and feel like I played it wrong since I ended up paying to keep bits that later got blown off while Ashley didn't pay my bribe for her bits that later got blown off.

The third round was going to be for all the marbles and had the extra card 'pay a dollar for each crew member at the end of the run' which didn't feel like it was going to hurt all that much but really made me want to put a priority on aliens and luxury cabins for crew instead of regular crew. My event was a battery testing thing where you had to pay a battery for every 2 pieces of your ship that could use batteries or have them blow off your ship. I knew that meant I wanted to limit my battery usage and went with just 2 shields and a shield booster along with a fair number of shields. Not having any way to make large amounts of weapon power or battery power (by skipping all the battery stuff) meant I really, really wanted aliens. I ended up with all 3 aliens and took the manager blue alien to make my other aliens better. I screwed up building my ship (we were using the Enterprise and my first placement made it so I couldn't make a circle for the saucer section) but my ship ended up being really, really good. Some cargo space, some batteries, all the aliens, all the shields, a few engines, and a TON of weapons. The round started off brutally for Ashley as the first couple cards were combat zones where she lost two categories and the other guy lost one. Ashley lost a bunch of bits from laser fire and spent a bunch of batteries. Then some pirates or something came that were going to steal cargo. I was able to exactly tie them so I was fine, but the other two couldn't fight them off and had no cargo to steal so they lost batteries. Then we did something that set me back a day to collect a reward which put Ashley back out in front. More pirates, these ones with guns, and weak enough that I killed them for bucks after they shot her up. She was flat out of batteries by now... Which meant it was prime time for my seeded card to come up. She couldn't pay for any of her things that used batteries since she had none left so all those bits exploded. Since we were using the Enterprise ship and since she'd lost a fair number of pieces already this meant a lot of the load bearing pieces left on her ship were battery related... She lost something like 7 battery related pieces and probably 5 others. Not too long after a meteor swarm took her out for good. And the other guy too, for that matter. I got to play the last 4 or 5 cards by myself.

Final scores were 81-2-(-3). The guy took lawyer twice and used him after he died so I have a feeling the scores probably should have been 81-(-3)-(-40). I don't know that I played super well, and I certainly don't think I played that much better than Ashley did, but she got pummeled early in age 3 and couldn't recover. She also built a ship that lost to my event... But maybe that's by design? If I'm aggressively taking batteries and spurning pieces that don't use batteries then it feels like the pieces left for the other players are likely to cost batteries to use without having extra batteries to go around? So maybe the disaster in the last round was a result of good play after all?

At any rate, I had fun in this game and decided I really wanted to play it again at WBC if I could. But since the semis were at the same time as my team game's semis that wasn't actually going to happen. Maybe next year will be different? I'd like to play more with all the crazy cards...

11pm was Can't Stop (Looking Fabulous) so I put on my watermelon getup (green shirt, pink tie, black pants) and went to roll dice. Andrew had been talking all week about how he was going to prove that Can't Stop is a heavy skill game by winning it. I lost in the first round. So did he. He got one turn. Someone at his table capped the 6s, 7s, and 8s all in one turn thanks to some goading from Andrew. Whatever high skill game. Whatever.

I don't think I'd eaten all day so Waffle House featured Papa Joe's pork chops, meat lovers size. It's a little surprising but Waffle House actually makes a pretty good pork chop. 3 pork chops and some hash browns is a pretty good meal.

2014 WBC: Day 4

Tuesday is a big day for WBC as a whole with the entire morning and afternoon dedicated solely to a gigantic game auction and auction store. The only tournament allowed to have any games played on Tuesday before 6pm is Through The Ages which has the final during that time. I guess they feel like losing 4 or 5 people from the auction is not a big loss? But if they ran something (ANYTHING) with open entries then that thing would get a ton of players and the auction would lose out. I guess it would also be hard to get volunteers to run the auction and auction store if it required them to not play games that were going on. So I understand the need for this quirk in the schedule but it means Tuesday is pretty much only for open gaming or for sleeping in.

No one scheduled me for any open gaming so I went with operation sleep in. I was still the first one in my room awake and I think I got up around 11am. Then I wandered around for a while, watched a bit of the TTA final, and wandered some more. We had plans to go eat steak at 3pm (10% of the bill from the Texas Roadhouse goes to the open gaming library at WBC) and ended up running into Sara and Duncan and Andrew around 2. We played a game of Splendor to kill time. I won! Then we ate steak. Yeehaa!

A full 17 events get started at 6pm but I didn't really have a strong desire to play any of them. I'd play History of the World but I had Le Havre at 9pm and History would go too long. So I ended up going to El Grande. Not so much because I like the game because I actually tend to dislike political area control games. More because Pounder and Robb really like it so it's worth inflating the attendance numbers for them. Also it's Robb's team game and I wanted a chance to take him out like I did with Jason in TTA. Note that even though I beat Jason in a heat he still came 2nd...

As it would turn out I ended up playing at Robb's table of El Grande. With one of the 'werewolf kids' (Jeff) who is suddenly not really a kid anymore and who is pretty good at the game and Eric who I recognized from Sceadeau's group of gamers. I didn't recognize the 5th guy but I think he was one of the crew of good gamers who come down from Quebec, so probably going to be a rough table? It ended up being rough for other reasons though. It turned out Eric didn't really know how to play... Worse, he kept screwing up the same rule over and over despite being reminded every turn. You can't move into or out of the king's region! He doesn't like that! It's the first rule! He even managed to try to spin the king's region on turn 8 with the GM watching. The official result was supposed to be the card owner got to bone him but the GM decided that was too harsh and just chose the region he should have chosen with a promise to update the rules for next year. No one had ever broken that rule before! Then on turn 9 he managed to do it again! He spun the king's region from the pit! This one was resolved by the rules and his 8 guys died instead of impacting the game. Eric would have lost regardless, but he should have stolen points from SOMEONE.

It was also rougher than it should have been because I can't read. At one point we needed to secretly choose a region to score. Jeff had no cubes at all on the board so I knew he was going to block someone. (If multiple people pick the same region it doesn't score.) I felt like he was going to spite Robb if he could, but Robb had 2 awesome regions and was just going to pick between them. So I decided Jeff was going to skip Robb and go after the next person in line which I figured would be me. So I didn't want to go to my best region. I also didn't really see a good blocking play so I decided to score a region I was tied in for a couple extra points. We flipped the wheels and I'd worked it all out correctly. Jeff scored my good region. What really surprised me was that Robb had come and blocked my second region. So I figured he'd probably gone another level, worked out what I worked out, and then hoped Jeff would score something of Robb's anyway...

It turns out what actually happened was Robb picked between his two regions at random and I had mixed up the words Aragon and Granada. They have a lot of the same letters, right? So my great deductive reasoning and planning got thrown out the window and I ended up taking a 50% chance to spite Robb 6 points by spiting myself and the Quebec guy 4 points each. Oops? At least Robb flipped the coin in my favour... Would have been really bad to score both his regions!

Anyway, I built up a decent point lead and then people started turning on my despite not actually being in a good board position. I didn't have as many guys in play and they were all stacked up in a couple regions. So I was scoring big points a couple of times but other people were scoring smaller points all the time. Robb was getting spited too, including one time where he set up a perfect move for Eric and Eric decided to do something completely random instead. This meant I got to go next, undo Robb's move, and score a bunch of points for myself. Woo!

El Grande is also in a time slot that's a little too short for the game. People who know what they are doing will get done in 2 hours. Eric did not know what he was doing, needed a rules refresher before we started, and played very slowly. So we were in real danger of going way over time. This meant the rest of us had to play really fast on the last couple turns which sucked for me. I threw a ton of points away near the end by taking what looked like a decent move but turned out to do nothing instead of spite drafting the scoring card and not activating it. Lots of people got 8 or 10 points to my nothing and I'm pretty sure it directly determined the winner of the game. But I couldn't take the time to think because of how delayed we were. Bah.

The game ended up with the guy from Quebec silently scoring tons of points in all the regions, getting all his guys in play, and winning pretty handily. Jeff came second. Robb and I tied for 3rd, but I had him on tiebreakers. If I don't punt the spin a wheel and if I take the time to think through my last couple turns I think I might have won, but what are you going to do? At least I finished ahead of Robb in a heat of his team game!

El Grande took more than 2 hours so I couldn't go play Lost Cities. So I screwed around for 40 minutes or so and headed to Le Havre. The format for Le Havre changed this year to be preferentially 3 player games which is great for me since I seem to do much better in 3 player games than in 4 player games. It fits my play style better I guess? Anyway, this heat had 20 people show up which resulted in 4 3-player games and 2 4-player games. This meant if you brought a copy of the game (and arrived early enough to set it up) you had a 66% chance of playing a 3er and if you didn't you had a 57% chance of playing a 3er. I guess that means you should bring a copy if you wanted to play a 3er with this number of people showing up? I didn't bring a copy, and I got unlucky, so I was at a 4 player table. With Nick Vayn who made the finals the last two years and two people who learned a lot from our game. Guy on my right went first and opened with taking money and buying the marketplace. I bought the 4 cost building firm and gave him my last dollar to take clay+iron+coal which I parlayed into the sawmill and then a wooden ship after a trip to (I think?) the joinery. Nick manipulated the board well and built the colliery so I was really worried about my ability to win this game, especially since I couldn't use it at my first opportunity after he built it since I was flat broke and didn't think it was worth trading my action and my only hammer to get 3 coal. But then rather than move out of the colliery once he got in Nick decided to just sit there and pick up offers. He seemed really happy to do it too, since it was preventing me from getting more coal and I was clearly getting thrown off 'my game' by not being able to scoop up extra coal. Nick did get some pretty good offers with something like 5 cows, 5 grain, 8 wood, 8 clay, and 2 iron being taken by him. Eventually I decided we weren't going to get to play a standard game and snapped first. I built both wharves. (Well, I think the town built one and I bought it, but I did end up with both in front of me.) I picked up some wood, turned it into charcoal, and used 8 charcoal to make 5 steel at the steel mill. I picked up an extra steel at the business office and made steel a second time for 4 more I think. I made 4 only coke in the cokery, but I was the first one to do so and it put me ahead of the curve. I think I built 2 steel ships, 2 luxury liners, and shipped a few times. It wasn't my best score ever, but it was enough to barely win the game over Nick with scores somewhere around 189-182-120-103. The 4th player was the GMs mother in law and she clearly knew what some of the key things were in the game but not really how to string them together. She vendored a bunch of stuff to buy the shipping line, which is strong. But then she'd use it with one boat to make 9 dollars. Maybe if you own it that is actually a good use of 3 cows and a coal? At least if you can leverage that bump in cash into something good... (I certainly used the first two special buildings in this game to turn 4 grain and 4 wood into 12 dollars and to turn 6 bread into 18 dollars.) She ended up using the cash to buy an iron ship and then going back to ship with 2 boats! Which she used to buy an iron ship! One more round of shipping and she was completely out of resources and was sitting on 3 iron ships, a shipping line, and nothing left. She knew to hit the marketplace early, and to pound the colliery whenever she could. But something went off the rails a little and she just ran out of stuff. She certainly seemed to be having fun though, so everything is good!

Nick complained a bit after the game about not having enough energy himself to do what he wanted to do. I told him that's because he blocked his own colliery! He needed to skip an offer take to go somewhere, ANYWHERE, to accelerate his next turn in the colliery. Especially when you're the one who owns it... If other people come in you get stuff. If they don't you get coal. The worst thing for the colliery owner is to have someone sit in it. So don't sit in it yourself! I'll pass up some very good offers just to move out of my own colliery. The corollary to that is I'll also consider taking slightly suboptimal offers to sit in someone else's colliery. I'd rather someone else squat in it, to be honest, but I'll do it myself if I have to. So I feel like Nick made plays to screw me but ended up screwing himself since I adapted to the game with less energy in it better than he did.

Pretty sure we went to Waffle House again, this time with fewer people. I had the same thing and it was good. Sceadeau's meal got boned (they threw in extra ham for funsies) and he had to send it back. They again didn't want to throw out the food so they gave it to us anyway so Robb got two meals. Hurray?