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!
Showing posts with label Wits and Wagers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wits and Wagers. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
WBC 2011 - Day 6
Saturday is a day at WBC that feels like it should be busy. A bunch of people can only come for the weekend so you'd think a lot of events would hold off until then to make sure they got those people. They do schedule a couple of the more mainstream events for Saturday but for the most part things have wound down by the weekend. Settlers of Catan is probably the widest known euro and it starts at 9am Saturday morning. At 5pm the Carcassonne event starts. There are a handful of heats for other games too but for the most part there's a bunch of semi-finals and finals plus Settlers and Carcassonne. I didn't make any semis or finals on Saturday and have no interest in playing Settlers or Carcassonne, so I slept in. I got like 12 hours sleep and then spent the next hour reading Game of Thrones in a warm bath.
Eventually Robb came back to the room having scrubbed out at Settlers and we headed to the open gaming room to play something with Dan and Pounder. We were hoping to find a copy of Lancaster but they didn't have one. Instead we settled on having Robb teach us Glen More. After playing for about half an hour we came to the realization that we weren't actually playing Glen More since we had the rules all wrong and gave up.
We went to eat, I think at Olive and Jasmine Asian Bistro, and then came back for party games. 7 oclock brought Wits & Wagers which we once again lost miserably. The normal Wits & Wagers guys weren't there so someone else filled in as GM but it wasn't the same. How much money did they just spend on pizza for us? The correct answer this year was $0.
Facts in Five was in the same room at 9 so we stuck around for that. We had 40 minutes to kill so we played most of a game of Innovation. Pretty sure we played most of a game before Wits & Wagers, too. At any rate Facts in Five was fun with some categories I simply had no chance at all of getting an answer. I did manage to prove that I am Canadian and got a clean sweep of the NHL team category.
Slapshot was up next but we decided we didn't really want to play it this year. Instead I went and got my D&D dice and we played a game of TOBOGGANS OF DOOOOOOOOOOOM! Robb didn't run into a snow man this year but I did manage to jump the SHARK ATTACK! and win so it was a good game.
Waffle House followed. I had a waffle and a side order of hash browns. Rocked out with the juke-box again, too. On the way back from Waffle House Pounder's car started acting weird. It was raining but the wipers were going very slowly. The lights on the panels were all flickering and the headlights were dim. We made it back to the hotel but halfway up the big hill into the driveway the car just turned off and wouldn't start. Robb and I got out and tried to push but we're weaklings and the car was on a steep hill.
Robb went into the hotel and came back shortly with a small army of people. And by people I mean teenagers who are weaker than I am. And one tall dude. Fortunately it turns out that when you get 7 weak people to push a car up a hill it actually works! We were trying to figure out a way to get the car into a parking spot when a random older man came out to put a board game in the back seat of his car. We asked him to move his car (he was beside an open spot so we'd get 2 spots to work with) and he obliged. Then we pushed/coasted the car down into the spots.
Robb dismissed his army (thanks guys!) and Pounder went in to call AAA. When the AAA guy came he paged us to the front desk and there was no question who he was when we walked up as there was a guy in a florescent yellow shirt standing there. He used a jump box thing to start the car and after hitting things with his crowbar a bunch declared it was probably the alternator that was dead and not the battery. He told us about a nearby garage that was open on Sunday and pointed out we'd probably be leaving for Canada on Monday. When Pounder and I have to work. Bah.
Pounder then checked with the hotel to see if we could extend the room a night but it turns out all of the 2 beds + balcony + no smoking rooms were somehow sold out for the next day. We went back to the room to look stuff up on the internet but the internet wasn't working. Annoying when I just wanted to play Galaxy Legion but pretty terrible when we're trying to find a way to get a car fixed so we can leave on the right day. We ended up using the phone book to call the recommended place to find out their hours and Pounder set the alarm to get up in time to call them when they opened to see what they could do.
Eventually Robb came back to the room having scrubbed out at Settlers and we headed to the open gaming room to play something with Dan and Pounder. We were hoping to find a copy of Lancaster but they didn't have one. Instead we settled on having Robb teach us Glen More. After playing for about half an hour we came to the realization that we weren't actually playing Glen More since we had the rules all wrong and gave up.
We went to eat, I think at Olive and Jasmine Asian Bistro, and then came back for party games. 7 oclock brought Wits & Wagers which we once again lost miserably. The normal Wits & Wagers guys weren't there so someone else filled in as GM but it wasn't the same. How much money did they just spend on pizza for us? The correct answer this year was $0.
Facts in Five was in the same room at 9 so we stuck around for that. We had 40 minutes to kill so we played most of a game of Innovation. Pretty sure we played most of a game before Wits & Wagers, too. At any rate Facts in Five was fun with some categories I simply had no chance at all of getting an answer. I did manage to prove that I am Canadian and got a clean sweep of the NHL team category.
Slapshot was up next but we decided we didn't really want to play it this year. Instead I went and got my D&D dice and we played a game of TOBOGGANS OF DOOOOOOOOOOOM! Robb didn't run into a snow man this year but I did manage to jump the SHARK ATTACK! and win so it was a good game.
Waffle House followed. I had a waffle and a side order of hash browns. Rocked out with the juke-box again, too. On the way back from Waffle House Pounder's car started acting weird. It was raining but the wipers were going very slowly. The lights on the panels were all flickering and the headlights were dim. We made it back to the hotel but halfway up the big hill into the driveway the car just turned off and wouldn't start. Robb and I got out and tried to push but we're weaklings and the car was on a steep hill.
Robb went into the hotel and came back shortly with a small army of people. And by people I mean teenagers who are weaker than I am. And one tall dude. Fortunately it turns out that when you get 7 weak people to push a car up a hill it actually works! We were trying to figure out a way to get the car into a parking spot when a random older man came out to put a board game in the back seat of his car. We asked him to move his car (he was beside an open spot so we'd get 2 spots to work with) and he obliged. Then we pushed/coasted the car down into the spots.
Robb dismissed his army (thanks guys!) and Pounder went in to call AAA. When the AAA guy came he paged us to the front desk and there was no question who he was when we walked up as there was a guy in a florescent yellow shirt standing there. He used a jump box thing to start the car and after hitting things with his crowbar a bunch declared it was probably the alternator that was dead and not the battery. He told us about a nearby garage that was open on Sunday and pointed out we'd probably be leaving for Canada on Monday. When Pounder and I have to work. Bah.
Pounder then checked with the hotel to see if we could extend the room a night but it turns out all of the 2 beds + balcony + no smoking rooms were somehow sold out for the next day. We went back to the room to look stuff up on the internet but the internet wasn't working. Annoying when I just wanted to play Galaxy Legion but pretty terrible when we're trying to find a way to get a car fixed so we can leave on the right day. We ended up using the phone book to call the recommended place to find out their hours and Pounder set the alarm to get up in time to call them when they opened to see what they could do.
Monday, July 20, 2009
WBC 2008 -> Day 4
Prelude
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap
So many nights in a row staying up late to play games is eventually going to catch up with you. The Queen's Gambit 'finals' were starting at noon and I wanted to play in that and nothing earlier really caught my eye so I decided to just sleep in until 11ish so I could shower and then Gambit it up.
Queen's Gambit - round of 16 - 12pm - I didn't make the cut to top 16 because for some reason the GM had me down in the 'doesn't own the game' pile so my win in my first round played wasn't good enough. Apparently several other people were in the wrong piles as well and after a little complaining the GM redid the standings. He was not happy about having to do this, especially since he obviously thought some of us were cheating. (Robb could have used my game in the first round, for example, and 'owned' a copy of the game.) I actually own a copy of the game and was the only one to use it so I didn't feel too bad about standing up for myself and getting into the top 16. I don't really agree with that rule as a tiebreaker but since it exists it should be used. (Especially since I’d bought a copy of the game partially because of the rule and certainly had only played one preliminary round because it was going to be good enough because of the rule.)
At any rate, they finally get things sorted out and I’m into the top 16. The really sad thing is we didn’t even use my copy of the game this round because they had enough copies already set up during the kerfuffle. I was matched up against Rob Flowers, the El Grande GM who is an all around nice guy. I bid 1 droid to play as the dark side and won the bidding. Rob took to the tactic of running everyone upstairs with window ledge movement and cleared out all my stuff up top. He eventually managed to get about 12 guards and Captain Panaka into the throne room, with Panaka in the door so I’d have to kill him to get at the guards. Both queens also made it up to the top floor. Unfortunately for Rob I won the Jedi battle handily and Darth Maul came a knocking. Maul eventually killed both queens and Panaka, opening the door for my destroyer droids to finally pour into the throne room and mop up the rest of the guards.
Queen’s Gambit – quarter-finals – 2pm – This time I played Dark Side for no cost, I think. This was an incredible close game, where I lost the Jedi battle but managed to kill an awful lot of guards in the early game. The game was winding down and my opponent got into a situation where he had Obi Wan, the fake queen, and a few guards alive. Obi Wan was running back and forth killing what few droids I was managing to get close to his guards, but due to card stacking (playing no cards one turn and then 4 the next to move droids) I was slowly able to kill them off. On the final turn of the game he only had 1 guard left and positioned Obi Wan in the wrong hex. One spot over and I wouldn’t have had a shot, but as it was if I’d played a move 8 spaces card I could just get into range for a shot. It was my next card, I ran up and took my 50% shot at the win and hit. Woo! It turns out his next card had the potential to win him the game. He rolled it out ‘just to see’ and would have won. (Of course, butterflies in Africa would have changed the roll so that proves nothing! Nothing I say!)
Queen’s Gambit – semi-finals – 4pm – For a change of pace I think I bid 1 guard to play light side this game. Why? I don’t know! At any rate, I managed to barely win the Jedi battle and ended up killing every single droid in the palace. I clogged up the entrance so my opponent could no longer move more droids in, so my palace setup was a guaranteed win. As soon as Anakin made it to the end of the track I would win and there was nothing my opponent could do to stop it. My opponent recognized this and conceded. A spectator (Larry Lingle, a previous champion) pointed out that he shouldn’t concede because I might just miss on every Anakin card I would play. My opponent couldn’t win, but maybe I’d get fantastically unlucky and I couldn’t win either.
Now, to make sure games end in 2 hours they put in a rule such that the dark side wins if time runs out. (Supposedly the light side is the better side, and also they’re the ones who can just stall out by not playing Anakin cards to try to get an advantage elsewhere.) It’s not the greatest rule but you need some way to make games end fast so I can’t really complain. The issue here is that if we keep playing and I whiff on every Anakin my opponent would win. Larry was strongly advocating my opponent take actions that couldn’t change the game position to waste time, and called over a GM to force my opponent to unconcede. The GM came over and ruled that the game could keep going if my opponent wanted it to. He seemed unsure but Larry kept badgering and the GM wasn’t trying to dissuade him so he gave in. We set the board back up and continued the game.
I should point out that when he conceded the first time there was over an hour left in the round and I basically just needed to win 4 coin flips in that hour. Of course in the time it took to decide to keep playing we’d wasted 20 minutes. It quickly became apparent, however, that my opponent had no interest in stalling out and was just trying to appease Larry. (My opponent was like 14 years old and didn’t look too happy to have adults and authority figures telling him he was wrong to have conceded. I honestly just stayed out of it for the most part because I knew I would win if we kept playing, no matter what Larry had to say about potentially getting unlucky.) He took no actions on his turn, basically just letting me cycle through my deck playing Anakin cards as fast as humanly possible. I won 5 minutes later.
It turns out my opponent had beaten Larry in the previous round, and therefore if he’d advanced Larry would have had a higher finish. Robb also pointed out when I told him what happened that this was Larry’s team game so he had a lot to gain by changing the outcome of my match. At the time I was a little annoyed that a random spectator was getting involved in the match but I was even more annoyed when I found out he had something to gain. (Especially since this wasn’t even something that could conceivably have mattered.) If there was 5 minutes left in the round, sure, advocate we keep playing. But we had more than half the round and I had a hard lock on the board and my opponent knew it. Oh well.
As a result of this incident I decided to never play light side again. You see, I play fast. I will sometimes pause to consider a rough choice but I tend to get a pretty good idea of the right plan and can follow it very quickly. It doesn’t matter how fast I play as light side if I get paired against a slow dark side opponent, or if they intentionally stall. Initially I didn’t think this would be a problem but since a former champion and the GM both strongly advocated intentionally stalling I decided I had no choice in the matter. I refuse to put myself in a situation where I need to call the GM over because my opponent is playing slow, and I refuse to lose as a result of not calling one. Therefore I will play dark side (despite it being the worst side) and I will play fast and the games will end. The only way a game won’t end if I play dark side is if my opponent is incredibly slow, and in that case I don’t mind that he loses.
Queen’s Gambit – finals – 6pm – I bid 1 to play dark side and win the bidding. (The fact I have to pay to play the weaker side is aggravating, but thems the breaks.) This game featured both of us rolling abysmally in the Jedi battle. Fortunately for me my droids in the palace were on complete fire. They should hit 50% of the time but were running over 90%. Eventually I generated enough bonus cards to win the Jedi battle and Darth Maul came out and cleaned out the palace. I’m pretty sure with my droids doing as much early as they did that I would have won easily even if I’d lost the Jedi battle. The fact I won it made it a foregone conclusion. It was probably my most lopsided match of the whole event. (Don’t get me wrong, my opponent played very well, the dice just came out strongly in my favour.)
Wits & Wagers – 8pm – This is a fun team trivia game run as a seminar so there’s no real prizes. It’s just an excuse to spend a couple hours having good times with good people. The trivia answers are also solely numbers, which I appreciate. Last year I teamed with Pounder, Robb, Lin, Rich Atwater (the Titan 2 GM) and some guy Lin met. This year Robb, Pounder and I resumed our coalition with Rich and two random dudes joined in. (There is a limited number of teams who can play but no limit to the number of people on each team!) Sorry I don’t remember your names, random dudes, but it was fun having you on our team!
We mostly picked out answers democratically, which unfortunately means that when the two random guys knew the answer and the rest of us thought we did but didn’t we ended up submitting the wrong answer. We had great success last year at this event, this year not so much. We got completely blown out, but we had fun and that’s all that matters!
Steak – 10pm – You may notice I very rarely mention food in this report. Sometimes I managed to sneak away between rounds and grab a hot dog or something, but for the most part games > food and we all know it. Pounder tries to make Robb and I eat when he can for our own good, but we all too often ignore him. At any rate, I’d played 8 straight hours of Queen’s Gambit and followed it up with the trivia game so I was starved. Someone had told Robb about a good actual restaurant that was likely still open downtown, so off we went. I had a nice steak; it was much needed and much appreciated. Of course the downside to this is Liar’s Dice started at 11 and there was no way we’d be back in time to play in it. I’ve always stated that I _will_ be the Liar’s Dice World Champion, but it seemed it would have to wait another year.
Liar’s Dice – 11:10pm – It turns out when hundreds of people show up to play an event it’s tricky to get them all going right at the start time. Games were in progress when we popped in to see what was up but the GM waved us over and said we could still join. The only downside is we’d have to play at the same table as each other, which is ok because clearly I’m better than Robb and Pounder at Liar’s Dice. Unfortunately it turns out the GM is better than all three of us and took us (and two other people) down rather quickly. Doh!
Imperial – 11:40pm – It’s not healthy to go to sleep so soon after eating (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) so we had to find something else to do before going to bed. Pounder expressed interest in learning Imperial and while I’d read the rules and had watched a game on BSW I’d never played so I was in for learning as well. This turned out to be a game in the ‘Rondel’ series. In this game there are 6 European countries vying for military and industrial power. The twist is the players don’t play the countries; instead they play investors who are backing the countries. Whoever has invested the most money in a country controls the actions they take on the country’s turn. Those actions can make the country better or make the investor’s in the country money. (This often worsens the country’s position.) It was an interesting game, but Pounder ended up having his initial countries bought up by Robb and me so he only got to make choices once every six turns. He turned out to have a winning strategy though, as he won by a fair margin. Having only played once I can’t say if that was an aberration or not, but any game where the winning strategy isn’t fun has problems.
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap
So many nights in a row staying up late to play games is eventually going to catch up with you. The Queen's Gambit 'finals' were starting at noon and I wanted to play in that and nothing earlier really caught my eye so I decided to just sleep in until 11ish so I could shower and then Gambit it up.
Queen's Gambit - round of 16 - 12pm - I didn't make the cut to top 16 because for some reason the GM had me down in the 'doesn't own the game' pile so my win in my first round played wasn't good enough. Apparently several other people were in the wrong piles as well and after a little complaining the GM redid the standings. He was not happy about having to do this, especially since he obviously thought some of us were cheating. (Robb could have used my game in the first round, for example, and 'owned' a copy of the game.) I actually own a copy of the game and was the only one to use it so I didn't feel too bad about standing up for myself and getting into the top 16. I don't really agree with that rule as a tiebreaker but since it exists it should be used. (Especially since I’d bought a copy of the game partially because of the rule and certainly had only played one preliminary round because it was going to be good enough because of the rule.)
At any rate, they finally get things sorted out and I’m into the top 16. The really sad thing is we didn’t even use my copy of the game this round because they had enough copies already set up during the kerfuffle. I was matched up against Rob Flowers, the El Grande GM who is an all around nice guy. I bid 1 droid to play as the dark side and won the bidding. Rob took to the tactic of running everyone upstairs with window ledge movement and cleared out all my stuff up top. He eventually managed to get about 12 guards and Captain Panaka into the throne room, with Panaka in the door so I’d have to kill him to get at the guards. Both queens also made it up to the top floor. Unfortunately for Rob I won the Jedi battle handily and Darth Maul came a knocking. Maul eventually killed both queens and Panaka, opening the door for my destroyer droids to finally pour into the throne room and mop up the rest of the guards.
Queen’s Gambit – quarter-finals – 2pm – This time I played Dark Side for no cost, I think. This was an incredible close game, where I lost the Jedi battle but managed to kill an awful lot of guards in the early game. The game was winding down and my opponent got into a situation where he had Obi Wan, the fake queen, and a few guards alive. Obi Wan was running back and forth killing what few droids I was managing to get close to his guards, but due to card stacking (playing no cards one turn and then 4 the next to move droids) I was slowly able to kill them off. On the final turn of the game he only had 1 guard left and positioned Obi Wan in the wrong hex. One spot over and I wouldn’t have had a shot, but as it was if I’d played a move 8 spaces card I could just get into range for a shot. It was my next card, I ran up and took my 50% shot at the win and hit. Woo! It turns out his next card had the potential to win him the game. He rolled it out ‘just to see’ and would have won. (Of course, butterflies in Africa would have changed the roll so that proves nothing! Nothing I say!)
Queen’s Gambit – semi-finals – 4pm – For a change of pace I think I bid 1 guard to play light side this game. Why? I don’t know! At any rate, I managed to barely win the Jedi battle and ended up killing every single droid in the palace. I clogged up the entrance so my opponent could no longer move more droids in, so my palace setup was a guaranteed win. As soon as Anakin made it to the end of the track I would win and there was nothing my opponent could do to stop it. My opponent recognized this and conceded. A spectator (Larry Lingle, a previous champion) pointed out that he shouldn’t concede because I might just miss on every Anakin card I would play. My opponent couldn’t win, but maybe I’d get fantastically unlucky and I couldn’t win either.
Now, to make sure games end in 2 hours they put in a rule such that the dark side wins if time runs out. (Supposedly the light side is the better side, and also they’re the ones who can just stall out by not playing Anakin cards to try to get an advantage elsewhere.) It’s not the greatest rule but you need some way to make games end fast so I can’t really complain. The issue here is that if we keep playing and I whiff on every Anakin my opponent would win. Larry was strongly advocating my opponent take actions that couldn’t change the game position to waste time, and called over a GM to force my opponent to unconcede. The GM came over and ruled that the game could keep going if my opponent wanted it to. He seemed unsure but Larry kept badgering and the GM wasn’t trying to dissuade him so he gave in. We set the board back up and continued the game.
I should point out that when he conceded the first time there was over an hour left in the round and I basically just needed to win 4 coin flips in that hour. Of course in the time it took to decide to keep playing we’d wasted 20 minutes. It quickly became apparent, however, that my opponent had no interest in stalling out and was just trying to appease Larry. (My opponent was like 14 years old and didn’t look too happy to have adults and authority figures telling him he was wrong to have conceded. I honestly just stayed out of it for the most part because I knew I would win if we kept playing, no matter what Larry had to say about potentially getting unlucky.) He took no actions on his turn, basically just letting me cycle through my deck playing Anakin cards as fast as humanly possible. I won 5 minutes later.
It turns out my opponent had beaten Larry in the previous round, and therefore if he’d advanced Larry would have had a higher finish. Robb also pointed out when I told him what happened that this was Larry’s team game so he had a lot to gain by changing the outcome of my match. At the time I was a little annoyed that a random spectator was getting involved in the match but I was even more annoyed when I found out he had something to gain. (Especially since this wasn’t even something that could conceivably have mattered.) If there was 5 minutes left in the round, sure, advocate we keep playing. But we had more than half the round and I had a hard lock on the board and my opponent knew it. Oh well.
As a result of this incident I decided to never play light side again. You see, I play fast. I will sometimes pause to consider a rough choice but I tend to get a pretty good idea of the right plan and can follow it very quickly. It doesn’t matter how fast I play as light side if I get paired against a slow dark side opponent, or if they intentionally stall. Initially I didn’t think this would be a problem but since a former champion and the GM both strongly advocated intentionally stalling I decided I had no choice in the matter. I refuse to put myself in a situation where I need to call the GM over because my opponent is playing slow, and I refuse to lose as a result of not calling one. Therefore I will play dark side (despite it being the worst side) and I will play fast and the games will end. The only way a game won’t end if I play dark side is if my opponent is incredibly slow, and in that case I don’t mind that he loses.
Queen’s Gambit – finals – 6pm – I bid 1 to play dark side and win the bidding. (The fact I have to pay to play the weaker side is aggravating, but thems the breaks.) This game featured both of us rolling abysmally in the Jedi battle. Fortunately for me my droids in the palace were on complete fire. They should hit 50% of the time but were running over 90%. Eventually I generated enough bonus cards to win the Jedi battle and Darth Maul came out and cleaned out the palace. I’m pretty sure with my droids doing as much early as they did that I would have won easily even if I’d lost the Jedi battle. The fact I won it made it a foregone conclusion. It was probably my most lopsided match of the whole event. (Don’t get me wrong, my opponent played very well, the dice just came out strongly in my favour.)
Wits & Wagers – 8pm – This is a fun team trivia game run as a seminar so there’s no real prizes. It’s just an excuse to spend a couple hours having good times with good people. The trivia answers are also solely numbers, which I appreciate. Last year I teamed with Pounder, Robb, Lin, Rich Atwater (the Titan 2 GM) and some guy Lin met. This year Robb, Pounder and I resumed our coalition with Rich and two random dudes joined in. (There is a limited number of teams who can play but no limit to the number of people on each team!) Sorry I don’t remember your names, random dudes, but it was fun having you on our team!
We mostly picked out answers democratically, which unfortunately means that when the two random guys knew the answer and the rest of us thought we did but didn’t we ended up submitting the wrong answer. We had great success last year at this event, this year not so much. We got completely blown out, but we had fun and that’s all that matters!
Steak – 10pm – You may notice I very rarely mention food in this report. Sometimes I managed to sneak away between rounds and grab a hot dog or something, but for the most part games > food and we all know it. Pounder tries to make Robb and I eat when he can for our own good, but we all too often ignore him. At any rate, I’d played 8 straight hours of Queen’s Gambit and followed it up with the trivia game so I was starved. Someone had told Robb about a good actual restaurant that was likely still open downtown, so off we went. I had a nice steak; it was much needed and much appreciated. Of course the downside to this is Liar’s Dice started at 11 and there was no way we’d be back in time to play in it. I’ve always stated that I _will_ be the Liar’s Dice World Champion, but it seemed it would have to wait another year.
Liar’s Dice – 11:10pm – It turns out when hundreds of people show up to play an event it’s tricky to get them all going right at the start time. Games were in progress when we popped in to see what was up but the GM waved us over and said we could still join. The only downside is we’d have to play at the same table as each other, which is ok because clearly I’m better than Robb and Pounder at Liar’s Dice. Unfortunately it turns out the GM is better than all three of us and took us (and two other people) down rather quickly. Doh!
Imperial – 11:40pm – It’s not healthy to go to sleep so soon after eating (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) so we had to find something else to do before going to bed. Pounder expressed interest in learning Imperial and while I’d read the rules and had watched a game on BSW I’d never played so I was in for learning as well. This turned out to be a game in the ‘Rondel’ series. In this game there are 6 European countries vying for military and industrial power. The twist is the players don’t play the countries; instead they play investors who are backing the countries. Whoever has invested the most money in a country controls the actions they take on the country’s turn. Those actions can make the country better or make the investor’s in the country money. (This often worsens the country’s position.) It was an interesting game, but Pounder ended up having his initial countries bought up by Robb and me so he only got to make choices once every six turns. He turned out to have a winning strategy though, as he won by a fair margin. Having only played once I can’t say if that was an aberration or not, but any game where the winning strategy isn’t fun has problems.
Monday, January 07, 2008
WBC 'report', Part 2
So you've just stayed up extra late learning a new game and there's nothing good at 9am the next morning... What do you do? If you answered sleep in then you are a wiser man than I, for I chose to get up early and play in the Risk event. Risk is not what I would call a terribly good game. It's also not very fun if you're playing with the wrong kind of person, but that's something I forgot. Plus, Risk is the 'most normal' game at WBC and I kinda wanted to be able to name a game people recognized if they asked me what I'd done. My grandmother knows how to play Risk, she's almost certainly never heard of anything else at WBC.
At any rate, it was a 6 player game and I went first. The way people placed on the board I ended up the only person with a force in South America. There were 2 people in Australia, 2 in Europe, 1 in North America, and 1 in Africa. Having not played the game in years I'd forgotten how brutal the turn-in scheme was, going first I think I probably should have taken a turn off so as not to be forced to turn in for 4...
Personal strategical failures aside, the game was 'interesting' to say the least. The two people in Australia refused to fight. They both had all their armies down there, and they just didn't move. One of the guys in Europe chose to ran away, and attacked Africa. The other guy in Europe just took Europe and no one made any effort to stop him. Finally I used my turn-in to go the long way through Alaska to back door it to stop the carnage but it was a bad plan. Other people cashed in for 10+ armies and took me out before I got to go again. Oh well, on the plus side I was finished (barely) in under 2 hours which gave me time to head for an 11am game.
Pounder was up to play Tigris and Euphrates and I decided to play too. Unfortunately it was an 'A' level event which meant no demo and they expected everyone to know the rules. I'd played a couple times before, but it was 4 years ago... I figured I could pick it back up again, especially if I could glance at the nifty rules placards everyone gets.
Turns out my table was using a German board, so the rules placard was conveniently written in a language I couldn't read. I got a brief run-down of turn order during game setup, and away we went! I had fun but I misremembered one rule about how internal conflicts worked which ended up giving one of my opponents a huge lead. One of the other people in the game then made the same mistake I did a couple turns later, the same guy capitalized on it, and that was pretty much the game.
1pm, and the third Queen's Gambit heat was starting. I'd had a lot of fun the night before playing it, and there wasn't anything I was dying to play scheduled opposite it, so I signed up. I got to play the other side in this game, drawing Darth Maul. It was during this game that I learned how blocking a window didn't actually stop you from jumping from floor to roof. Once my opponent clarified that rule for me I stopped worrying about blocking her. A much better use of my droid cards was just to shoot people. I ended up winning the Jedi battle, but Darth Maul only had 1 health left. I took advantage of a rule that allowed him to run out, kill people, and then run out of line of site which let me kill a large number of her guys without fear of Maul dying. I believe I then drew a healing card for Darth Maul and he went the distance for me. Go evil!
5pm had Acquire on the schedule which Pounder and I wanted to play. Pounder had also played Queen's Gambit and his round went to time, so we couldn't get into a 3pm game if we'd wanted to. We decided an hour and a half break was a good time to go eat, so we went to the Amish diner. We weren't really in the mood for a big meal so we had a slice of pie and a milkshake each. The pie was only ok (lemon merangue but no where near as good as my mother's) but the milkshake was insane. We'd each ordered a strawberry milkshake so they made a bunch in a blender and gave us the 'leavings' in a jug along with our two large glasses. When I say strawberry I actually mean strawberry, and not just pink. There were huge hunks of real strawberries in the milkshake. We finished up our glasses and went to divvy up the rest. Turns out there was enough to fill up both of our glasses with plenty left over! When it was all said and done there was about five and a half full milkshakes in the jug, which made for a really awesome deal. (Of course, a meal of 3 milkshakes in an hour might not be the sanest thing, but it sure was tasty and filling.)
5pm was Acquire, a game of building hotels, buying stock, merging hotels, and selling stock. I got into a 4 player game with a guy who really knew the game, an older lady who kinda knew the rules, and a 13ish year old who also kinda knew the rules. This is a game where having your hotels get merged off the board is very good for you, and having your hotels get merged into large hotels is very good for you... The first merger was the kid joining two hotels he had no part of, which pretty much just gave myself and the other guy a huge lead. The kid realized what he'd done by his next turn, but it was too late to recover. (A feeling I knew all too well from Manifest Destiny the day before!) Ultimately the guy who's game it was pulled out a close victory over me with the other two nowhere near us.
7pm saw the first Puerto Rico round on the schedule. Unfortunately for me, I was completely exhausted. I didn't particularly want to play a thinking game in that state, so I wimped out and went back to the hotel to sleep early. I didn't actually end up playing PR at all over the course of the event. Robb ended up making the semifinals and Pounder lost in the quarterfinals to an annoying ruling. Someone forgot to restock the boat after a mayor phase, so instead of there being 9 on the board when Pounder was to call mayor the next turn there were only 4. They could clearly retrace everything that had happened after that mayor phase but the GM decided the ruling was 1 per player... Oddly enough that game was mentioned in the recap because it was won (barely) by the #2 indigo player who scored 69 points. I watched chunks of the game and I'm pretty sure she benefited pretty hugely from that boat miscue, but what are you going to do?
So I got to sleep by 8pm, which is something I used to do on occasion on a normal day when I work at 3am. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that I ended up waking up around 3am on Friday morning. This time also coincided with everyone else arriving back to the room. I tried to get back to sleep for a few minutes but gave up and decided to just go play DS at the conventional hall.
I wandered around for a bit first, but 4am is a shockingly quiet time. A rowdy werewolf game had just wound down and there didn't seem to be anything going on in any rooms. I went to the wargaming room where there were actually a few people looking in on 'A World at War', which is the 60+ hour long game. They were looking at games and commenting on the positions and such. They sounded knowledgeable, which is pretty crazy... You'd have to put in a lot of time playing a 60 hour game to get good enough at it to comment on board positions. (Not that I'm one to talk, having put who knows how much time into playing Titan for example!)
10am on Friday had the Queen's Gambit single elimination finals scheduled, and with two wins I was in ok position to make the top 16 but sadly wasn't a lock. It turns out the #1 tiebreaker is actually owning a copy of the game! (They need 8 copies to show up in order to actually run the round, and it's been out of print for a long time.) I managed to squeak in at position #15, one of a few people without a game who qualified. I ended up liking the game enough that I bought a copy on eBay for way more money than it originally sold so I won't be in that position next year!
I drew evil in my quarterfinal match, and the single elimination rounds played by a different rule... If no one has won after 2 hours, evil wins. This was to make sure the game actually progresses and they could play all 4 rounds in time. (Also, a pretty solid Naboo strategy is to ignore Anakin I think, assuming that if you get a stable palace position you will eventually win.) This actually came close to coming up in my game, as the game ended with 3 Naboo characters alive and like 1 minute on the clock when Anakin finally blew up the mother ship. I quite possibly lost because of not knowing a rule, I thought a deck of cards reshuffled when it didn't. Oh well, live and learn! The one thing that bothered me was a spectator who knew my opponent accused me of cheating by intentionally playing slowly to try to time the game out. Having only played twice before it did take me time to read some of the cards, but I was going as fast as I could. Perhaps more importantly my opponent actually played very slowly for the first hour or so. We were playing beside another friend of his, and they were chatting a fair bit and not playing quickly. If winning was more of a priority for me I guarantee I would have won that game, either by killing 1 more guy by taking my time planning out turns or by timing him out. That's not how I am though, and I'm rather cheezed that I was accused of cheating. At any rate, I was out in the quarterfinals by the slimmest of margins. Frowns.
I've lost track of time, and I don't know what I did until 5pm. I might have played a game of Titan, but I don't think I did. I browsed the vendor area I think, and possibly attended some demos. At 5pm was a Lost Cities draw. I hadn't played that game in at least a year, and only ever on BSW. I used to play a fair bit with Tom Gannon on there, I think. Anyway, it seemed like a fun thing to do. I sat down with my opponent, had her give me a brief rules refresher, and then off we went. Lost Cities is a card game where you play 3 hands, summing the scores over all 3 hands. After our 3 hands... We were tied! Apparently this doesn't come up very often, from the GM report it sounds like it's happened 4 times in 3 years. The tiebreaker is to play a 4th hand... In that single hand I ended up outscoring the total from the previous three... (I had a triple bonus tiled excavation with enough cards to get the 8 card bonus.) This was the 3rd heat of 4 and I seem to recall they used a weird scoring system so because I started in round 3 it was unlikely I'd make the cut to the finals... So I didn't even think about it!
7pm was the start of the single elimination Battle Line tournament. Battle Line is another card game, this one a game where you play 3 card poker on many different fronts. The way they ran this tournament was to put people into pods of 4, and have you play round robin in your pod. Overall winner of the pod advances to the next round. I was actually mentioned in the GM breakdown despite not winning my first pod, but he misspelled my name! It seems so easy, what with only having 8 letters and all, but he stuck an i into Page. Grr! I believe I finished 2-1 in my pod, but someone went 3-0 so he advanced and I didn't. (I might have been 1-2, I don't remember. Not that it matters!) It was pretty fun, and the round robin format is a pretty fair one I think. It makes sure you get 3 games in at least for signing up, which is good since it can be a pretty fast game.
Friday night has a lot of finals on it, which I wasn't a part of, so I didn't have much to do until later in the evening. I don't remember what exactly I did but I know I skipped playing the 10pm Acquire game for fear it wouldn't end by 11pm. Why does 11pm matter? Because at 11pm the single most important tournament at the convention was held. I am, of course, refering to crowning the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! Liar's Dice had 195 people show up, and they claim to have been the most attended event. Ticket to Ride made that same claim, and had 191 distinct people show up, but they had multiple rounds so maybe they're both right. At any rate, that's a lot of people! They had enough copies of the game to get everyone seated at once, and they made sure no one started until everyone was ready... Then in one fell swoop 975 dice were rolled and slammed onto tables in unison. That, my friends, is a lot of dice.
Now, I'd told people before I left that I was going to be the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! so I had my work cut out for me. Remember, I'd woken up at 3am that morning, so I was up for over 20 hours at this point. Regardless, my first round was a cake walk, I was clearly the most skilled player at my table and I'm sure I won handily despite not remembering how many dice I had left. I do remember I won pretty fast as I had what seemed like a looooong wait before the next round.
The semi-finals made me rue the creation of the exacta rule. You see, if someone calls a bluff and the bid makes exactly not just the caller loses... Everyone at the table loses a die. Three straight times around the table went bid from the girl on my right (my Queen's Gambit opponent from my second game) huge raise by me, raise by 1 by the girl to my left, call... Exacta! Everyone lose a die. After the third one of these the girl on my left (who was 14 years old and playing with a Pirates of the Carribean cup) had 5 dice left and everyone else had 1 or 2. I've blocked the rest of the game out of my mind but suffice it to say she didn't find a way to Bung up that position and won handily. And thus, my dreams of being the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! were crushed.
A word of warning to all... Next year I will back, and next year I will fulfill my destiny. I will prevail. I will be victorious. I will be the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!
Pounder, Robb, and Lin had gone out to a nearby 24/7 breakfast diner and had picked me up some bacon to eat after my disappointing loss. At this point I'd been up almost 24 hours... So we sat down and played one of the demo games set up in the hall. I believe this time we played a coffee plantation game where Pounder shipped a ton of white coffee on a ton of white boats with a ton of white slaves for big bucks. I remember not particularly liking the game but that may just be because we didn't know what we were doing. I know Robb and I tried to collude at one point by selling brown coffee together but colluding with someone else just seemed worse than playing for yourself as Pounder crushed us.
The Settlers of Catan tournament started at 9am Saturday morning. Robb had won this event in 2005 but I don't think he had any interest in playing in it. I know I sure didn't! It turns out they expect Settlers to be a big draw (132 people played) and most of the other games on Saturday are finals from other events. I didn't want to play Settlers and was exhausted... So I just didn't get up. Around noon I finally got up, and headed over to the site. 11am had a Puerto Rico round that I would have played in if I'd been up, but oh well. 12pm had nothing to do.
1pm saw the start of the Carcassone single elimination event along with another Risk round, a Saint Petersburgh round and a Titan:The Arena round. I kinda wanted to play both of the last two games and decided to go with the Titan spinoff. It doesn't actually have anything to do with Titan other than it uses some of the characters from that game on the cards. I ended up in an ok position, but was forced to reveal my hidden bet at a bad time in order to not lose. That put a bullseye on my head which everyone but one guy took aim at. I had to work with that guy to keep from losing, but it turned out he also had a hidden bet on the same monster and had better overall position so I ended up just helping him win... Or so I thought. Our opponents finally pulled off a coup, killing our dragon, and thus we were both screwed. Oh well, still a pretty fun card game and I really wasn't expecting to win.
3pm had either another round of Lost Cities, or another round of Manifest Destiny, or a round of Monsters Ravage which is a game where you control a monster and a branch of the military and you try to use your tanks to kill other monsters or something. I wanted to play it, but I'd missed the demos and didn't really feel like trying to pick it up on the fly. (Also, as a B event, they don't really let that happen. Attend the demo!) Lost Cities lasts an hour, Manifest Destiny lasts four, and I had nothing I wanted to do for five hours so I went with Manifest Destiny. I was kinda bitter at myself for getting blown out of my previous game and I wanted to vindicate myself.
I think the GM was happy to see me come back. (He's also the game designer.) Having someone come back for more means good things for your game, I would think! I don't remember much about this game other than that it was a lot closer than the last one and I ended up cheating to my disadvantage by not knowing the rules. (You reshuffle decks of cards, but you're supposed to leave some out. I got one of those cards which was useless at that point in the game, but didn't know I wasn't supposed to get it. Oh well!)
At both 7pm and 10pm there was a 'Wits & Wagers' game show being held. It's a party game where the host names a category and everyone writes down a numerical guess. The guesses are given odds and then you bet chips on which answer you think is closest without going over. You win chips for giving the right answer and chips for betting correctly. We wanted to play at the same time and both Robb and Pounder had a Puerto Rico semi-final at 7 so we decided to try for the 10pm session. A grand total of one event started at 8 or 9pm for me to play in (I ate leading up to 7pm so missed that start time) and it was Ticket to Ride and 8pm. Ticket to Ride was fun the first time and being the only option helped, so away I went! I played a different variant than the first time but the end result was the same. Just building long routes preferentially gave me a pretty large victory. I think the game is probably a pretty good strategy game when everyone is on the same page but man are the early rounds ever soft.
10pm and both Robb and Pounder were ready for Wits & Wagers. They had a TON of people show up, so they had everyone play on large teams if possible. Robb, Pounder, Lin and myself picked up Rick Atwater (the Titan GM) and someone else Lin met during the week and formed team Canadian Bacon. The way the game works is they ask questions that have an exact numerical answer and everyone guesses what the right answer is. For example, one of the questions asked for what year the Queen first sent an email. Another asked how many pounds the world's largest lobster was. On the lobster question in particular we thought differently than the rest of the room. Our answer was laughed at for being so small compared to everyone else's, and Robb made a joke about how we're from Canada and don't know what a pound is. Of course, it turned out we were way closer than anyone else and had bet all our chips on the 'long-shot' that it was, giving us a massive chip lead. On the final round the question asked what percentage of the US population had voted in the last election, which supposedly had a big turnout. Being mostly Canadians we had no clue, but Rich had a pretty good idea. Of course, our answer depended on if the question counted people who lived in the US but couldn't vote for citizenship/age reasons. The GM said it was complete population so us, along with everyone else in the room but one team, were way wrong with our bets. We answered the question asked, but not the question they wanted an answer to it turns out. Oh well, it was a silly event with no real prize, not even a plaque, so it didn't really matter. We still think we won though!
Unfortunately this event went beyond 11pm so we missed the silly game for the night which was Slapshot. I don't know much about the game but from listening to people talk about it it sounds a LOT like Bloodbowl on ice. I know you build teams and play people and your goons could permanently injure the other team, which sounds like the Bloodbowl I knew and loved! (Ken Rootsevear going to crush your head!) We ended up learning a really complex game in the foyer that eventually was abandoned due to Lin not liking the game and everyone being hungry. We went out to the breakfast diner which I gather is the only thing open at that hour and had a decent meal. We came back, Lin went to bed, and Robb, Pounder and I met up with a guy they'd met earlier to play a game of Notre Dame.
I don't remember his name, sadly, but he was a really nice guy. He was on his way to bed when we came back from food but all it took was the question 'game?' and he aborted sleep to play Notre Dame. He even went up to his room to get it! (Mental note: staying at the center itself means you can store games there without needing to cross a highway and spend 20 minutes getting them!) Notre Dame is a pretty fun game with a draft component to it, where you draft roles and then perform the actions you drafted. It's a euro-game so you're trying to score victory points while managing the resources that will let you score more victory points later. A unique aspect of the game is that there is a 'rat count' in your segment of town and if you let it get too high you get plagued. You can draft cards that let you reduce the rat count... But then you're not making moneys or scoring points! It's a delicate balance, as all good euro-games are, and was a lot of fun.
After that Pounder went to be claiming something about having to drive home the next day. Robb and I had slept in that morning and as such had NO interest is sleeping. There was a werewolf game in progress that we watched and then tagged into. Apparently this group had been playing every night all week and the game was getting a little inbred as it seemed like the same people were yelling at each other the whole time. I've played the game a few times in online forums but never in person before. I must say it's kinda fun but I'm really horrible at it. I'm much better at keeping cool under fire and debating online than in person. Oh well, it was still fun and there really wasn't any other options at that hour of the day. Eventually the game broke up so Robb and I went and had breakfast at the hotel (yay still being up at 7am?) and then passed out. There were only 5 non-final games being run on Sunday and while I've played 3 of them before I didn't feel like not-sleeping to play them. (They were Diplomacy, Ticket to Ride, and Transamerica.) At 11am was the Ticket to Ride final which I was qualified for I'm sure due to winning the first two rounds but Pounder wasn't terribly interested in staying until 3pm while I won that event and I didn't really want to play in it either. I'd had to solo pack the hotel room on not much sleep before checkout time since Robb and Pounder were playing in finals and Lin just talked on the phone and watched as I packed everything. *frowns* At any rate... No gaming on Sunday but still fun times.
As far as things I know I did but forgot when they happened...
I attended multiple demos for games I wasn't interested in playing after seeing them in action. I watched demos for 3 stock-car racing games... 2 of which were designed so you couldn't get too far behind which ultimately meant the first N-1 turns of the game were irrelevant and the third of which was basically just a math game in a formula-1 disguise. I kinda wanted to play that one, liking math as much as I do, but it conflicted with something else I think.
I also attended the GANGSTERS! demo, which was a game I'd read about beforehand and was trying to convince Robb and Pounder to play. The demo convinced us that there's no way we wanted to play it in an event though. I kinda still wanted to play it for fun with just people I know though. For some reason I'm think Dave would have a lot of fun with that game.
There were two different fishing games in the demo area and I know I played both of them with Robb, Pounder, and random people who were passing by as I read the rules. None of them were very good.
I saw some people playing World of Warcraft: The Board Game! I think one team had both warrior and druid on it and hence was completely dominant.
Rich Atwater taught us to play a weird trick taking game at some point. Basically you deal out the cards and then there's a round of bidding. When you bid you play cards from your hand face up on the table, going in a circle having to pass or beat the previous bid. Eventually everyone but one person passes and they are declarer. They have to call a trump suit from the cards they played as their bid. They name either colour or rank as trump. (So all the 4s could be trump!) Then the person who was #2 in bidding names one of their bid cards as second trump. Second trump beats normal cards, Main trump beats second trump. Then declarer picks someone (not the second bidder) to be their partner. Those two play against everyone else, with the goal being to take the most 'points' worth of cards very similar to TICHU and 200. It was fun but we only got to play a couple hands.
Speaking of Tichu, I also played a few hands of that with some Titan players while waiting for a Titan game to start at some point. Fun game. Must play more of it on BSW!
Lin, Robb, Pounder and I also played an archaelogy game where you move around the board spending time researching to become 'good' at digging, and then go to dig sites. Once there you can spend turns 'digging', which means reach into the bag for that site and pull out X items. The items are either points, stat boosts, or nothing. After you finish digging keep all the stuff, put the nothing back in the bag, and pass the turn. So there's a delicate balance in trying to get a lot of pulls from the bag but also making sure you get there before someone takes all the treasure. It was an interesting mechanic though Robb was pretty bitter at how much rubble he kept pulling out. He'd focused on a couple different colour ruins and Lin and I cleaned them out before he got there I think. Meanwhile Pounder just hung around in Europe giving lectures about things while the rest of us actually did dirty work digging... I enjoyed the game but didn't think it was terribly good. I would play it again though!
Summary to follow tomorrow...
At any rate, it was a 6 player game and I went first. The way people placed on the board I ended up the only person with a force in South America. There were 2 people in Australia, 2 in Europe, 1 in North America, and 1 in Africa. Having not played the game in years I'd forgotten how brutal the turn-in scheme was, going first I think I probably should have taken a turn off so as not to be forced to turn in for 4...
Personal strategical failures aside, the game was 'interesting' to say the least. The two people in Australia refused to fight. They both had all their armies down there, and they just didn't move. One of the guys in Europe chose to ran away, and attacked Africa. The other guy in Europe just took Europe and no one made any effort to stop him. Finally I used my turn-in to go the long way through Alaska to back door it to stop the carnage but it was a bad plan. Other people cashed in for 10+ armies and took me out before I got to go again. Oh well, on the plus side I was finished (barely) in under 2 hours which gave me time to head for an 11am game.
Pounder was up to play Tigris and Euphrates and I decided to play too. Unfortunately it was an 'A' level event which meant no demo and they expected everyone to know the rules. I'd played a couple times before, but it was 4 years ago... I figured I could pick it back up again, especially if I could glance at the nifty rules placards everyone gets.
Turns out my table was using a German board, so the rules placard was conveniently written in a language I couldn't read. I got a brief run-down of turn order during game setup, and away we went! I had fun but I misremembered one rule about how internal conflicts worked which ended up giving one of my opponents a huge lead. One of the other people in the game then made the same mistake I did a couple turns later, the same guy capitalized on it, and that was pretty much the game.
1pm, and the third Queen's Gambit heat was starting. I'd had a lot of fun the night before playing it, and there wasn't anything I was dying to play scheduled opposite it, so I signed up. I got to play the other side in this game, drawing Darth Maul. It was during this game that I learned how blocking a window didn't actually stop you from jumping from floor to roof. Once my opponent clarified that rule for me I stopped worrying about blocking her. A much better use of my droid cards was just to shoot people. I ended up winning the Jedi battle, but Darth Maul only had 1 health left. I took advantage of a rule that allowed him to run out, kill people, and then run out of line of site which let me kill a large number of her guys without fear of Maul dying. I believe I then drew a healing card for Darth Maul and he went the distance for me. Go evil!
5pm had Acquire on the schedule which Pounder and I wanted to play. Pounder had also played Queen's Gambit and his round went to time, so we couldn't get into a 3pm game if we'd wanted to. We decided an hour and a half break was a good time to go eat, so we went to the Amish diner. We weren't really in the mood for a big meal so we had a slice of pie and a milkshake each. The pie was only ok (lemon merangue but no where near as good as my mother's) but the milkshake was insane. We'd each ordered a strawberry milkshake so they made a bunch in a blender and gave us the 'leavings' in a jug along with our two large glasses. When I say strawberry I actually mean strawberry, and not just pink. There were huge hunks of real strawberries in the milkshake. We finished up our glasses and went to divvy up the rest. Turns out there was enough to fill up both of our glasses with plenty left over! When it was all said and done there was about five and a half full milkshakes in the jug, which made for a really awesome deal. (Of course, a meal of 3 milkshakes in an hour might not be the sanest thing, but it sure was tasty and filling.)
5pm was Acquire, a game of building hotels, buying stock, merging hotels, and selling stock. I got into a 4 player game with a guy who really knew the game, an older lady who kinda knew the rules, and a 13ish year old who also kinda knew the rules. This is a game where having your hotels get merged off the board is very good for you, and having your hotels get merged into large hotels is very good for you... The first merger was the kid joining two hotels he had no part of, which pretty much just gave myself and the other guy a huge lead. The kid realized what he'd done by his next turn, but it was too late to recover. (A feeling I knew all too well from Manifest Destiny the day before!) Ultimately the guy who's game it was pulled out a close victory over me with the other two nowhere near us.
7pm saw the first Puerto Rico round on the schedule. Unfortunately for me, I was completely exhausted. I didn't particularly want to play a thinking game in that state, so I wimped out and went back to the hotel to sleep early. I didn't actually end up playing PR at all over the course of the event. Robb ended up making the semifinals and Pounder lost in the quarterfinals to an annoying ruling. Someone forgot to restock the boat after a mayor phase, so instead of there being 9 on the board when Pounder was to call mayor the next turn there were only 4. They could clearly retrace everything that had happened after that mayor phase but the GM decided the ruling was 1 per player... Oddly enough that game was mentioned in the recap because it was won (barely) by the #2 indigo player who scored 69 points. I watched chunks of the game and I'm pretty sure she benefited pretty hugely from that boat miscue, but what are you going to do?
So I got to sleep by 8pm, which is something I used to do on occasion on a normal day when I work at 3am. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that I ended up waking up around 3am on Friday morning. This time also coincided with everyone else arriving back to the room. I tried to get back to sleep for a few minutes but gave up and decided to just go play DS at the conventional hall.
I wandered around for a bit first, but 4am is a shockingly quiet time. A rowdy werewolf game had just wound down and there didn't seem to be anything going on in any rooms. I went to the wargaming room where there were actually a few people looking in on 'A World at War', which is the 60+ hour long game. They were looking at games and commenting on the positions and such. They sounded knowledgeable, which is pretty crazy... You'd have to put in a lot of time playing a 60 hour game to get good enough at it to comment on board positions. (Not that I'm one to talk, having put who knows how much time into playing Titan for example!)
10am on Friday had the Queen's Gambit single elimination finals scheduled, and with two wins I was in ok position to make the top 16 but sadly wasn't a lock. It turns out the #1 tiebreaker is actually owning a copy of the game! (They need 8 copies to show up in order to actually run the round, and it's been out of print for a long time.) I managed to squeak in at position #15, one of a few people without a game who qualified. I ended up liking the game enough that I bought a copy on eBay for way more money than it originally sold so I won't be in that position next year!
I drew evil in my quarterfinal match, and the single elimination rounds played by a different rule... If no one has won after 2 hours, evil wins. This was to make sure the game actually progresses and they could play all 4 rounds in time. (Also, a pretty solid Naboo strategy is to ignore Anakin I think, assuming that if you get a stable palace position you will eventually win.) This actually came close to coming up in my game, as the game ended with 3 Naboo characters alive and like 1 minute on the clock when Anakin finally blew up the mother ship. I quite possibly lost because of not knowing a rule, I thought a deck of cards reshuffled when it didn't. Oh well, live and learn! The one thing that bothered me was a spectator who knew my opponent accused me of cheating by intentionally playing slowly to try to time the game out. Having only played twice before it did take me time to read some of the cards, but I was going as fast as I could. Perhaps more importantly my opponent actually played very slowly for the first hour or so. We were playing beside another friend of his, and they were chatting a fair bit and not playing quickly. If winning was more of a priority for me I guarantee I would have won that game, either by killing 1 more guy by taking my time planning out turns or by timing him out. That's not how I am though, and I'm rather cheezed that I was accused of cheating. At any rate, I was out in the quarterfinals by the slimmest of margins. Frowns.
I've lost track of time, and I don't know what I did until 5pm. I might have played a game of Titan, but I don't think I did. I browsed the vendor area I think, and possibly attended some demos. At 5pm was a Lost Cities draw. I hadn't played that game in at least a year, and only ever on BSW. I used to play a fair bit with Tom Gannon on there, I think. Anyway, it seemed like a fun thing to do. I sat down with my opponent, had her give me a brief rules refresher, and then off we went. Lost Cities is a card game where you play 3 hands, summing the scores over all 3 hands. After our 3 hands... We were tied! Apparently this doesn't come up very often, from the GM report it sounds like it's happened 4 times in 3 years. The tiebreaker is to play a 4th hand... In that single hand I ended up outscoring the total from the previous three... (I had a triple bonus tiled excavation with enough cards to get the 8 card bonus.) This was the 3rd heat of 4 and I seem to recall they used a weird scoring system so because I started in round 3 it was unlikely I'd make the cut to the finals... So I didn't even think about it!
7pm was the start of the single elimination Battle Line tournament. Battle Line is another card game, this one a game where you play 3 card poker on many different fronts. The way they ran this tournament was to put people into pods of 4, and have you play round robin in your pod. Overall winner of the pod advances to the next round. I was actually mentioned in the GM breakdown despite not winning my first pod, but he misspelled my name! It seems so easy, what with only having 8 letters and all, but he stuck an i into Page. Grr! I believe I finished 2-1 in my pod, but someone went 3-0 so he advanced and I didn't. (I might have been 1-2, I don't remember. Not that it matters!) It was pretty fun, and the round robin format is a pretty fair one I think. It makes sure you get 3 games in at least for signing up, which is good since it can be a pretty fast game.
Friday night has a lot of finals on it, which I wasn't a part of, so I didn't have much to do until later in the evening. I don't remember what exactly I did but I know I skipped playing the 10pm Acquire game for fear it wouldn't end by 11pm. Why does 11pm matter? Because at 11pm the single most important tournament at the convention was held. I am, of course, refering to crowning the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! Liar's Dice had 195 people show up, and they claim to have been the most attended event. Ticket to Ride made that same claim, and had 191 distinct people show up, but they had multiple rounds so maybe they're both right. At any rate, that's a lot of people! They had enough copies of the game to get everyone seated at once, and they made sure no one started until everyone was ready... Then in one fell swoop 975 dice were rolled and slammed onto tables in unison. That, my friends, is a lot of dice.
Now, I'd told people before I left that I was going to be the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! so I had my work cut out for me. Remember, I'd woken up at 3am that morning, so I was up for over 20 hours at this point. Regardless, my first round was a cake walk, I was clearly the most skilled player at my table and I'm sure I won handily despite not remembering how many dice I had left. I do remember I won pretty fast as I had what seemed like a looooong wait before the next round.
The semi-finals made me rue the creation of the exacta rule. You see, if someone calls a bluff and the bid makes exactly not just the caller loses... Everyone at the table loses a die. Three straight times around the table went bid from the girl on my right (my Queen's Gambit opponent from my second game) huge raise by me, raise by 1 by the girl to my left, call... Exacta! Everyone lose a die. After the third one of these the girl on my left (who was 14 years old and playing with a Pirates of the Carribean cup) had 5 dice left and everyone else had 1 or 2. I've blocked the rest of the game out of my mind but suffice it to say she didn't find a way to Bung up that position and won handily. And thus, my dreams of being the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!!! were crushed.
A word of warning to all... Next year I will back, and next year I will fulfill my destiny. I will prevail. I will be victorious. I will be the LIARS DICE WORLD CHAMPION!
Pounder, Robb, and Lin had gone out to a nearby 24/7 breakfast diner and had picked me up some bacon to eat after my disappointing loss. At this point I'd been up almost 24 hours... So we sat down and played one of the demo games set up in the hall. I believe this time we played a coffee plantation game where Pounder shipped a ton of white coffee on a ton of white boats with a ton of white slaves for big bucks. I remember not particularly liking the game but that may just be because we didn't know what we were doing. I know Robb and I tried to collude at one point by selling brown coffee together but colluding with someone else just seemed worse than playing for yourself as Pounder crushed us.
The Settlers of Catan tournament started at 9am Saturday morning. Robb had won this event in 2005 but I don't think he had any interest in playing in it. I know I sure didn't! It turns out they expect Settlers to be a big draw (132 people played) and most of the other games on Saturday are finals from other events. I didn't want to play Settlers and was exhausted... So I just didn't get up. Around noon I finally got up, and headed over to the site. 11am had a Puerto Rico round that I would have played in if I'd been up, but oh well. 12pm had nothing to do.
1pm saw the start of the Carcassone single elimination event along with another Risk round, a Saint Petersburgh round and a Titan:The Arena round. I kinda wanted to play both of the last two games and decided to go with the Titan spinoff. It doesn't actually have anything to do with Titan other than it uses some of the characters from that game on the cards. I ended up in an ok position, but was forced to reveal my hidden bet at a bad time in order to not lose. That put a bullseye on my head which everyone but one guy took aim at. I had to work with that guy to keep from losing, but it turned out he also had a hidden bet on the same monster and had better overall position so I ended up just helping him win... Or so I thought. Our opponents finally pulled off a coup, killing our dragon, and thus we were both screwed. Oh well, still a pretty fun card game and I really wasn't expecting to win.
3pm had either another round of Lost Cities, or another round of Manifest Destiny, or a round of Monsters Ravage which is a game where you control a monster and a branch of the military and you try to use your tanks to kill other monsters or something. I wanted to play it, but I'd missed the demos and didn't really feel like trying to pick it up on the fly. (Also, as a B event, they don't really let that happen. Attend the demo!) Lost Cities lasts an hour, Manifest Destiny lasts four, and I had nothing I wanted to do for five hours so I went with Manifest Destiny. I was kinda bitter at myself for getting blown out of my previous game and I wanted to vindicate myself.
I think the GM was happy to see me come back. (He's also the game designer.) Having someone come back for more means good things for your game, I would think! I don't remember much about this game other than that it was a lot closer than the last one and I ended up cheating to my disadvantage by not knowing the rules. (You reshuffle decks of cards, but you're supposed to leave some out. I got one of those cards which was useless at that point in the game, but didn't know I wasn't supposed to get it. Oh well!)
At both 7pm and 10pm there was a 'Wits & Wagers' game show being held. It's a party game where the host names a category and everyone writes down a numerical guess. The guesses are given odds and then you bet chips on which answer you think is closest without going over. You win chips for giving the right answer and chips for betting correctly. We wanted to play at the same time and both Robb and Pounder had a Puerto Rico semi-final at 7 so we decided to try for the 10pm session. A grand total of one event started at 8 or 9pm for me to play in (I ate leading up to 7pm so missed that start time) and it was Ticket to Ride and 8pm. Ticket to Ride was fun the first time and being the only option helped, so away I went! I played a different variant than the first time but the end result was the same. Just building long routes preferentially gave me a pretty large victory. I think the game is probably a pretty good strategy game when everyone is on the same page but man are the early rounds ever soft.
10pm and both Robb and Pounder were ready for Wits & Wagers. They had a TON of people show up, so they had everyone play on large teams if possible. Robb, Pounder, Lin and myself picked up Rick Atwater (the Titan GM) and someone else Lin met during the week and formed team Canadian Bacon. The way the game works is they ask questions that have an exact numerical answer and everyone guesses what the right answer is. For example, one of the questions asked for what year the Queen first sent an email. Another asked how many pounds the world's largest lobster was. On the lobster question in particular we thought differently than the rest of the room. Our answer was laughed at for being so small compared to everyone else's, and Robb made a joke about how we're from Canada and don't know what a pound is. Of course, it turned out we were way closer than anyone else and had bet all our chips on the 'long-shot' that it was, giving us a massive chip lead. On the final round the question asked what percentage of the US population had voted in the last election, which supposedly had a big turnout. Being mostly Canadians we had no clue, but Rich had a pretty good idea. Of course, our answer depended on if the question counted people who lived in the US but couldn't vote for citizenship/age reasons. The GM said it was complete population so us, along with everyone else in the room but one team, were way wrong with our bets. We answered the question asked, but not the question they wanted an answer to it turns out. Oh well, it was a silly event with no real prize, not even a plaque, so it didn't really matter. We still think we won though!
Unfortunately this event went beyond 11pm so we missed the silly game for the night which was Slapshot. I don't know much about the game but from listening to people talk about it it sounds a LOT like Bloodbowl on ice. I know you build teams and play people and your goons could permanently injure the other team, which sounds like the Bloodbowl I knew and loved! (Ken Rootsevear going to crush your head!) We ended up learning a really complex game in the foyer that eventually was abandoned due to Lin not liking the game and everyone being hungry. We went out to the breakfast diner which I gather is the only thing open at that hour and had a decent meal. We came back, Lin went to bed, and Robb, Pounder and I met up with a guy they'd met earlier to play a game of Notre Dame.
I don't remember his name, sadly, but he was a really nice guy. He was on his way to bed when we came back from food but all it took was the question 'game?' and he aborted sleep to play Notre Dame. He even went up to his room to get it! (Mental note: staying at the center itself means you can store games there without needing to cross a highway and spend 20 minutes getting them!) Notre Dame is a pretty fun game with a draft component to it, where you draft roles and then perform the actions you drafted. It's a euro-game so you're trying to score victory points while managing the resources that will let you score more victory points later. A unique aspect of the game is that there is a 'rat count' in your segment of town and if you let it get too high you get plagued. You can draft cards that let you reduce the rat count... But then you're not making moneys or scoring points! It's a delicate balance, as all good euro-games are, and was a lot of fun.
After that Pounder went to be claiming something about having to drive home the next day. Robb and I had slept in that morning and as such had NO interest is sleeping. There was a werewolf game in progress that we watched and then tagged into. Apparently this group had been playing every night all week and the game was getting a little inbred as it seemed like the same people were yelling at each other the whole time. I've played the game a few times in online forums but never in person before. I must say it's kinda fun but I'm really horrible at it. I'm much better at keeping cool under fire and debating online than in person. Oh well, it was still fun and there really wasn't any other options at that hour of the day. Eventually the game broke up so Robb and I went and had breakfast at the hotel (yay still being up at 7am?) and then passed out. There were only 5 non-final games being run on Sunday and while I've played 3 of them before I didn't feel like not-sleeping to play them. (They were Diplomacy, Ticket to Ride, and Transamerica.) At 11am was the Ticket to Ride final which I was qualified for I'm sure due to winning the first two rounds but Pounder wasn't terribly interested in staying until 3pm while I won that event and I didn't really want to play in it either. I'd had to solo pack the hotel room on not much sleep before checkout time since Robb and Pounder were playing in finals and Lin just talked on the phone and watched as I packed everything. *frowns* At any rate... No gaming on Sunday but still fun times.
As far as things I know I did but forgot when they happened...
I attended multiple demos for games I wasn't interested in playing after seeing them in action. I watched demos for 3 stock-car racing games... 2 of which were designed so you couldn't get too far behind which ultimately meant the first N-1 turns of the game were irrelevant and the third of which was basically just a math game in a formula-1 disguise. I kinda wanted to play that one, liking math as much as I do, but it conflicted with something else I think.
I also attended the GANGSTERS! demo, which was a game I'd read about beforehand and was trying to convince Robb and Pounder to play. The demo convinced us that there's no way we wanted to play it in an event though. I kinda still wanted to play it for fun with just people I know though. For some reason I'm think Dave would have a lot of fun with that game.
There were two different fishing games in the demo area and I know I played both of them with Robb, Pounder, and random people who were passing by as I read the rules. None of them were very good.
I saw some people playing World of Warcraft: The Board Game! I think one team had both warrior and druid on it and hence was completely dominant.
Rich Atwater taught us to play a weird trick taking game at some point. Basically you deal out the cards and then there's a round of bidding. When you bid you play cards from your hand face up on the table, going in a circle having to pass or beat the previous bid. Eventually everyone but one person passes and they are declarer. They have to call a trump suit from the cards they played as their bid. They name either colour or rank as trump. (So all the 4s could be trump!) Then the person who was #2 in bidding names one of their bid cards as second trump. Second trump beats normal cards, Main trump beats second trump. Then declarer picks someone (not the second bidder) to be their partner. Those two play against everyone else, with the goal being to take the most 'points' worth of cards very similar to TICHU and 200. It was fun but we only got to play a couple hands.
Speaking of Tichu, I also played a few hands of that with some Titan players while waiting for a Titan game to start at some point. Fun game. Must play more of it on BSW!
Lin, Robb, Pounder and I also played an archaelogy game where you move around the board spending time researching to become 'good' at digging, and then go to dig sites. Once there you can spend turns 'digging', which means reach into the bag for that site and pull out X items. The items are either points, stat boosts, or nothing. After you finish digging keep all the stuff, put the nothing back in the bag, and pass the turn. So there's a delicate balance in trying to get a lot of pulls from the bag but also making sure you get there before someone takes all the treasure. It was an interesting mechanic though Robb was pretty bitter at how much rubble he kept pulling out. He'd focused on a couple different colour ruins and Lin and I cleaned them out before he got there I think. Meanwhile Pounder just hung around in Europe giving lectures about things while the rest of us actually did dirty work digging... I enjoyed the game but didn't think it was terribly good. I would play it again though!
Summary to follow tomorrow...
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