Andrew invited me over to play board games at Sara's today which was a lot of fun. We played a bunch of Hanabi, Galaxy Trucker, Ricochet Robots, Mutant Meeples, and Tier Und Tier. And one silly game Andrew really wanted to play... Zombie in my Pocket. It felt like a pretty big dud.
The game was introduced as a mostly cooperative game. The rules to the game stated in bold that it was a non-cooperative game. This may be a bit of the issue since for most of the game most of us were playing it as a coop game while Andrew was playing to score the most points. We finally got justice by killing Andrew off and then tying the game between the other three of us.
In a sense the game reminded me a lot of Republic of Rome. If everyone plays just to win themselves then the game is impossible and everyone will lose. If people actually work together completely selflessly the game is probably pretty easy but has no substance. Flip some cards up, see if the optimal but trivial play wins or not. The trick to this sort of game would be finding a way to make the 'stab for the win' part of the game interesting enough while not being blatantly obvious. I've yet to see that happen. Red November tried, but it didn't have it. Only a couple people could possibly stab for the win in that game which meant the 'right' play is to waste the early game trying to be one of those people which tended to mean everyone lost.
Maybe it's just playing these sorts of games with people like Andrew and Sky. They're practically unwinnable when we're all trying to find the way to screw the team over for the solo win. But playing this sort of game with true team players just means I either don't play for the optimal win or I screw them over time and again. Neither of those situations is very appealing either. I love winning, but I want to win games on the same terms as my opponent. Playing a different game and sneaking in the win isn't fun for me. But if we're all playing the same game we just lose. So maybe the real problem is playing this sort of game with people like me...
Showing posts with label anecdotes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anecdotes. Show all posts
Friday, June 14, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Battlestar Galactica: Favoured Side
A few months ago back at the Niagara Boardgaming Weekend Sara asked me while in a teaching game of Battlestar Galactica which side was favoured to win. I was playing something else at the time so I gave a pretty basic response: cylons win more when people are first starting; humans win more when people know what they're doing. I didn't elaborate any more (I wasn't asked to do so, and I was busy) but the idea has been spinning around in my crazy little brain ever since. I played a game of BSG last week with Sara, Duncan, Andrew, and Byung which the cylons won, but I feel like Andrew made a bizarre human play that pretty much caused it to happen. He figured I'd post about it, and I don't want to let him down, so I'll try to weave the two together...
At any rate, BSG is a game where any individual player can be in one of three states, each with their own goals and decisions to be made. You can either be a human, a hidden cylon, or a revealed cylon. The play behind each of these states evolves as you get experience with the game, and I feel like these evolutions are what causes the favoured side in the game to change over time.
First off, human players are at their very core playing a resource management game. You have access to a lot of different resources and have to make decisions about which ones to lose at which points in time. The whole goal for the humans is to survive until the end of the game. The biggest resources humans have to contend with, and one most people don't really think about, is cards in hand. Frequently over the course of the game the humans are given options to trade cards in hand for other resources to prolong the game. I've found that rookie players often feel like they need to try to pass every skill check that comes up and will throw cards into lost causes. Alternatively, and just as bad, they'll throw way too much into a skill check. If you need to get your total up to 10 it's great to end up in the 10-12 range. It's fine to end up around 15, or around -5. It's terrible to end up at 7, or at 25. When you end up at 7 you've thrown a bunch of cards away and still lost your skill check. At 25 you've thrown even more cards away. Giving up, staying at -5, is actually fine. You're going to fail some of the skill checks in the game. You can still win. So there's a lot of play involved in figuring out when to pass a skill check and when to intentionally fail it. New players don't have this ability. They won't be able to predict whether a skill check will end up at 0, 7, 12, or 20 without their help. They aren't going to know which resources are critical to protect and which can be sacrificed for the common good. A game with a lot of new human players is therefore going to be more inefficient with their resources than a game with a lot of experienced human players, and efficiency is pretty much everything for the humans. You can use up most of everything and still win, you just can't go critical on any one thing.
Revealed cylon players tend to have a pretty easy job regardless of their game experience. There are very limited numbers of actions they can take, and a limit impact they can have on skill checks. For the most part they exist merely to slow the game down and bleed off human resources. You can certainly be a better revealed cylon if you know what you're doing, but the difference between a passable revealed cylon and an awesome one isn't very big. For the most part it's pretty hard to target down a specific human resource so the revealed cylon is just trying to do damage anywhere they can, and that's an easy thing to grasp. Especially when pretty much anything you do will cause some damage somewhere! Certainly some games get won or lost based on the revealed cylon being able to shift gears at the right time and focus on a critical weakness, don't get me wrong... But a mediocre revealed cylon isn't apt to make big mistakes. A mediocre human player can make huge mistakes.
Unrevealed cylons are tricky. You'd think having a lot of experience with the game would have a big impact on how much secret damage you can inflict as an unrevealed cylon but I haven't found that to be the case at all. The thing is that as the humans gain experience with the game they become better and better at noticing strange plays. It's the start of your turn and you're the CAG... If no one knows what they're doing it's easy for you to 'forget' to use the CAG special ability. Probably everyone else will forget too! And if they notice you can easily feign ignorance and then do the action. I can't pull that off with experienced players. If I'd tried to 'forget' to use my CAG ability the jig would have been up. I probably wouldn't have gotten executed for it, but the spotlight would be on and I'd never be able to get away with anything. In the game last week I actually gave the CAG title away so I wouldn't get caught using it poorly. (As Apollo I could also use Duncan's CAG activation to reveal out of turn!) But now that I've done that once, I don't know that I can do it again. Now, maybe I'm just bad at being an unrevealed cylon but I find my best play is just to do blatant damage and reveal ASAP. Flipping up more jump prep on crisis cards only helps the humans out, I feel. Regardless, I think that the humans gain more in cylon detecting with experience than an unrevealed cylon gains in stealthiness. At least in games I play I find the unrevealed cylons have to go to great lengths to take pro-human actions or I'll sniff them out.
Which reminds me of a game a long time ago at Andrew's place where a brand new player was an unrevealed cylon. She made brutal misplay after misplay which hurt the humans. Everyone else at the table was convinced she was just new to the game and making mistakes. I knew she was a cylon, but I was playing as the cylon leader who wanted the humans to lose so I saw no reason to rain on her parade. It was glorious, and the humans got obliterated. But if the humans had more experience with the game at the time, or if she had more experience and couldn't play the newbie card, it likely wouldn't have worked at all.
My feeling is the humans get a lot better at managing their limited resources and at uncovering unrevealed cylons as they gain experience. This in turn makes the job of an unrevealed cylon harder! (Especially if you take into account human players who will track card colours in people's hands and in the destiny deck.) A revealed cylon can get better, but not much better, and the unrevealed cylons actually feel worse to me in an experienced game than in a newbie game. All of these things combine to make it more likely the humans will win with experienced players, and I think they contribute enough to shift the balance of power from the cylons to the humans.
And yet, the cylons won the game last week. And not by a little bit... Sara and I were in a dominating position. Four damaged sections of Galactica, 3 boarded centurions, and all four resources in the red. I don't know if the humans would have won one way or the other, but Andrew made certain they couldn't win. The sleeper phase went off at the end of Byung's turn, giving everyone a new loyalty card. I was already a revealed cylon at this point, so I gave my extra card to Andrew who was the admiral at the time. Duncan was next, and used an Ionian Nebula character to throw Andrew in the brig, taking the admiral title. Duncan then put out a new Nebula character, into the brig, and could either make Andrew discard his hand or let him out of the brig. Duncan then took a fairly human action and ended his turn. Sara went next, drew two Quorom cards, and said go. No skill checks came up on either turn. Andrew was next, found that Duncan had let him out of the brig, and decided that meant Duncan was human. Sara hadn't revealed, so obviously she was human. Therefore Byung was a cylon. So Andrew threw him out the air lock. Andrew spent 5 cards to pull it off and managed to convince Duncan that this was a good idea so Duncan chipped in a card as well. Byung was not a cylon. This cost the humans a morale, and it cost them all the cards in Byung's hand, and it cost them the 6 cards they spent. I think Sara and I also threw in a card. All told it was something like a 14 card loss, and a resource lost, and Andrew didn't take a real action on his turn. Oh, and we were playing with the 'set aside' loyalty card, so Andrew gave me a 50-50 chance of getting a cylon friend if it happened to be the shelf that was the extra cylon.
Byung hadn't taken a single action. Not that he hadn't taken a pro-human action... He hadn't done anything at all! I was convinced Andrew had to be a cylon because he took that action, but no. It turned out Sara had just punted her first turn in the hopes of getting a good skill check to sabotage before revealing. I'd say it worked out pretty well!
I was the next player in line, and since Andrew had killed Byung instead of letting Duncan go defend the space areas I was able to take my turn to shoot down 3 civilian ships. Which in turn cost the humans enough population that Duncan couldn't pick a far away planet on their next jump as it would have cost too much pop to pull off. Which gave the cylons enough time to decimate all the human resources. The game goes very differently if Andrew doesn't throw away a ton of human resources for no reason. But even though I had an awesome start to the game (I was revealed with 2 base stars in play and their jump prep track was still at the start) it was by no means in the bag.
At any rate, BSG is a game where any individual player can be in one of three states, each with their own goals and decisions to be made. You can either be a human, a hidden cylon, or a revealed cylon. The play behind each of these states evolves as you get experience with the game, and I feel like these evolutions are what causes the favoured side in the game to change over time.
First off, human players are at their very core playing a resource management game. You have access to a lot of different resources and have to make decisions about which ones to lose at which points in time. The whole goal for the humans is to survive until the end of the game. The biggest resources humans have to contend with, and one most people don't really think about, is cards in hand. Frequently over the course of the game the humans are given options to trade cards in hand for other resources to prolong the game. I've found that rookie players often feel like they need to try to pass every skill check that comes up and will throw cards into lost causes. Alternatively, and just as bad, they'll throw way too much into a skill check. If you need to get your total up to 10 it's great to end up in the 10-12 range. It's fine to end up around 15, or around -5. It's terrible to end up at 7, or at 25. When you end up at 7 you've thrown a bunch of cards away and still lost your skill check. At 25 you've thrown even more cards away. Giving up, staying at -5, is actually fine. You're going to fail some of the skill checks in the game. You can still win. So there's a lot of play involved in figuring out when to pass a skill check and when to intentionally fail it. New players don't have this ability. They won't be able to predict whether a skill check will end up at 0, 7, 12, or 20 without their help. They aren't going to know which resources are critical to protect and which can be sacrificed for the common good. A game with a lot of new human players is therefore going to be more inefficient with their resources than a game with a lot of experienced human players, and efficiency is pretty much everything for the humans. You can use up most of everything and still win, you just can't go critical on any one thing.
Revealed cylon players tend to have a pretty easy job regardless of their game experience. There are very limited numbers of actions they can take, and a limit impact they can have on skill checks. For the most part they exist merely to slow the game down and bleed off human resources. You can certainly be a better revealed cylon if you know what you're doing, but the difference between a passable revealed cylon and an awesome one isn't very big. For the most part it's pretty hard to target down a specific human resource so the revealed cylon is just trying to do damage anywhere they can, and that's an easy thing to grasp. Especially when pretty much anything you do will cause some damage somewhere! Certainly some games get won or lost based on the revealed cylon being able to shift gears at the right time and focus on a critical weakness, don't get me wrong... But a mediocre revealed cylon isn't apt to make big mistakes. A mediocre human player can make huge mistakes.
Unrevealed cylons are tricky. You'd think having a lot of experience with the game would have a big impact on how much secret damage you can inflict as an unrevealed cylon but I haven't found that to be the case at all. The thing is that as the humans gain experience with the game they become better and better at noticing strange plays. It's the start of your turn and you're the CAG... If no one knows what they're doing it's easy for you to 'forget' to use the CAG special ability. Probably everyone else will forget too! And if they notice you can easily feign ignorance and then do the action. I can't pull that off with experienced players. If I'd tried to 'forget' to use my CAG ability the jig would have been up. I probably wouldn't have gotten executed for it, but the spotlight would be on and I'd never be able to get away with anything. In the game last week I actually gave the CAG title away so I wouldn't get caught using it poorly. (As Apollo I could also use Duncan's CAG activation to reveal out of turn!) But now that I've done that once, I don't know that I can do it again. Now, maybe I'm just bad at being an unrevealed cylon but I find my best play is just to do blatant damage and reveal ASAP. Flipping up more jump prep on crisis cards only helps the humans out, I feel. Regardless, I think that the humans gain more in cylon detecting with experience than an unrevealed cylon gains in stealthiness. At least in games I play I find the unrevealed cylons have to go to great lengths to take pro-human actions or I'll sniff them out.
Which reminds me of a game a long time ago at Andrew's place where a brand new player was an unrevealed cylon. She made brutal misplay after misplay which hurt the humans. Everyone else at the table was convinced she was just new to the game and making mistakes. I knew she was a cylon, but I was playing as the cylon leader who wanted the humans to lose so I saw no reason to rain on her parade. It was glorious, and the humans got obliterated. But if the humans had more experience with the game at the time, or if she had more experience and couldn't play the newbie card, it likely wouldn't have worked at all.
My feeling is the humans get a lot better at managing their limited resources and at uncovering unrevealed cylons as they gain experience. This in turn makes the job of an unrevealed cylon harder! (Especially if you take into account human players who will track card colours in people's hands and in the destiny deck.) A revealed cylon can get better, but not much better, and the unrevealed cylons actually feel worse to me in an experienced game than in a newbie game. All of these things combine to make it more likely the humans will win with experienced players, and I think they contribute enough to shift the balance of power from the cylons to the humans.
And yet, the cylons won the game last week. And not by a little bit... Sara and I were in a dominating position. Four damaged sections of Galactica, 3 boarded centurions, and all four resources in the red. I don't know if the humans would have won one way or the other, but Andrew made certain they couldn't win. The sleeper phase went off at the end of Byung's turn, giving everyone a new loyalty card. I was already a revealed cylon at this point, so I gave my extra card to Andrew who was the admiral at the time. Duncan was next, and used an Ionian Nebula character to throw Andrew in the brig, taking the admiral title. Duncan then put out a new Nebula character, into the brig, and could either make Andrew discard his hand or let him out of the brig. Duncan then took a fairly human action and ended his turn. Sara went next, drew two Quorom cards, and said go. No skill checks came up on either turn. Andrew was next, found that Duncan had let him out of the brig, and decided that meant Duncan was human. Sara hadn't revealed, so obviously she was human. Therefore Byung was a cylon. So Andrew threw him out the air lock. Andrew spent 5 cards to pull it off and managed to convince Duncan that this was a good idea so Duncan chipped in a card as well. Byung was not a cylon. This cost the humans a morale, and it cost them all the cards in Byung's hand, and it cost them the 6 cards they spent. I think Sara and I also threw in a card. All told it was something like a 14 card loss, and a resource lost, and Andrew didn't take a real action on his turn. Oh, and we were playing with the 'set aside' loyalty card, so Andrew gave me a 50-50 chance of getting a cylon friend if it happened to be the shelf that was the extra cylon.
Byung hadn't taken a single action. Not that he hadn't taken a pro-human action... He hadn't done anything at all! I was convinced Andrew had to be a cylon because he took that action, but no. It turned out Sara had just punted her first turn in the hopes of getting a good skill check to sabotage before revealing. I'd say it worked out pretty well!
I was the next player in line, and since Andrew had killed Byung instead of letting Duncan go defend the space areas I was able to take my turn to shoot down 3 civilian ships. Which in turn cost the humans enough population that Duncan couldn't pick a far away planet on their next jump as it would have cost too much pop to pull off. Which gave the cylons enough time to decimate all the human resources. The game goes very differently if Andrew doesn't throw away a ton of human resources for no reason. But even though I had an awesome start to the game (I was revealed with 2 base stars in play and their jump prep track was still at the start) it was by no means in the bag.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Popeing
I went through my drafted posts list today and found this from last November. I guess I never found a conclusion but I found it interesting upon rereading it so I'm going to try to finish it off... For reference it's talking about a day of board games that took place at Duncan's right after his kitten got spayed.
An interesting situation came up in a game of Puerto Rico on the weekend that I wanted to talk about to go over decision making in general and my dislike for Puerto Rico as a game in particular but the more I thought over the ideas in my head (I have a hard time falling asleep...) the more I decided the whole situation was just a symptom of an entirely different issue worth discussing. I turned to Google to do some background research but couldn't find anyone saying anything about it. I'm thinking it's likely I just don't know what to search for but maybe there's a void here.
What am I talking about? The term I've heard used to describe it is 'Popeing', but Google's definition of that term is not what I'm talking about. (While intriguing it is not the sort of thing I want to see happen with the Puerto Rico players...) It's the act of saying things while playing a game in an attempt to convince your opponents that someone else is winning. The goal is to convince the other players to take actions to restrict that opponent instead of actions to restrict you thereby increasing the odds you'll win the game.
The primary example, to me, is Settlers of Catan.Watch a game of Settlers and wait for someone to roll a 7. If you play with people who are anything like the people I play games with you should immediately hear three people point out the 'obvious' hex on which to place the robber. You'll also notice that none of those three people pointed to a hex adjacent to their own settlements. (And, as a result, the three 'obvious' hexes are at least two and sometimes three distinct hexes.) If you're playing with really aggressive people here they'll even bribe you to take their suggestion. "I'll give you a sheep if you don't hit me." "I won't use my soldier to put it back on your land if you hit Sky." etc...
Why did people pick the hexes they did?
Well, some people just want to increase their own position in an absolute sense and therefore just want you to hit anybody that isn't them. Maybe they're trying to protect the only brick card in their hand and bribing you with extra sheep will further their position. Maybe they desperately need wheat and don't want the robber on their wheat square. Maybe they just don't like getting attacked.
Others will try to work out who's currently leading and want you to hit them to bring them back to the pack. Deny them a card from hand and a good production square and maybe there's time for the rest of you to catch up.
Some will try to figure who's their biggest competition and campaign to hurt them. This is similar to above in terms of the actual pitch but the reasoning behind them is different and it can be hard to distinguish between the two at the table. (Do I want you to hit Sky because if you don't he's going to win or do I want you to hit Sky because if you do I will win... My pitch is the same either way but in the first case you actually may want to hit Sky and in the second you actually probably should hit me.)
Some just bring outside grudges into the game. (Sky drank the last Coke so I want to punish him.)
Maybe someone in your group just wins a lot so you want to hit them so they don't win this time. (Robb is winning! Let's get him!)
Sometimes people even try to look at things objectively from your point of view. Yeah, I'm winning, you really should hit me. More likely if we're preparing for a tournament of some kind but sometimes just the beauty of a perfectly played game is more important than winning by any means.
Personally I like to talk a fair bit during games because I like to learn how to play games better and part of that is finding out why other people are doing what they're doing. If I make a suggestion that I think is right and it gets justifiably shot down then I can use that information to potentially revise what I think is right in the future. I want to win too, and mostly I want to win against optimal opponent play and not because they threw me the game, but I do get sucked into Popeing for the sake of winning sometimes. (Which, admittedly, can make it hard for people to work out my motivations at any given time.) When I make helpful suggestions I do try to point out if it's also very good for me to do it, though with destructive suggestions that's less likely. (For example, at the start of our Le Havre game I mentioned a plan I saw used at WBC that seemed to work ok, but I mentioned it after I had already set up to take advantage of it myself if someone did it. Aidan took that plan but I did point out it was good for me too if he did it, as I got to build the marketplace with wood since he took bucks and didn't buy it.)
The important thing to consider though is what does Popeing actually accomplish? If you're playing with new or impressionable players then often a game will come down to who Popes more. Stay silent in a game of Settlers with 2 new players and a shark and you'll lose practically every time. They'll get lopsided trades and you won't since they'll butt in with helpful advice to torpedo your scams but will succeed in their own scams if you're silent. The robber will live on your land. They'll build to the hexes you want. You'll need some pretty good dice to overcome those sorts of handicaps.
If you're playing a game with experts then it mostly just adds noise and length to the game. Assuming everyone is Popeing non-stop then chances are the optimal move will get iterated over and you just need to find brain time to spend on finding it and filtering out the other comments.
But if you're playing a game with experts and some people Pope and some don't the Popers still get an advantage. Now on your turn you have as options to consider all moves you thought up yourself and all moves that hurt Sky. If Sky isn't Popeing back then sometimes you'll fail to consider the move that hurts me but you'll never fail to consider the move that hurts Sky. This has to put Sky at a disadvantage compared to me unless you're perfect at iterating all your possible moves or vindictively attack the Poper. (And if your goal is winning you're not likely to do that!)
Now, I don't remember all the details of the games last year but I distinctly remember we played a 4 player game of Puerto Rico. Sky and I both got off to an early lead (maybe we bought the harbors?) and immediately started pointing fingers at each other. Duncan looked like he had a decent building strategy going on and Pounder was saying he'd already lost. His position certainly looked pretty bad. But then as the game progressed we stopped considering how our moves would affect Pounder. One particular example involved the trading house having 3 goods in it. Either Sky or myself could have solo-sold something cheap but doing so wasn't going to hurt the other one. So Pounder got to solo-sell coffee. Needless to say, Pounder ended up winning the game handily.
Which is why I don't like playing Puerto Rico very much. The game is all about benefiting from the actions other people take. When Popeing plays a major role in the game everything changes. It turns into a game of convincing the other players to vote you the winner.
Three years ago I won the WBC Puerto Rico tournament. There wasn't any Popeing in any of the games except for the final. All of my elimination games were very close and all came down to one of the players choosing who was going to win on the final turn. My opponents in the quarterfinals and semifinals didn't try to sway the play in their favour, and neither did I. In both cases I remember looking at the opponent and shrugging as we waited for another player to pick the winner. The finals was a little different. There was one instance of Popeing, and it was actually from a player directed at himself. He managed to convince himself that I was winning and that he should take a move that was really bad for himself in order to hurt me. It turns out if he just takes his best play he wins the game! But denying me my best move (and letting me take my second best move) was enough for me to make up the gap.
Two years ago I also played in the PR tournament and came (tied for) last in all my games. I don't think I played particularly worse in those games but the opponents sat down with the advance knowledge that I'd won the year before. I really dislike Popeing with strangers so I once again didn't take part but the other players were all over making sure I couldn't do anything. One game I started off well with an early coffee and the other players conspired to give another player the money to build coffee, called settler so he could get a coffee plantation, mayored to turn it on, and crafted a second time so he could have coffee to sell before I could.
I liked the game when it was about finding the best action to take for your self. I liked it when it was about setting up to take advantage of other people's best actions. I hate it when it's all about convincing other people to do what you want with words.
An interesting situation came up in a game of Puerto Rico on the weekend that I wanted to talk about to go over decision making in general and my dislike for Puerto Rico as a game in particular but the more I thought over the ideas in my head (I have a hard time falling asleep...) the more I decided the whole situation was just a symptom of an entirely different issue worth discussing. I turned to Google to do some background research but couldn't find anyone saying anything about it. I'm thinking it's likely I just don't know what to search for but maybe there's a void here.
What am I talking about? The term I've heard used to describe it is 'Popeing', but Google's definition of that term is not what I'm talking about. (While intriguing it is not the sort of thing I want to see happen with the Puerto Rico players...) It's the act of saying things while playing a game in an attempt to convince your opponents that someone else is winning. The goal is to convince the other players to take actions to restrict that opponent instead of actions to restrict you thereby increasing the odds you'll win the game.
The primary example, to me, is Settlers of Catan.Watch a game of Settlers and wait for someone to roll a 7. If you play with people who are anything like the people I play games with you should immediately hear three people point out the 'obvious' hex on which to place the robber. You'll also notice that none of those three people pointed to a hex adjacent to their own settlements. (And, as a result, the three 'obvious' hexes are at least two and sometimes three distinct hexes.) If you're playing with really aggressive people here they'll even bribe you to take their suggestion. "I'll give you a sheep if you don't hit me." "I won't use my soldier to put it back on your land if you hit Sky." etc...
Why did people pick the hexes they did?
Well, some people just want to increase their own position in an absolute sense and therefore just want you to hit anybody that isn't them. Maybe they're trying to protect the only brick card in their hand and bribing you with extra sheep will further their position. Maybe they desperately need wheat and don't want the robber on their wheat square. Maybe they just don't like getting attacked.
Others will try to work out who's currently leading and want you to hit them to bring them back to the pack. Deny them a card from hand and a good production square and maybe there's time for the rest of you to catch up.
Some will try to figure who's their biggest competition and campaign to hurt them. This is similar to above in terms of the actual pitch but the reasoning behind them is different and it can be hard to distinguish between the two at the table. (Do I want you to hit Sky because if you don't he's going to win or do I want you to hit Sky because if you do I will win... My pitch is the same either way but in the first case you actually may want to hit Sky and in the second you actually probably should hit me.)
Some just bring outside grudges into the game. (Sky drank the last Coke so I want to punish him.)
Maybe someone in your group just wins a lot so you want to hit them so they don't win this time. (Robb is winning! Let's get him!)
Sometimes people even try to look at things objectively from your point of view. Yeah, I'm winning, you really should hit me. More likely if we're preparing for a tournament of some kind but sometimes just the beauty of a perfectly played game is more important than winning by any means.
Personally I like to talk a fair bit during games because I like to learn how to play games better and part of that is finding out why other people are doing what they're doing. If I make a suggestion that I think is right and it gets justifiably shot down then I can use that information to potentially revise what I think is right in the future. I want to win too, and mostly I want to win against optimal opponent play and not because they threw me the game, but I do get sucked into Popeing for the sake of winning sometimes. (Which, admittedly, can make it hard for people to work out my motivations at any given time.) When I make helpful suggestions I do try to point out if it's also very good for me to do it, though with destructive suggestions that's less likely. (For example, at the start of our Le Havre game I mentioned a plan I saw used at WBC that seemed to work ok, but I mentioned it after I had already set up to take advantage of it myself if someone did it. Aidan took that plan but I did point out it was good for me too if he did it, as I got to build the marketplace with wood since he took bucks and didn't buy it.)
The important thing to consider though is what does Popeing actually accomplish? If you're playing with new or impressionable players then often a game will come down to who Popes more. Stay silent in a game of Settlers with 2 new players and a shark and you'll lose practically every time. They'll get lopsided trades and you won't since they'll butt in with helpful advice to torpedo your scams but will succeed in their own scams if you're silent. The robber will live on your land. They'll build to the hexes you want. You'll need some pretty good dice to overcome those sorts of handicaps.
If you're playing a game with experts then it mostly just adds noise and length to the game. Assuming everyone is Popeing non-stop then chances are the optimal move will get iterated over and you just need to find brain time to spend on finding it and filtering out the other comments.
But if you're playing a game with experts and some people Pope and some don't the Popers still get an advantage. Now on your turn you have as options to consider all moves you thought up yourself and all moves that hurt Sky. If Sky isn't Popeing back then sometimes you'll fail to consider the move that hurts me but you'll never fail to consider the move that hurts Sky. This has to put Sky at a disadvantage compared to me unless you're perfect at iterating all your possible moves or vindictively attack the Poper. (And if your goal is winning you're not likely to do that!)
Now, I don't remember all the details of the games last year but I distinctly remember we played a 4 player game of Puerto Rico. Sky and I both got off to an early lead (maybe we bought the harbors?) and immediately started pointing fingers at each other. Duncan looked like he had a decent building strategy going on and Pounder was saying he'd already lost. His position certainly looked pretty bad. But then as the game progressed we stopped considering how our moves would affect Pounder. One particular example involved the trading house having 3 goods in it. Either Sky or myself could have solo-sold something cheap but doing so wasn't going to hurt the other one. So Pounder got to solo-sell coffee. Needless to say, Pounder ended up winning the game handily.
Which is why I don't like playing Puerto Rico very much. The game is all about benefiting from the actions other people take. When Popeing plays a major role in the game everything changes. It turns into a game of convincing the other players to vote you the winner.
Three years ago I won the WBC Puerto Rico tournament. There wasn't any Popeing in any of the games except for the final. All of my elimination games were very close and all came down to one of the players choosing who was going to win on the final turn. My opponents in the quarterfinals and semifinals didn't try to sway the play in their favour, and neither did I. In both cases I remember looking at the opponent and shrugging as we waited for another player to pick the winner. The finals was a little different. There was one instance of Popeing, and it was actually from a player directed at himself. He managed to convince himself that I was winning and that he should take a move that was really bad for himself in order to hurt me. It turns out if he just takes his best play he wins the game! But denying me my best move (and letting me take my second best move) was enough for me to make up the gap.
Two years ago I also played in the PR tournament and came (tied for) last in all my games. I don't think I played particularly worse in those games but the opponents sat down with the advance knowledge that I'd won the year before. I really dislike Popeing with strangers so I once again didn't take part but the other players were all over making sure I couldn't do anything. One game I started off well with an early coffee and the other players conspired to give another player the money to build coffee, called settler so he could get a coffee plantation, mayored to turn it on, and crafted a second time so he could have coffee to sell before I could.
I liked the game when it was about finding the best action to take for your self. I liked it when it was about setting up to take advantage of other people's best actions. I hate it when it's all about convincing other people to do what you want with words.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
M12: Skywinder Drake
Wizards has a lot of images from the M12 set up on their website. What they had up so far was pretty interesting but one card in particular brought back memories of possibly the most important draft of my life. The card?
I expect most people will see this and be pretty unexcited. Sure, it's a nice aggressive card for blue in drafts but what's so special about it? Well, it is a functionally equivalent reprint of the card Rishadan Airship from the Mercadian Masques set, which was the limited format for the first Pro Tour I qualified for.
It was December 5th, 1999. Pro Tour: Chicago was taking place and there was a storm in Toronto so the turnout was very low. Jer had won a PTQ in Waterloo earlier in the season but still let a couple of us crash at his parent's house in Toronto and chauffeured us around. I think it was just myself and Tom playing in the tournament. There were 5 rounds and I was 3-1 going into the 5th round. The judge then pulled out a rule I'd never seen before and hadn't seen since. There were enough people at 3-1 that if we all drew some of us wouldn't make top 8, but if just one table drew they'd both advance. He didn't want games dragging on as we waited to see if other people were drawing or not so he said we had to decide _right now_ if we were drawing. We were all choosing secretly if we wanted to draw without even knowing who our opponents were. If two people wanted to draw and happened to get matched up they could draw. Otherwise we had to play. No one ended up drawing.
My opponent ended up being incredibly slow, and we actually ended up naturally drawing. I'm not sure if he did it on purpose or not, I certainly played fast as always. At any rate we both ended up making top 8. We had a draft archetype we liked in Team Comf which involved focusing heavily on blue for aggressive flyers (3/1 and 2/3 for 3) coupled with great control cards like waterfront bouncer, stinging barrier, counterspell, and gush. I ended up drafting mono blue with I think 4 bouncers and a ton of flyers. I won the first two rounds easily and ended up in finals against a young Richard Hoaen. I believe we split the first two games and were on to game three for all the marbles.
We ended up doing a lot of early damage to each other and then the board clogged up with a lot of junk on both sides. On the critical turn I declared an attack and Hoaen cast shoving match. This was a blue instant which gave all creatures in play on both sides the ability to tap to tap another target creature. In a game with a lot of creatures and low life totals it might as well read 'target player wins the game'.
Typically what will happen is the caster will tap a creature to tap something else. The something else has the same ability so it taps back. Eventually everything is tapped. And when everything is tapped, I lose. So I put on my best dejected face and didn't tap anything back. After all, doing so would guarantee I lose. Hoaen tapped my flyers and then said he was done. It was at this point that my heart started racing and I got really excited. I turned to the judge and said 'I get to attack now, right?' and the judge nodded. So I attacked with my Saprazzan Outrigger, used my balloon peddler to give it flying, and then used the shoving match and my remaining creatures to tap the rest of Hoaen's flyers. Outrigger punched him in the face and killed him off. 'Target player wins the game' indeed, but for some reason he targeted me with it instead of himself.
I often get asked by people why I never concede games when it's 'obvious' I'm dead. This game is the primary reason why. Even when I know I'm guaranteed dead just the act of staying calm and making my opponent keep making plays can result in them making a brutal mistake and throwing the game away. Also, sometimes I actually have an answer in hand. If I'd always concede when I didn't then good players could play around my answer when I don't. By always making the game play out to conclusion I remove that tell from play. (An exception is if I think time is a concern and it's just game 1 and not the match. Conceding early to save time can make sense.) Interestingly, the first time I qualified for Nationals I won a slot in a grinder. My opponent in the last round of that grinder had the game guaranteed won several times but managed to throw the game away at every turn.
Never give up! Never surrender!
I expect most people will see this and be pretty unexcited. Sure, it's a nice aggressive card for blue in drafts but what's so special about it? Well, it is a functionally equivalent reprint of the card Rishadan Airship from the Mercadian Masques set, which was the limited format for the first Pro Tour I qualified for.
It was December 5th, 1999. Pro Tour: Chicago was taking place and there was a storm in Toronto so the turnout was very low. Jer had won a PTQ in Waterloo earlier in the season but still let a couple of us crash at his parent's house in Toronto and chauffeured us around. I think it was just myself and Tom playing in the tournament. There were 5 rounds and I was 3-1 going into the 5th round. The judge then pulled out a rule I'd never seen before and hadn't seen since. There were enough people at 3-1 that if we all drew some of us wouldn't make top 8, but if just one table drew they'd both advance. He didn't want games dragging on as we waited to see if other people were drawing or not so he said we had to decide _right now_ if we were drawing. We were all choosing secretly if we wanted to draw without even knowing who our opponents were. If two people wanted to draw and happened to get matched up they could draw. Otherwise we had to play. No one ended up drawing.
My opponent ended up being incredibly slow, and we actually ended up naturally drawing. I'm not sure if he did it on purpose or not, I certainly played fast as always. At any rate we both ended up making top 8. We had a draft archetype we liked in Team Comf which involved focusing heavily on blue for aggressive flyers (3/1 and 2/3 for 3) coupled with great control cards like waterfront bouncer, stinging barrier, counterspell, and gush. I ended up drafting mono blue with I think 4 bouncers and a ton of flyers. I won the first two rounds easily and ended up in finals against a young Richard Hoaen. I believe we split the first two games and were on to game three for all the marbles.
We ended up doing a lot of early damage to each other and then the board clogged up with a lot of junk on both sides. On the critical turn I declared an attack and Hoaen cast shoving match. This was a blue instant which gave all creatures in play on both sides the ability to tap to tap another target creature. In a game with a lot of creatures and low life totals it might as well read 'target player wins the game'.
Typically what will happen is the caster will tap a creature to tap something else. The something else has the same ability so it taps back. Eventually everything is tapped. And when everything is tapped, I lose. So I put on my best dejected face and didn't tap anything back. After all, doing so would guarantee I lose. Hoaen tapped my flyers and then said he was done. It was at this point that my heart started racing and I got really excited. I turned to the judge and said 'I get to attack now, right?' and the judge nodded. So I attacked with my Saprazzan Outrigger, used my balloon peddler to give it flying, and then used the shoving match and my remaining creatures to tap the rest of Hoaen's flyers. Outrigger punched him in the face and killed him off. 'Target player wins the game' indeed, but for some reason he targeted me with it instead of himself.
I often get asked by people why I never concede games when it's 'obvious' I'm dead. This game is the primary reason why. Even when I know I'm guaranteed dead just the act of staying calm and making my opponent keep making plays can result in them making a brutal mistake and throwing the game away. Also, sometimes I actually have an answer in hand. If I'd always concede when I didn't then good players could play around my answer when I don't. By always making the game play out to conclusion I remove that tell from play. (An exception is if I think time is a concern and it's just game 1 and not the match. Conceding early to save time can make sense.) Interestingly, the first time I qualified for Nationals I won a slot in a grinder. My opponent in the last round of that grinder had the game guaranteed won several times but managed to throw the game away at every turn.
Never give up! Never surrender!
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Cylon Leaders
The second Battlestar Galactica board game expansion came out last week and it just happened to be New Year's Eve so of course it got picked up and played at Andrew's place. There are a lot of new mechanics so we wanted to minimize the impact of the first expansion but we ended up with 7 players and hence had to use a cylon leader. I rolled relatively high and got to pick second and decided if one of us had to be a cylon leader it might as well be me.
For those who may not know the game it's a team game where you don't know who's on your team at the start of the game. You get dealt secret cards indicating which team you're on both at the start of the game and halfway through the game. Everyone starts out as a human but some people are actually cylons in disguise. The humans are just trying to survive to game end; the cylons are trying to commit genocide in any of a variety of ways. You take a lot of hidden actions so people try to use logic to deduce who is actually evil based on imperfect information. It's pretty interesting but hard to balance with 7 people. 4 humans against 3 cylons is pretty much a slaughter for the cylons. 5 humans against 2 cylons is pretty much a guaranteed win for the humans. So what they did was they made the "cylon leader" who doesn't take part in the hidden team part of the game the way the other players do. They act as a cylon most of the time but can also turn into a human and help them if they want. Their motivation is derived from a secret agenda card which tells them what their win conditions are. They either need the humans to win while having done things to hurt them or they need the cylons to win with a lot of complications tacked on. In theory it makes the balance more like 4.5 vs 2.5 but in practice it doesn't always work out that way. I think it warps games but it's a reasonable solution to the problem of the game only being balanced with 5 players by default.
At any rate, an interesting situation arose in the game we played. It became pretty clear that I was a cylon-wins cylon leader since every overt action I took for the first 2 hours of the game was attacking the humans. It also became pretty clear that the humans were dead. They were in danger of losing on 5 of the 6 losing conditions and were a long way from the end. But I hadn't completed my special objectives yet, so we were basically just playing it out to see if I could win or not. Assuming I actually am a cylon-wins character there are 4 possible options for what I could need to accomplish. The question then is, how should the other players act?
The 4 humans should hope for a miracle and keep trying to survive as long as possible. I'd actually started helping them near the end and a couple lucky draws and maybe they could have pulled it off. Alternatively, if they've really given up they could try to work out my win condition and fight to keep me from getting it. The cylons win, no need to have the cylon leader win.
What should the 2 cylons do? If they get me working with them again they definitely win. Ignore me and they almost certainly win. If they work at it they might be able to screw me out of my goal, but should they even worry about it? There is certainly some risk involved, since the further they take me from my goal the more I need to prolong the game in order to win.
For me the answer is clear. I need to achieve my goal and then blow the humans up. If I'm not going to win I have to keep them alive, if I am I want them dead. I'm not spite playing here, if that matters, but maximizing my own winningness. This sort of thing came up in Republic of Rome too. Is it 'better' for the humans to have me lose too? Is it 'worse' if I win? Or once they've lost should it be irrelevant to them?
As it turned out I had to help the humans survive one card that was guaranteed to kill them if I hadn't helped. My criteria was met shortly thereafter and then we blew them up. No one even put any thought into what I could be trying to accomplish or tried to help/hinder me in any way. The game was a little long and I think most people just wanted it over, but I'm not sure they could have colluded to keep me from winning even if they knew my goal. (Not without just throwing in the towel long before they were practically guaranteed death.) I'm pretty sure I had the hardest secret objective (cylons win, 3 or less morale, 4 or more Galactica locations damaged) and it was pretty tricky trying to pull both of the requirements off. But I was essentially a better cylon from the start of the game to the end and only helped the humans once, so they didn't have a lot of hope of winning, sadly. Which is the problem with the cylon leaders in general. I had a great game but the humans (Andrew, Byung, Dee, and Heather) had a lot of trouble and the two cylons (Adam and Duncan) had an easier time than they should have. This isn't to say they didn't play well (Adam managed to take some bad actions as a hidden cylon without being ousted and I didn't think Duncan was a cylon either until he revealed) but the game balance was skewed in their favour because of the cylon leader. It's always great to be the cylon leader, so if I played a lot of games and everyone rotated being the cylon leader I think it would be a reasonable mechanic. But I don't play enough and some people refuse to be a cylon leader so I'm not much of a fan. Even if you can call me Al.
For those who may not know the game it's a team game where you don't know who's on your team at the start of the game. You get dealt secret cards indicating which team you're on both at the start of the game and halfway through the game. Everyone starts out as a human but some people are actually cylons in disguise. The humans are just trying to survive to game end; the cylons are trying to commit genocide in any of a variety of ways. You take a lot of hidden actions so people try to use logic to deduce who is actually evil based on imperfect information. It's pretty interesting but hard to balance with 7 people. 4 humans against 3 cylons is pretty much a slaughter for the cylons. 5 humans against 2 cylons is pretty much a guaranteed win for the humans. So what they did was they made the "cylon leader" who doesn't take part in the hidden team part of the game the way the other players do. They act as a cylon most of the time but can also turn into a human and help them if they want. Their motivation is derived from a secret agenda card which tells them what their win conditions are. They either need the humans to win while having done things to hurt them or they need the cylons to win with a lot of complications tacked on. In theory it makes the balance more like 4.5 vs 2.5 but in practice it doesn't always work out that way. I think it warps games but it's a reasonable solution to the problem of the game only being balanced with 5 players by default.
At any rate, an interesting situation arose in the game we played. It became pretty clear that I was a cylon-wins cylon leader since every overt action I took for the first 2 hours of the game was attacking the humans. It also became pretty clear that the humans were dead. They were in danger of losing on 5 of the 6 losing conditions and were a long way from the end. But I hadn't completed my special objectives yet, so we were basically just playing it out to see if I could win or not. Assuming I actually am a cylon-wins character there are 4 possible options for what I could need to accomplish. The question then is, how should the other players act?
The 4 humans should hope for a miracle and keep trying to survive as long as possible. I'd actually started helping them near the end and a couple lucky draws and maybe they could have pulled it off. Alternatively, if they've really given up they could try to work out my win condition and fight to keep me from getting it. The cylons win, no need to have the cylon leader win.
What should the 2 cylons do? If they get me working with them again they definitely win. Ignore me and they almost certainly win. If they work at it they might be able to screw me out of my goal, but should they even worry about it? There is certainly some risk involved, since the further they take me from my goal the more I need to prolong the game in order to win.
For me the answer is clear. I need to achieve my goal and then blow the humans up. If I'm not going to win I have to keep them alive, if I am I want them dead. I'm not spite playing here, if that matters, but maximizing my own winningness. This sort of thing came up in Republic of Rome too. Is it 'better' for the humans to have me lose too? Is it 'worse' if I win? Or once they've lost should it be irrelevant to them?
As it turned out I had to help the humans survive one card that was guaranteed to kill them if I hadn't helped. My criteria was met shortly thereafter and then we blew them up. No one even put any thought into what I could be trying to accomplish or tried to help/hinder me in any way. The game was a little long and I think most people just wanted it over, but I'm not sure they could have colluded to keep me from winning even if they knew my goal. (Not without just throwing in the towel long before they were practically guaranteed death.) I'm pretty sure I had the hardest secret objective (cylons win, 3 or less morale, 4 or more Galactica locations damaged) and it was pretty tricky trying to pull both of the requirements off. But I was essentially a better cylon from the start of the game to the end and only helped the humans once, so they didn't have a lot of hope of winning, sadly. Which is the problem with the cylon leaders in general. I had a great game but the humans (Andrew, Byung, Dee, and Heather) had a lot of trouble and the two cylons (Adam and Duncan) had an easier time than they should have. This isn't to say they didn't play well (Adam managed to take some bad actions as a hidden cylon without being ousted and I didn't think Duncan was a cylon either until he revealed) but the game balance was skewed in their favour because of the cylon leader. It's always great to be the cylon leader, so if I played a lot of games and everyone rotated being the cylon leader I think it would be a reasonable mechanic. But I don't play enough and some people refuse to be a cylon leader so I'm not much of a fan. Even if you can call me Al.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
WBC 2008 -> Day 6
Prelude
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap
Puerto Rico – semi-finals – 9am – I end up in a game with Brian Kowal and two people I didn’t recognize. I took Robb’s previous advice to heart and positioned myself to Brian’s right and it ended up paying off. I was able to take a couple of moves which hurt his position while the guy on my left failed to hurt me. I’m pretty sure I paid for 4th chair in this game after Brian and I bid one of the other players up to 2.5 on seat 3.
I ended up winning by a fairly large margin, and I remember at one point Brian looked at me and just shook his head after the guy on my right just kept taking jobs that were awesome for me.
Puerto Rico – finals – 11am – The time here is a bit of a misnomer as we actually had a large delay before the round started. The GM had made it to the finals so he was scrambling trying to find someone else to record the game move for move for posterity. Those of us playing didn’t seem to mind but Pounder was a little bitter as he had an 8 hour drive ahead of him and wanted to get started as soon as he could. Oh well!
The GM (John Weber) sent me the recap and it will be included in the next post along with my comments about the game. Sadly I entered in the comments this week instead of at the time so it’s not as detailed as it could have been but I did what I could given my procrastinationism.
Spoiler alert: I won, collected my plaque and headed home. We ran into a minor issue trying to find a bridge back into the country but eventually we stopped at a knick-knack shop and I used a placemat map to guess our way to the Rainbow Bridge.
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap
Puerto Rico – semi-finals – 9am – I end up in a game with Brian Kowal and two people I didn’t recognize. I took Robb’s previous advice to heart and positioned myself to Brian’s right and it ended up paying off. I was able to take a couple of moves which hurt his position while the guy on my left failed to hurt me. I’m pretty sure I paid for 4th chair in this game after Brian and I bid one of the other players up to 2.5 on seat 3.
I ended up winning by a fairly large margin, and I remember at one point Brian looked at me and just shook his head after the guy on my right just kept taking jobs that were awesome for me.
Puerto Rico – finals – 11am – The time here is a bit of a misnomer as we actually had a large delay before the round started. The GM had made it to the finals so he was scrambling trying to find someone else to record the game move for move for posterity. Those of us playing didn’t seem to mind but Pounder was a little bitter as he had an 8 hour drive ahead of him and wanted to get started as soon as he could. Oh well!
The GM (John Weber) sent me the recap and it will be included in the next post along with my comments about the game. Sadly I entered in the comments this week instead of at the time so it’s not as detailed as it could have been but I did what I could given my procrastinationism.
Spoiler alert: I won, collected my plaque and headed home. We ran into a minor issue trying to find a bridge back into the country but eventually we stopped at a knick-knack shop and I used a placemat map to guess our way to the Rainbow Bridge.
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.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
WBC 2008 -> Day 2
Prelude
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap
Last year we stayed at the hotel across the street which came with 2 free breakfast buffets, which we made full use of. We decided to hit the breakfast buffet at the event site this year, even though it wasn't free. Despite it not being free it was actually much worse. The selection was smaller, the cereal was stale, and they didn't have an omelette guy. We were not impressed, and I for one didn't go back.
Titan 2-player - 10 am - Titan 2 player is run as a single elimination event with rounds scheduled haphazardly. The goal is to be done by the end, and you're supposed to arrange to play your next match with your next opponent as soon as is feasible without screwing your week. Unfortunately I didn't take this to heart, as we will see...
Anyway, they set things up with seeding such that all previous winners are spread apart on the single elimination bracket. I was matched up with a former winner. I don't remember much about the game but my notes say I won in 35 minutes during the first battle of the game. Short and sweet! What I should have done is looked at the schedule and found something else to do. What I actually did was wait around for the match containing my next opponent to finish. They didn't finish for over 7 hours...
Now I was really annoyed at this at the time, but the problem is really my own. I should have found something to do and let the guys playing know that I'd be back in a couple hours to check in on them. For no good reason I stuck around skipping events I wanted to play in so I could be available as soon as they finished.
The kicker here is they finished and the winner decided he'd rather play the next morning anyway as he'd played enough Titan. *sigh* At this point they were trying to put together some 4 player Titan games and were short some players. I always want to play at least one game of multiplayer Titan each year to boost their attendance numbers. (If you're trying to make the semi-finals you want to play 6 games ideally, less if you win a couple.) After sitting around for 7 hours to play Titan I figured I should get my 4 player Titan game in. The really frustrating part is the ended up with 7 people interested in playing multiplayer Titan and my 2-player Titan opponent stepped in to fill out the games. So, my opponent who didn't want to play more 2-player Titan put it off so he could play 4-player Titan. *sigh*
If I was a more assertive fellow I'd have pushed to play 2-player then and there but because I'm not I didn't.
In the middle of waiting I went to watch the Agricola demo. I should have then played in the Agricola round and I'd probably have been a lot happier with the day. Oh well.
Titan 4-player - 6 pm - I ended up in a game with Robb and there were things on the schedule I really wanted to do at 9 (Queen's Gambit), 10 (Vegas Showdown), and 11 (Can't Stop). I came second in Can't Stop last year and really wanted to improve on that so my plan was QG at 9 and CS at 11. So, of course, I end up in a fight for my life in Titan with Robb around 8. That one fight took 45 minutes. I managed to win the fight but ended up in a position where I was forced to attack a couple of turns later. I was eliminated and it was past 9. *sigh*
I could have aborted to Vegas Showdown but I really wanted to play Can't Stop. So I stuck around watching things until 11.
Can't Stop - 11pm - Last year I made it to the finals and the GM commented that he thought the game was incredibly random and he didn't expect to ever see the same people make it to the finals year after year. Now, I think Can't Stop has a lot of skill to it, and I think most people are very bad, so I really wanted to prove him wrong and make it back to the finals. I started off by winning the first round, but that incredible random part bit me in the butt for the second round. The guy who ended up winning stopped literally every 5 rolls. That gives your opponents so many turns to win its ridiculous. I, on the other hand, kept getting really terrible rolls, things like trips and quads only a couple of rolls in. I'm convinced my opponent's plan actually only gave him a really small chance to win as he needed both me and the third guy to consistently fail with good odds to succeed. Oh well! I'll be back next year!
Nefertiti - 12pmish - Robb also lost in round 2 and I don't think Pounder played at all. We headed back to Cafe Jay and looked for a new demo to play. We ended up playing Nefertiti which is an odd little auction/collection game. I set out to collect the rare stuff worth the most and got almost all of them. It was an interesting game, the costs of the auctions changed as time went on so it had a bit more variance than something like Ra and I'd consider playing it again.
Quo Vadis - later - We headed back to the room but for some insane reason decided to play Quo Vadis instead of going to bed. We ended up losing a piece but found it under the bed 3 days later. (Doesn't say much for the cleaning staff!)
Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
PR Finals
Recap
Last year we stayed at the hotel across the street which came with 2 free breakfast buffets, which we made full use of. We decided to hit the breakfast buffet at the event site this year, even though it wasn't free. Despite it not being free it was actually much worse. The selection was smaller, the cereal was stale, and they didn't have an omelette guy. We were not impressed, and I for one didn't go back.
Titan 2-player - 10 am - Titan 2 player is run as a single elimination event with rounds scheduled haphazardly. The goal is to be done by the end, and you're supposed to arrange to play your next match with your next opponent as soon as is feasible without screwing your week. Unfortunately I didn't take this to heart, as we will see...
Anyway, they set things up with seeding such that all previous winners are spread apart on the single elimination bracket. I was matched up with a former winner. I don't remember much about the game but my notes say I won in 35 minutes during the first battle of the game. Short and sweet! What I should have done is looked at the schedule and found something else to do. What I actually did was wait around for the match containing my next opponent to finish. They didn't finish for over 7 hours...
Now I was really annoyed at this at the time, but the problem is really my own. I should have found something to do and let the guys playing know that I'd be back in a couple hours to check in on them. For no good reason I stuck around skipping events I wanted to play in so I could be available as soon as they finished.
The kicker here is they finished and the winner decided he'd rather play the next morning anyway as he'd played enough Titan. *sigh* At this point they were trying to put together some 4 player Titan games and were short some players. I always want to play at least one game of multiplayer Titan each year to boost their attendance numbers. (If you're trying to make the semi-finals you want to play 6 games ideally, less if you win a couple.) After sitting around for 7 hours to play Titan I figured I should get my 4 player Titan game in. The really frustrating part is the ended up with 7 people interested in playing multiplayer Titan and my 2-player Titan opponent stepped in to fill out the games. So, my opponent who didn't want to play more 2-player Titan put it off so he could play 4-player Titan. *sigh*
If I was a more assertive fellow I'd have pushed to play 2-player then and there but because I'm not I didn't.
In the middle of waiting I went to watch the Agricola demo. I should have then played in the Agricola round and I'd probably have been a lot happier with the day. Oh well.
Titan 4-player - 6 pm - I ended up in a game with Robb and there were things on the schedule I really wanted to do at 9 (Queen's Gambit), 10 (Vegas Showdown), and 11 (Can't Stop). I came second in Can't Stop last year and really wanted to improve on that so my plan was QG at 9 and CS at 11. So, of course, I end up in a fight for my life in Titan with Robb around 8. That one fight took 45 minutes. I managed to win the fight but ended up in a position where I was forced to attack a couple of turns later. I was eliminated and it was past 9. *sigh*
I could have aborted to Vegas Showdown but I really wanted to play Can't Stop. So I stuck around watching things until 11.
Can't Stop - 11pm - Last year I made it to the finals and the GM commented that he thought the game was incredibly random and he didn't expect to ever see the same people make it to the finals year after year. Now, I think Can't Stop has a lot of skill to it, and I think most people are very bad, so I really wanted to prove him wrong and make it back to the finals. I started off by winning the first round, but that incredible random part bit me in the butt for the second round. The guy who ended up winning stopped literally every 5 rolls. That gives your opponents so many turns to win its ridiculous. I, on the other hand, kept getting really terrible rolls, things like trips and quads only a couple of rolls in. I'm convinced my opponent's plan actually only gave him a really small chance to win as he needed both me and the third guy to consistently fail with good odds to succeed. Oh well! I'll be back next year!
Nefertiti - 12pmish - Robb also lost in round 2 and I don't think Pounder played at all. We headed back to Cafe Jay and looked for a new demo to play. We ended up playing Nefertiti which is an odd little auction/collection game. I set out to collect the rare stuff worth the most and got almost all of them. It was an interesting game, the costs of the auctions changed as time went on so it had a bit more variance than something like Ra and I'd consider playing it again.
Quo Vadis - later - We headed back to the room but for some insane reason decided to play Quo Vadis instead of going to bed. We ended up losing a piece but found it under the bed 3 days later. (Doesn't say much for the cleaning staff!)
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...
Sunday, January 06, 2008
WBC 'report', Part 1
This all happened five months ago and the only notes I have are little pencil marks in my guide book indicating what events I thought I wanted to go to so this won't be an incredibly detailed report. It should, however, serve to demonstrate just how much gaming there is to be had at WBC.
We drove down to Lancaster on Tuesday morning, stopping to pick Robb and Lin up in Cambridge and then at a diner in some small town in rural PA, but beyond that it was straight through. It took something like 8 hours all told, and we ended up in Lancaster around 4-5pm. Our hotel ended up directly across the street from the convention center which was convenient. However, it is a major highway so crossing it was exciting to say the least. We didn't bother to pack any games so we didn't have to cart anything across the street ever, just cut and run when the coast looked clear.
Once we'd finally crossed the street we had to go register. Robb and Pounder had been to WBC a couple years earlier so they didn't have to have their pictures taken, but Lin and I had to so we got to wait around for a bit while that happened.
(I look like a farmer in mine!)
5pm is the start of demos, but 6pm is the start of actual events. 22 different games had rounds start at 6pm, many of which I wanted to play but I didn't really know my way around and didn't particularly want to try something new for my first event. Robb and Pounder were going to play El Grande and I don't detest that game so I followed along and gave it a spin. I almost won my game, finishing a close second, but I believe both Robb and Pounder won their games. Robb ended up winning the entire event!
They only had 2 hour rounds for El Grande which is a little tight, and we ended up missing the 8pm start time for other events. 9pm didn't have any games we wanted to play but did have the Titan demo so we wandered over to that. We'd met quite a few of the main Titan players a couple years ago when we stormed US Nationals down in Maryland, which Robb also won. Every night at 11pm they have a less serious game which tends to have a large turnout due to nothing else going on, and these games often lend themselves to drinking. The 11pm game on Tuesday was Win, Place & Show which was a horse racing game that didn't sound very interesting so we played the 10pm Ra round instead. Now, Ra is a pretty fun game but I'm abysmally bad at it. I have this real problem with wanting to play "Can't Stop", getting all the other players out so I can pull tiles against the sun clock. I've had games where I didn't purchase a lot in the first 2 rounds! I think I scored positive at WBC but I could be wrong, I certainly know I came last in my game. It was fun though!
We'd gotten up pretty early to drive down (I think Pounder and I got up at 7am) and at the time I worked the graveyard shift so I was _really_ tired. So we went to the demo lounge and taught ourselves to play the Caylus spin-off they had set up. Yeah, we're smart guys alright...
Wednesday started off with a bang as the single elimination 2-player Titan event kicked off at 9am. With our 4 person hotel room we got 2 free breakfasts, and all three of Robb, Pounder, and myself were up in time to eat so we ended up having to buy an extra breakfast. This was the last day that would happen as people started sleeping in longer... Or staying up later? At any rate, off to the wargaming room which is where Titan was set up in the back. Most of a ginormous room was filled with wargames, many of which stayed set up overnight. One of the games had a 60 hour round! Two of the five games actually finished last year which I gather is a larger than normal number. (The game simulates WW2 on both the European and Pacific fronts.)
At any rate, TITAN! I honestly don't remember my 2 player game very well at all. I lost, and I remember being unsatisfied, but I don't know why. Oh well. With so many people having just lost 2 player Titan games they had a main Titan round kicking off an hour later. Titan-2 was single elimination but Titan-N is a Multiple Entry Swiss Elimination variant which basically means you can play as many rounds as you want but only your first 6 count for points or something. (I may be mixing up the rules from Titan nationals and WBC.) For scheduling they basically let you start a game whenever you have 4 people who want to play, with 'expected' starting times 3 times a day.
My game featured a young boy who was pretty new to the game but clearly having a blast and a couple of seasoned veterans. Eventually the kid got into a completely unwinnable position and was quite bored so he withdrew from the game rather than wait for elimination. Hopefully he doesn't get discouraged and keeps on gaming. I followed soon thereafter, though I went down kicking and screaming. I have a philosophical issue with withdrawing from a game of Titan when you're about to die. I think the person who hunted you should get the points for killing you!
At any rate, I hadn't really played Titan much in the previous year and was more interested in playing other games than more Titan. I added to the attendance figures for Titan (to try to ensure it stays an event) and had fun, but it was time to move on. 1pm was approaching, and I again had multiple choices. I could go play Empire Builder (a game I'd like to think I'm pretty good at), or I could play Power Grid (a game I'd like to think I can pronounce the German name for), or I could go to a demo for a 4 hour game I'd never heard of. There wasn't anything I really wanted to do for the next 5 hours, and I like to learn new games, so demo time!
Manifest Destiny is a Civ style game centered on North America dealing with the period of time from the colonization of the US until modern time. It has tech trees you research with money ala Advanced Civ, it has wonders you can try to build by rolling dice, it has city building on the map, attacking other players, cards you can play to make special events and payouts happen... Tons of cool, complicated things that all work together. The hour long demo restarted a couple times as stragglers showed up so really there was about 25 minutes of rules explanation and then we took off to the wargaming room to play. I didn't really know what was going on but I wanted to try and they didn't seem to mind that I didn't know what was going on, so away we went!
I ended up getting demolished (unsurprisingly) and lost by a very large margin. I picked up some strategies by watching the other players take their turns and decided it was at least an ok game. I basically butchered my position on the first turn when I didn't build enough settlers to do anything, so my income was about 60% of everyone else's for the entire game. I didn't really have a chance to win but I played to maximize my own score, which made for some sketchy plays later in the game in order to secure a wonder for bonus points. One of the other players seemed a little annoyed that I'd made that play but it was the only way I saw to score points from my position and it worked, woo!
The other players at my table were pretty fast, and I ended up playing quickly by virtue of having no money, so my game ended before the 4 hours were up giving me enough time to make it to a 6pm event if I wanted. Titan:The Arena was the only game I knew the rules to at 6pm but Robb convinced me I could learn how to play Queen's Gambit in the 10 minutes before the round started, so I signed up for that and borrowed a rule book to start reading. I gathered this was a pretty popular game amongst the Titan players in previous years and they said the Jedi battle was the only thing that mattered...
So, knowing kinda how the pieces moved and the ultimate goal of the game, it was time to play. Queen's Gambit is a game that simulates the final battle of Star Wars Episode One, and takes place on four fronts. You have Anakin flying through space trying to blow up the mother ship, you have the gungans getting killed en masse by droids, you have Amadala storming the palace, and you have Darth Maul fighting Obiwan and Quigon. The Naboo win if Anakin blows up the mother ship and you get a majority in the throne room at the top of the palace. Evil wins by killing all but 2 Naboo people in the palace.
With the strategy of 'play Jedi cards' I set out to play my first game. I was the Naboo, and my opponent told me a rule that it turns out doesn't exist that at the time really seemed like it screwed me. (You can jump up floors in the palace with the Naboo people on some cards, he said one droid on the middle floor could block jumping up to the top.) This prevented me from running guys to the top floor which was something I wanted to do. After all, I have cards that let me do it, so I should, right? Wrong! Having played the game a few times now I don't think you should go up to the top without a good reason to do so, and I really didn't when I tried to. Luckily, my opponent took actions with 'prevented' me from doing so, which were pretty much wastes of time. If I don't want to do something, and you take turns to stop me from doing it... I profit!
At any rate, by focusing on playing Jedi cards, and cards that dug me to more Jedi cards, I ended up winning the Jedi battle. From there I ended up winning the game, having learned to play not 10 minutes before the game. My opponent didn't seem too unhappy though. We did have fun, which is the main thing.
There wasn't anything we wanted to play for a couple hours which made it the perfect time to go get food. Next door to the convention center was an Amish diner that had pretty good food. The four of us went out and ate, with plans to come back for 9pm and another round of El Grande.
I wasn't really feeling up for El Grande, but there was another game being played in the same room at the same time, Ticket to Ride. Pounder convinced me over supper that it was easy to learn and promised to explain it to me before the round. He gave me a rough overview, and said the winning strategy was to ignore making your routes and just buy long stretches of track, but didn't explain specifics of the game.
I signed up, got assigned to a table, and during setup asked if I could read the rules. Ticket to Ride if a 'C' level event, so you don't need to know the game or attend a demo to play. (Supposedly they were supposed to teach me how to play during sign-ups but there were a TON of people and the GM was swamped.) So, I again asked to see the rules as the game was being set up. It turns out the game is really simple. You have two types of cards, routes and cars. A route lists two cities and at game end if you own track between those cities you get bonus points. If you don't you get negative bonus points. The further apart the cities are the more points you get or lose. The second type of card is train cars, which all have a colour.
You start the game with a few route cards and some cars. The board is set up with a bunch of cities (we played in the US) and track between cities. The tracks all have distinct colours and number of cars. (New York to Boston might have 2 pink cars, for example, and Los Angeles to Denver might have 6 black ones.) On your turn you either draw more route cards, or draw 2 cars, or build a section of track. To build track you play the number of cards that are on the segment from your hand, so I'd have to play 2 pink to build New York to Boston. Once I build it I put my cars on top of it and then no one else can build it.
Scoring is done with routes at end game, some bonus points for longest track and most routes done, and then points for building track. You get points via the triangle method, so a 1-length piece of track is worth 1 point, 2 is worth 3, 3 is worth 6 and so on. Note, it takes a full turn to build track if it's size 1 or size 6. Also, you only get 1 or 2 cards a turn. (When you draw cars there's a pool of face-up cards. You can draw a face-up, or from the deck. If you draw a wild-card face-up you only get the one card, otherwise you get two.) So at worst you could be turning 2 turns into 1 point (draw a wild and play it for a length 1 track) and at best you couls turn 4 turns into 21 points (draw 6 of a kind over 3 turns and build a size 6 track). It doesn't take a math degree to figure out that 5.25 points a turn is better than .5 points a turn... And yet many people were drawing wilds to build short pieces of track.
Now, depending on the routes you have this might seem like a good idea. I had one route that was worth 20 points, so the difference between building it or not is a 40 point swing. That's worth a couple mediocre building turns to pull off, to be sure. The trick, though, is that there's actually lots of ways to get from New York to Los Angeles. Someone might build the 2 pink from New York to Boston, but there's still a 2 orange from New York to Boston... Or I could go via Philadelphia or Portland instead of Boston...
In all it seemed like a pretty good game, you have to balance taking turns to score points with taking turns to secure your routes, and you have to know when you need to build the short routes that other people want. Ultimately though it seemed like the optimal strategy was to just draw 2 cards every turn building up a huge hand to give yourself the most options, only building when it looked like someone else wanted something. (Or when you could score 21 points with 6 of a kind.) It was actually pretty easy, having never played the game before, to work out what other people wanted. The other people in my game were picking up cards to build specific routes, sometimes from both ends, and building the tracks as soon as they could. So if someone build up to both ends of a given piece of track... They probably want the middle one and I should take it first if I wanted it. This is what I did, eventually connecting things up with smaller, less desired tracks to get my 20 point bonus at game end. I ended up with over 150 points with the next closest person being just under 100... Not bad for not knowing how to play before I sat down! (Ticket to Ride was the most attended game at WBC last year, it attracts a lot of people who aren't gamers.)
The 11pm silly game for Wednesday was... Can't Stop! WOO! This is a game you can play on Brettspielwelt and believe me, I have! Dave Nicholson and I used to play several times a day one month when he was trying to win a medal. All told I've played it 156 times on BSW, and I suspect I had the most experience in the game of anyone at WBC. That said, it is still a dice game and you do need to not get unlucky in order to win! I ended up finishing second overall, losing in the finals to someone who took a gamble and it paid off for him. I had closed out 2 numbers, and he had closed out 1. Chances are reasonable good if I get another turn I win, so when he completed a number he didn't stop. He had to go up a couple more on the other number with no leeway... And pulled it off. It was fun, but I did have one gripe... The GM said during the finals that the game is all luck and that he'd be surprised to ever see repeat winners in the event if he ran it for many years. That's hogwash I think! There's a fair amount of skill to the game and while it's certainly hard for someone to win a 100+ person event multiple times it won't be because there's no skill involved! If I have a single goal for this coming year it's to at least make the finals again to try to show him wrong! (Setting out to win Can't Stop of all games seems a little silly, but I'm going to do it!)
The finals didn't end until around 1-2ish, but Pounder and Robb were still around so we did the only thing you should do after playing games for 17 straight hours... We went to the open gaming area and taught ourselves to play Vikings! (A game which sadly didn't involve raping or pillaging. There were diplomat vikings, and canoerowing vikings... All in all, a pretty disappointing theme for such a great title. It was an ok game though.)
More to follow at a later date...
We drove down to Lancaster on Tuesday morning, stopping to pick Robb and Lin up in Cambridge and then at a diner in some small town in rural PA, but beyond that it was straight through. It took something like 8 hours all told, and we ended up in Lancaster around 4-5pm. Our hotel ended up directly across the street from the convention center which was convenient. However, it is a major highway so crossing it was exciting to say the least. We didn't bother to pack any games so we didn't have to cart anything across the street ever, just cut and run when the coast looked clear.
Once we'd finally crossed the street we had to go register. Robb and Pounder had been to WBC a couple years earlier so they didn't have to have their pictures taken, but Lin and I had to so we got to wait around for a bit while that happened.
(I look like a farmer in mine!)
5pm is the start of demos, but 6pm is the start of actual events. 22 different games had rounds start at 6pm, many of which I wanted to play but I didn't really know my way around and didn't particularly want to try something new for my first event. Robb and Pounder were going to play El Grande and I don't detest that game so I followed along and gave it a spin. I almost won my game, finishing a close second, but I believe both Robb and Pounder won their games. Robb ended up winning the entire event!
They only had 2 hour rounds for El Grande which is a little tight, and we ended up missing the 8pm start time for other events. 9pm didn't have any games we wanted to play but did have the Titan demo so we wandered over to that. We'd met quite a few of the main Titan players a couple years ago when we stormed US Nationals down in Maryland, which Robb also won. Every night at 11pm they have a less serious game which tends to have a large turnout due to nothing else going on, and these games often lend themselves to drinking. The 11pm game on Tuesday was Win, Place & Show which was a horse racing game that didn't sound very interesting so we played the 10pm Ra round instead. Now, Ra is a pretty fun game but I'm abysmally bad at it. I have this real problem with wanting to play "Can't Stop", getting all the other players out so I can pull tiles against the sun clock. I've had games where I didn't purchase a lot in the first 2 rounds! I think I scored positive at WBC but I could be wrong, I certainly know I came last in my game. It was fun though!
We'd gotten up pretty early to drive down (I think Pounder and I got up at 7am) and at the time I worked the graveyard shift so I was _really_ tired. So we went to the demo lounge and taught ourselves to play the Caylus spin-off they had set up. Yeah, we're smart guys alright...
Wednesday started off with a bang as the single elimination 2-player Titan event kicked off at 9am. With our 4 person hotel room we got 2 free breakfasts, and all three of Robb, Pounder, and myself were up in time to eat so we ended up having to buy an extra breakfast. This was the last day that would happen as people started sleeping in longer... Or staying up later? At any rate, off to the wargaming room which is where Titan was set up in the back. Most of a ginormous room was filled with wargames, many of which stayed set up overnight. One of the games had a 60 hour round! Two of the five games actually finished last year which I gather is a larger than normal number. (The game simulates WW2 on both the European and Pacific fronts.)
At any rate, TITAN! I honestly don't remember my 2 player game very well at all. I lost, and I remember being unsatisfied, but I don't know why. Oh well. With so many people having just lost 2 player Titan games they had a main Titan round kicking off an hour later. Titan-2 was single elimination but Titan-N is a Multiple Entry Swiss Elimination variant which basically means you can play as many rounds as you want but only your first 6 count for points or something. (I may be mixing up the rules from Titan nationals and WBC.) For scheduling they basically let you start a game whenever you have 4 people who want to play, with 'expected' starting times 3 times a day.
My game featured a young boy who was pretty new to the game but clearly having a blast and a couple of seasoned veterans. Eventually the kid got into a completely unwinnable position and was quite bored so he withdrew from the game rather than wait for elimination. Hopefully he doesn't get discouraged and keeps on gaming. I followed soon thereafter, though I went down kicking and screaming. I have a philosophical issue with withdrawing from a game of Titan when you're about to die. I think the person who hunted you should get the points for killing you!
At any rate, I hadn't really played Titan much in the previous year and was more interested in playing other games than more Titan. I added to the attendance figures for Titan (to try to ensure it stays an event) and had fun, but it was time to move on. 1pm was approaching, and I again had multiple choices. I could go play Empire Builder (a game I'd like to think I'm pretty good at), or I could play Power Grid (a game I'd like to think I can pronounce the German name for), or I could go to a demo for a 4 hour game I'd never heard of. There wasn't anything I really wanted to do for the next 5 hours, and I like to learn new games, so demo time!
Manifest Destiny is a Civ style game centered on North America dealing with the period of time from the colonization of the US until modern time. It has tech trees you research with money ala Advanced Civ, it has wonders you can try to build by rolling dice, it has city building on the map, attacking other players, cards you can play to make special events and payouts happen... Tons of cool, complicated things that all work together. The hour long demo restarted a couple times as stragglers showed up so really there was about 25 minutes of rules explanation and then we took off to the wargaming room to play. I didn't really know what was going on but I wanted to try and they didn't seem to mind that I didn't know what was going on, so away we went!
I ended up getting demolished (unsurprisingly) and lost by a very large margin. I picked up some strategies by watching the other players take their turns and decided it was at least an ok game. I basically butchered my position on the first turn when I didn't build enough settlers to do anything, so my income was about 60% of everyone else's for the entire game. I didn't really have a chance to win but I played to maximize my own score, which made for some sketchy plays later in the game in order to secure a wonder for bonus points. One of the other players seemed a little annoyed that I'd made that play but it was the only way I saw to score points from my position and it worked, woo!
The other players at my table were pretty fast, and I ended up playing quickly by virtue of having no money, so my game ended before the 4 hours were up giving me enough time to make it to a 6pm event if I wanted. Titan:The Arena was the only game I knew the rules to at 6pm but Robb convinced me I could learn how to play Queen's Gambit in the 10 minutes before the round started, so I signed up for that and borrowed a rule book to start reading. I gathered this was a pretty popular game amongst the Titan players in previous years and they said the Jedi battle was the only thing that mattered...
So, knowing kinda how the pieces moved and the ultimate goal of the game, it was time to play. Queen's Gambit is a game that simulates the final battle of Star Wars Episode One, and takes place on four fronts. You have Anakin flying through space trying to blow up the mother ship, you have the gungans getting killed en masse by droids, you have Amadala storming the palace, and you have Darth Maul fighting Obiwan and Quigon. The Naboo win if Anakin blows up the mother ship and you get a majority in the throne room at the top of the palace. Evil wins by killing all but 2 Naboo people in the palace.
With the strategy of 'play Jedi cards' I set out to play my first game. I was the Naboo, and my opponent told me a rule that it turns out doesn't exist that at the time really seemed like it screwed me. (You can jump up floors in the palace with the Naboo people on some cards, he said one droid on the middle floor could block jumping up to the top.) This prevented me from running guys to the top floor which was something I wanted to do. After all, I have cards that let me do it, so I should, right? Wrong! Having played the game a few times now I don't think you should go up to the top without a good reason to do so, and I really didn't when I tried to. Luckily, my opponent took actions with 'prevented' me from doing so, which were pretty much wastes of time. If I don't want to do something, and you take turns to stop me from doing it... I profit!
At any rate, by focusing on playing Jedi cards, and cards that dug me to more Jedi cards, I ended up winning the Jedi battle. From there I ended up winning the game, having learned to play not 10 minutes before the game. My opponent didn't seem too unhappy though. We did have fun, which is the main thing.
There wasn't anything we wanted to play for a couple hours which made it the perfect time to go get food. Next door to the convention center was an Amish diner that had pretty good food. The four of us went out and ate, with plans to come back for 9pm and another round of El Grande.
I wasn't really feeling up for El Grande, but there was another game being played in the same room at the same time, Ticket to Ride. Pounder convinced me over supper that it was easy to learn and promised to explain it to me before the round. He gave me a rough overview, and said the winning strategy was to ignore making your routes and just buy long stretches of track, but didn't explain specifics of the game.
I signed up, got assigned to a table, and during setup asked if I could read the rules. Ticket to Ride if a 'C' level event, so you don't need to know the game or attend a demo to play. (Supposedly they were supposed to teach me how to play during sign-ups but there were a TON of people and the GM was swamped.) So, I again asked to see the rules as the game was being set up. It turns out the game is really simple. You have two types of cards, routes and cars. A route lists two cities and at game end if you own track between those cities you get bonus points. If you don't you get negative bonus points. The further apart the cities are the more points you get or lose. The second type of card is train cars, which all have a colour.
You start the game with a few route cards and some cars. The board is set up with a bunch of cities (we played in the US) and track between cities. The tracks all have distinct colours and number of cars. (New York to Boston might have 2 pink cars, for example, and Los Angeles to Denver might have 6 black ones.) On your turn you either draw more route cards, or draw 2 cars, or build a section of track. To build track you play the number of cards that are on the segment from your hand, so I'd have to play 2 pink to build New York to Boston. Once I build it I put my cars on top of it and then no one else can build it.
Scoring is done with routes at end game, some bonus points for longest track and most routes done, and then points for building track. You get points via the triangle method, so a 1-length piece of track is worth 1 point, 2 is worth 3, 3 is worth 6 and so on. Note, it takes a full turn to build track if it's size 1 or size 6. Also, you only get 1 or 2 cards a turn. (When you draw cars there's a pool of face-up cards. You can draw a face-up, or from the deck. If you draw a wild-card face-up you only get the one card, otherwise you get two.) So at worst you could be turning 2 turns into 1 point (draw a wild and play it for a length 1 track) and at best you couls turn 4 turns into 21 points (draw 6 of a kind over 3 turns and build a size 6 track). It doesn't take a math degree to figure out that 5.25 points a turn is better than .5 points a turn... And yet many people were drawing wilds to build short pieces of track.
Now, depending on the routes you have this might seem like a good idea. I had one route that was worth 20 points, so the difference between building it or not is a 40 point swing. That's worth a couple mediocre building turns to pull off, to be sure. The trick, though, is that there's actually lots of ways to get from New York to Los Angeles. Someone might build the 2 pink from New York to Boston, but there's still a 2 orange from New York to Boston... Or I could go via Philadelphia or Portland instead of Boston...
In all it seemed like a pretty good game, you have to balance taking turns to score points with taking turns to secure your routes, and you have to know when you need to build the short routes that other people want. Ultimately though it seemed like the optimal strategy was to just draw 2 cards every turn building up a huge hand to give yourself the most options, only building when it looked like someone else wanted something. (Or when you could score 21 points with 6 of a kind.) It was actually pretty easy, having never played the game before, to work out what other people wanted. The other people in my game were picking up cards to build specific routes, sometimes from both ends, and building the tracks as soon as they could. So if someone build up to both ends of a given piece of track... They probably want the middle one and I should take it first if I wanted it. This is what I did, eventually connecting things up with smaller, less desired tracks to get my 20 point bonus at game end. I ended up with over 150 points with the next closest person being just under 100... Not bad for not knowing how to play before I sat down! (Ticket to Ride was the most attended game at WBC last year, it attracts a lot of people who aren't gamers.)
The 11pm silly game for Wednesday was... Can't Stop! WOO! This is a game you can play on Brettspielwelt and believe me, I have! Dave Nicholson and I used to play several times a day one month when he was trying to win a medal. All told I've played it 156 times on BSW, and I suspect I had the most experience in the game of anyone at WBC. That said, it is still a dice game and you do need to not get unlucky in order to win! I ended up finishing second overall, losing in the finals to someone who took a gamble and it paid off for him. I had closed out 2 numbers, and he had closed out 1. Chances are reasonable good if I get another turn I win, so when he completed a number he didn't stop. He had to go up a couple more on the other number with no leeway... And pulled it off. It was fun, but I did have one gripe... The GM said during the finals that the game is all luck and that he'd be surprised to ever see repeat winners in the event if he ran it for many years. That's hogwash I think! There's a fair amount of skill to the game and while it's certainly hard for someone to win a 100+ person event multiple times it won't be because there's no skill involved! If I have a single goal for this coming year it's to at least make the finals again to try to show him wrong! (Setting out to win Can't Stop of all games seems a little silly, but I'm going to do it!)
The finals didn't end until around 1-2ish, but Pounder and Robb were still around so we did the only thing you should do after playing games for 17 straight hours... We went to the open gaming area and taught ourselves to play Vikings! (A game which sadly didn't involve raping or pillaging. There were diplomat vikings, and canoerowing vikings... All in all, a pretty disappointing theme for such a great title. It was an ok game though.)
More to follow at a later date...
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Handlebar Gaming
Speaking of New Year's resolutions I have one more that stems from the frustration of trying to eat a bowl of soul or a bag of chips with hair in one's mouth. Get your mind out of the gutter, I am refering to my moustache. It started back in April during the NHL playoffs when I didn't shave while the Wings were still around. By the time they got knocked out I decided to keep the 'stache around and get rid of the beard, with the plan of growing a handlebar. I had no clue how to do that at the time, of course, but it seemed like the thing to do.
It turns out it's not as easy as it sounds. Gravity makes it so hair just doesn't grow like that naturally, so you tend to need some sort of method to force it into place. Moustache wax is the typical way to do it, but it's not like there's a moustache wax store downtown. I've made a couple purchases online, one from a company in California and one from a fireman and his wife in Mississippi but neither really did the trick for me. The first one wouldn't even hold for 45 minutes before it started drooping into my mouth. The second one fared a bit better, keeping the moustache out of my mouth for 4-5 hours, but it failed to keep it in a nice handlebar shape for more than a couple hours. Great for a first impression (I think I almost killed Josh yesterday when he saw it) but gets rather unsightly after a bit.
So, the options become to continue the search for a better wax, or resign myself to rewaxxing every few hours, or give up and shave. Maybe not so much give up as end an experiment... How many people can say they've grown a handlebar moustache? My gnome warrior can! Ultimately I've decided that my hair is just too spindly, it doesn't look like a moustache so much as a bunch of random hairs when it isn't nicely waxxed, and I keep chewing on them accidentally and ripping them out by the root. So, I resolve to not have facial hair this year, woo?
To get things back on topic yesterday a bunch of my old University friends got together at Aidan's place for a New Year's Eve's Eve party, Comfy style. By which I mean there were chips, and drinks, and many board games. Sadly we didn't start until the evening and some of us (like myself) had to work at 8am this morning so there wasn't nearly enough games playing, but I'll recant a bit about what there was.
We started with a variant of Cranium, with everyone who was willing to play involved. We started out with Snuggles and Justyna against Adam, Tom, and Dee against Jer, Lindsay, and myself. My brain doesn't quite work the same as most people's (handlebar?) so I'm not terribly good at this game. We had 3 more people show up and join the game in progress, with Sara joining the first team, a second Dee joining the second team, and Andrew joining my team. Unfortunately for us Andrew is the only person in the world worse than I am at Cranium so we ended up not moving after he joined us. Ultimately the team of two Dee's ended up winning despite Mr. Hurd's best efforts to sabotage them from the inside. It was fun times, though certainly not what I would call a good game.
As this was going on I think a game of Ra had broken out in the basement. Rather than go check that out I stayed upstairs to play Can't Stop. (A game in which I came 2nd at the World Boardgaming Championships which I will be writing more about soon.) Anyway, aparently Andrew is convinced the game title isn't merely a suggestion but a requirement as he decided to keep rolling after he'd finished a row off. It might have been the 'right' choice since he didn't get another turn after that, but he still fell off which is sweet justice as far as I'm concerned. This game isn;t as fun in person as it is online, I think mainly because you don't get an awesome scream when you fall off the mountain. (I try to fill in, but my scream isn't good enough.)
With Can't Stop over and done a game of Apples to Apples broke out. This is another game that is fun enough, but is not a good game. Party games are good and all, but I prefer real games, so I stepped aside and went downstairs to kibitz the second Ra game. I didn't catch the whole game but Adam managed to bamboozle the table somehow, ending up with a dozen rivers along with a ton of other tiles and ended up with a huge lead. Jer and Josh combined barely caught third place which was Tmiv. Tom P was a solid second, but no one was anywhere near Adam.
People were starting to want to leave, but Apples to Apples wasn't done, so we busted out San Juan for a quick four-man. I could say I had a grand strategy for the game but I really didn't. I ended up drawing a Zumfthall and going the tried and true method of Poor House, Smithy, money building, 8 production buildings. Everyone else was doing fancy things with chapels and councilor huts and whatnot but they just couldn't generate enough points to compete with 5 point silver smelters for 3 cards. It's really not fair. Tmiv drew the second Guild Hall, and had a Palace, but had built a bunch of normal buildings to start the game off, which sadly for him wasn't good enough. It's one of the two real problems I have with San Juan, the Guild Hall is too powerful when you draw it early enough to craft a strategy around it. (The other is that the stupid Gold Mine is so swingy, but that's another story...)
At any rate, it was then midnight so we all took off in various directions for sleep. I ended up only getting like 4 hours of sleep which made for a bit of a painful day at work, but playing games with good people is worth some exhaustion any day.
Heck, playing games with bad people is sometimes worth exhaustion, as I am about to proove to myself by starting a game of DotA.
Coming up soon... An attempt to recruit people for WBC!
(Oh, as an aside, I couldn't find my post on Gleemax so who knows what the deal with that is. I may dig into that site in more detail later, but for now I'm just going to use this place.)
It turns out it's not as easy as it sounds. Gravity makes it so hair just doesn't grow like that naturally, so you tend to need some sort of method to force it into place. Moustache wax is the typical way to do it, but it's not like there's a moustache wax store downtown. I've made a couple purchases online, one from a company in California and one from a fireman and his wife in Mississippi but neither really did the trick for me. The first one wouldn't even hold for 45 minutes before it started drooping into my mouth. The second one fared a bit better, keeping the moustache out of my mouth for 4-5 hours, but it failed to keep it in a nice handlebar shape for more than a couple hours. Great for a first impression (I think I almost killed Josh yesterday when he saw it) but gets rather unsightly after a bit.
So, the options become to continue the search for a better wax, or resign myself to rewaxxing every few hours, or give up and shave. Maybe not so much give up as end an experiment... How many people can say they've grown a handlebar moustache? My gnome warrior can! Ultimately I've decided that my hair is just too spindly, it doesn't look like a moustache so much as a bunch of random hairs when it isn't nicely waxxed, and I keep chewing on them accidentally and ripping them out by the root. So, I resolve to not have facial hair this year, woo?
To get things back on topic yesterday a bunch of my old University friends got together at Aidan's place for a New Year's Eve's Eve party, Comfy style. By which I mean there were chips, and drinks, and many board games. Sadly we didn't start until the evening and some of us (like myself) had to work at 8am this morning so there wasn't nearly enough games playing, but I'll recant a bit about what there was.
We started with a variant of Cranium, with everyone who was willing to play involved. We started out with Snuggles and Justyna against Adam, Tom, and Dee against Jer, Lindsay, and myself. My brain doesn't quite work the same as most people's (handlebar?) so I'm not terribly good at this game. We had 3 more people show up and join the game in progress, with Sara joining the first team, a second Dee joining the second team, and Andrew joining my team. Unfortunately for us Andrew is the only person in the world worse than I am at Cranium so we ended up not moving after he joined us. Ultimately the team of two Dee's ended up winning despite Mr. Hurd's best efforts to sabotage them from the inside. It was fun times, though certainly not what I would call a good game.
As this was going on I think a game of Ra had broken out in the basement. Rather than go check that out I stayed upstairs to play Can't Stop. (A game in which I came 2nd at the World Boardgaming Championships which I will be writing more about soon.) Anyway, aparently Andrew is convinced the game title isn't merely a suggestion but a requirement as he decided to keep rolling after he'd finished a row off. It might have been the 'right' choice since he didn't get another turn after that, but he still fell off which is sweet justice as far as I'm concerned. This game isn;t as fun in person as it is online, I think mainly because you don't get an awesome scream when you fall off the mountain. (I try to fill in, but my scream isn't good enough.)
With Can't Stop over and done a game of Apples to Apples broke out. This is another game that is fun enough, but is not a good game. Party games are good and all, but I prefer real games, so I stepped aside and went downstairs to kibitz the second Ra game. I didn't catch the whole game but Adam managed to bamboozle the table somehow, ending up with a dozen rivers along with a ton of other tiles and ended up with a huge lead. Jer and Josh combined barely caught third place which was Tmiv. Tom P was a solid second, but no one was anywhere near Adam.
People were starting to want to leave, but Apples to Apples wasn't done, so we busted out San Juan for a quick four-man. I could say I had a grand strategy for the game but I really didn't. I ended up drawing a Zumfthall and going the tried and true method of Poor House, Smithy, money building, 8 production buildings. Everyone else was doing fancy things with chapels and councilor huts and whatnot but they just couldn't generate enough points to compete with 5 point silver smelters for 3 cards. It's really not fair. Tmiv drew the second Guild Hall, and had a Palace, but had built a bunch of normal buildings to start the game off, which sadly for him wasn't good enough. It's one of the two real problems I have with San Juan, the Guild Hall is too powerful when you draw it early enough to craft a strategy around it. (The other is that the stupid Gold Mine is so swingy, but that's another story...)
At any rate, it was then midnight so we all took off in various directions for sleep. I ended up only getting like 4 hours of sleep which made for a bit of a painful day at work, but playing games with good people is worth some exhaustion any day.
Heck, playing games with bad people is sometimes worth exhaustion, as I am about to proove to myself by starting a game of DotA.
Coming up soon... An attempt to recruit people for WBC!
(Oh, as an aside, I couldn't find my post on Gleemax so who knows what the deal with that is. I may dig into that site in more detail later, but for now I'm just going to use this place.)
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