Pre WBC Games Played

I've been crashing in Pounder's basement for a little over a week now and we're pretty much set to leave for Lancaster at some stupidly early hour of the morning. I hate mornings. I should probably already be asleep and even that wouldn't give me enough sleep, but what can you do? Be grumpy and drink Coke I guess...

Anyway, lots of games got played this week. Since leaving my place on Thursday I believe I've played Quarriors twice, Hanabi, Race For The Galaxy, Battlestar Galactica, Innovation twice, Iron Dragon twice, Terra Mystica, Through the Ages, and Le Havre. And TITAN! We also went and hung out with Snuggles and Diana to work on the Puzzle Boat for a couple of nights. We're SO CLOSE to finishing it up now! TOOT TOOT!

I also did a lot of my normal stuff, like watching League of Legends, and playing League of Legends, and Civ V and Agricola and other such video gamely things. I have my SNES blog posts done up and the bridge ones should be finished up before I go to sleep so I should be all set on that front.

I got sick. I got better. I don't think it was food related. And maybe it was enough of a shock to my normally sequestered immune system that I'm all set up for 9 days among thousands of strangers in a foreign country? One can hope! Here's to lots of games, to wearing an actual team shirt on team shirt day, to tricking Andrew into eating strawberry sauced chocolate chip waffles, and to not being sick. Woo!

WBC Team Bracket

Yesterday Don sent out his 'before the con' email for the World Boardgaming Championships and the main thing that concerned me was it provided the details for how to sign up for the team tournament tournament. I found it interesting that they explicitly call out that you need to already registered for WBC to play. I blame Andrew for that since I feel like he tried to play recently despite not going to WBC. He is finally going this year so he got to submit one for reals this time! You just pick 10 teams off the list and then hope those teams finish in the top 10 of the team tournament. Pretty easy!

I've been struggling with if I should include my own team on my bracket. Part of me feels like failing to do so is showing a lack of confidence in my team and that's not the case. I think we have a pretty good shot at making the top 10 since I'm obviously going to win my team game and most of my teammates have won their team game at least once in casual play... But then I got to thinking about what I've actually liked about the team event in previous years. And the best part has always been when people come up and tell me that they chose my team as a dark horse in the team tournament. In 2011 the winner of the bracket contest (Bruno Wolff, the excellent Titan GM) won because he picked my team and we came 9th which was pretty great. Then last year when we were lazy and didn't submit a team we had a couple team complain to us because they wanted to put us on their bracket and couldn't because we weren't there. (Even worse, we would have won for them!)

I decided what this meant is I actually want to be on a good team so that other people want to pick my team. I don't need to pick my own team to have that happen. In fact, if I don't pick my own team I get to pick 10 other teams to cheer for instead of only 9. So I get to root for 4 more people and maybe if I remember (or can get over anxiety issues) to tell them about it I can share some of that around. And if it turns out I lose the bracket tournament solely because I didn't pick my own team, well, at least my team did well and might have made other people happy!

It also makes my bracket more different than Andrew's, which he posted as a comment on Facebook to my last post on this subject. I used a different method of picking teams than he did, but we still ended up picking a lot of the same teams regardless.

I went through the PDF file on the website which listed all the numbers the odds guy used to work out the odds for each team. He doesn't post the exact formula, but the inputs are the total laurels ever earned at WBC, the laurels earned last year, the laurels earned in the chosen game, and the number of wins in the chosen game. A lot of these make sense, but I think they aren't properly weighted. My big problem is actually with how it deals with newer players and newer games. I get that my 3 teammates who have never been to WBC before are worth nothing in the formula. There's no data and since most people in an event don't make the top 6 it seems pretty reasonable to assert that new people are less likely to do well than established players. My concern is more for things like my own team game, Le Havre. I only have 72 laurels in the game, and I only have 1 win. But the game has only been around for 4 years, and I am #1 on the laurel list for the game. I've earned laurels every year it's been an event. That's not as good as someone who has earned laurels every year for 15 years (13 wins, a 2nd, and a 3rd) for sure (James Pei in For The People, for reference) but how much worse is it? I don't know. But I feel like the handicapper formula they use could use to be normalized for percentage of laurels earned in the event, not total laurels earned in the event. Laurels earned all time should probably be laurels per year attended. That sort of thing.

It's also going to miss out on things like someone new showing up and starting to dominate an existing game, though. Something like what Stephane Dorais has done in Air Baron, which is a game that has been played at WBC for 18 years. Stephane first earned laurels in that event 6 years ago and has gone on to earn them in 5 of 6 years including two wins. That's a reasonably dominating performance, but he's still only 4th on the laurels list for that event.
There's also the problem that the laurel count includes laurels earned at events other than WBC, as does the event wins column. So James Pei is listed as winning 18 times in 15 years. In actuality he won an email tournament and 4 at 'WAM', one of which was an 8 player tournament. Which doesn't detract from how strong he is in the team tournament... He's a machine! But that it's included in his stats means it's included in other people's stats too and those people (whoever they might be) may end up looking stronger than they are. At least compared to people who don't play the email tournaments or go to WAM/EuroQuest/whatever.

But I guess that's why they have a bracket, right? So people can see things like that and think they're onto something and stick them in there! But I still want odds to be perfect, so I'm still going to be annoyed and you can't stop me! So there!

Anyway... I feel like getting into the top 10 mostly requires having one person on the team get a win and someone else earn points. So when I see a team like Nest of Spies which has the aforementioned James Pei on it along with teammates that are all multi-time winners in their events I feel like they have to be put on a bracket. Unfortunately it turned out there were something like 7 teams that looked to be about that good and I really wanted to pick more 'sleepers' to show I'm better than the formula. So I had to drop some of the better odds teams. Oh well!

Here's what I submitted:

1 Nest of Spies
2 Wood Bee Contenders
3 Harry B's
4 Uncivil Servants
5 Magic Men
6 Roll One Die
7 Cold Fusion
8 Now Playing
9 Lady Luck
10 Pea Soup

All the pressure is on you now, Robb! You'd better win for me!

Off to WBC!

The World Boardgaming Championships don't start until August 2nd so it feels a little weird to be packing up and leaving today, but it is what it is. It turns out Pounder is on vacation and Robb is, for now, still unemployed so there are plenty of games to be played if only I was in Waterloo. It's not like I actually have any real reason to hang around at my place in Toronto so I'm getting kidnapped later today to live in Pounder's basement for a week or so and play games. Have I mentioned I like games?

I don't want to be away from my computer for so long, especially with all the asynch Civ V games I'm in, so I'm going to be carting that along with all my normal WBC stuff like my bed and 10 days worth of clothes. Today so far has been a lot of packing. Now I need to go buy a network card for my computer so I can have internet in Pounder's basement and then I'm going to play games with Sara, Duncan, and Andrew because what I really need to do before playing board games for 2 and a half weeks is play more board games. Hurray board games!

I haven't done any post prepping yet, but I assume I'll actually get a network card and have internet at Pounder's so I'll be able to whip up some bridge posts to go up as an emergency in case WBC internet is as terrible as it sometimes can be. I fully intend to keep a post going up each day! Hopefully about WBC, but maybe extra bridge stuff. Woo!

Niagara 2014

Another year, another Niagara Board Gaming Weekend! They've changed their website for this year but it has somehow managed to be less informative than the previous one. This is a very hard thing because I'm not sure the last one gave any useful information at all! I seem to recall the last one actually mentioned that people would be playing board games... This one seems to leave that out! I have no clue from the webpage what to expect.

I've been twice before, though, and I have blogged about it in the past, so I do have an idea about what to expect. 4 days of open gaming from the 23rd to the 26th of January. I can also apparently expect to hurt my back, accidentally eat gluten, and have anxiety attacks. And be a cylon! That's probably good enough to offset the other stuff, right?

My biggest worry is actually being awake when everyone else is asleep. I have a floor to crash on, which is great, but it means having a bad sleep schedule is really bad. I do think a solution could be to just bring a big book (I've been meaning to relearn JavaScript) and find some place to camp in the hotel or something.

As far as food goes, I've gotten better at going on adventures without getting sick since last year. Both WBC and CastleCon went fine so I expect I can pull something off for this, too. Maybe I can find some gluten free mushrooms to bring along...

I figure I'll just take the Go Train/Go Bus combo to get down there which will make things work no matter when I happen to be waking up, which at this point is looking pretty sketchy. 8pm or so? Maybe I'll just stay up, take an early bus, and then go to sleep when I get there. I guess it depends on how late I end up sleeping the next couple of days.

I haven't played enough board games lately so I think I'm going to give it a go. It should be fun! You should go too!

On 'Vacation'

I don't know if it's fair to call something a vacation when realistically I'm just going to be playing games all day in New Brunswick for two weeks instead of games all day in Ontario, but it is what it is. After taking the subway, a bus, a ferry, an airplane, and a car I have arrived safely in good old Riverview. Internet looks to be working fine and my laptop survived the trip so I'm sure I'll find plenty of things to post about while I'm here.

At the very least I installed a few Steam games that have cards to give a spin and I'm sure I'll find a post about those. I installed Path of Exile but it was running very chunkily. I'll need to try turning all the settings to minimum and see if that gets me anywhere. I also transfered over my PSX emulator... Maybe it's finally time to move the Final Fantasy marathon forward!

I also did up some extra bridge posts in case I don't have the time to write something on a couple of days. I spent a chunk of yesterday finally making a spreadsheet to simplify the bridge posts (it handles showing the right hands and formats the bidding table and such) and it was so much faster and more enjoyable to pound the hands out. I wish I'd had more time to build up more of a buffer. Oh well! I also did two SNES posts so those are ready to roll out.

Bah Humbug!

CastleCon Recap

I want to make Andrew sad, so here's what went on for me this weekend...

I played a bunch of games, some new, some I knew before. In particular I believe I played Mage Tower (x3), K2, Timeline (x2), Suburbia, Viva Java, Bora Bora, Galaxy Trucker, Dominion (x5), Pack and Stack, and The Capitals. Sadly no Battlestar Galactica, though.

I didn't sleep terribly well. I'm not sure if that was the air conditioner making a racket, going to bed too early, or just a consequence of setting an alarm on Friday to wake up in time to head in. But I was still around for a lot of games, so it was all good.

We ordered out for Swiss Chalet one night, and I ate stuff I brought with me the rest of the time. In particular I found some gluten free mushrooms muffins that were surprisingly good, and I brought a couple granny smiths along. I didn't get sick, which beats Niagara earlier in the year. Woo!

There was a problem in the venue of there not being enough garbage cans and no one emptying the ones that were there. I've noticed gamers tend to be pretty good about throwing out their trash when they can, but we're really not interested in going above and beyond. So we filled up the garbage cans, and then we just built a pile of garbage beside the cans... Ew!

The new games to me this year were Mage Tower, Viva Java, and The Capitals. They were all very different, and all had flaws, but I had fun with each of them. Mage Tower is a deck drafting game that simulates a tower defense game in that you get swarmed by monsters until you die and you're just trying to outlast the other players. Viva Java was a team game where the teams changed every turn. You had a tech tree, and you were trying to accumulate resources in order to spend them with your current teammates to randomly build poker hands. The Capitals is a more complicated take at Sim City: the board game than Suburbia where you draft a new unique building every turn which gives you points on different resource tracks and has a special ability that might combo with other buildings you have.

Mage Tower had the flaw of forcing every card in the draft to get played in someone's deck which meant Robb had a completely unplayable card one game and we were stuck playing attack cards with no personal benefit which only served to accelerate game end with no way to avoid doing so. Viva Java had the flaw of requiring the ability to track the public private contents of 7 other player's bean bags in order to figure out who you wanted on your team. The Capitals suffered from random tiles coming up each turn so the ability to plan ahead wasn't really a thing. Close your eyes, cross your fingers, and hope the buildings you want show up when you need them and when you're high in drafting order. I also fear it may suffer from the flaw that optimal strategy will involve just paying 6 points per turn in order to always go first. And it's a first printing of the game and had a lot of misprints and there was no way to tell what colour each player was. Fortunately three of the four players in my game had 'known' colours to me (Duncan is always black, I'm always green, Sara is always purple/red and the last colour was blue and left for Robb).

That said, all three games were fun, and I want to play them all again. And I think Andrew wants to play them all, too.

CastleCon 2013

This weekend is CastleCon, a little board game convention held out in Oshawa. I went last year for 2 days and we drove in each day. It's not very far away so that wasn't so bad, but the 4 of us who went in the car have very different ideas of the right times to be asleep and I live far away so coordinating the drives wasn't the best. This year Sara and Duncan are getting a hotel room and I will be bringing my air mattress to crash on the floor. So if Sara wants to wake up at some stupid early hour like 6am or 10am or whatever she's welcome to do so, and I can sleep in until 4pm! Woo!

I did have to wake up early today in order to be ready for the ride in. Who knows what that will do to my sleep schedule (or lack thereof). On the plus side there will be lots and lots of games played. GAAAAAAAMES!

2013 WBC Recap

Another year, another WBC. Here's the list of games I played over the course of the week:

A Few Acres of Snow - 4
Innovation - 4
Coup - 3
Le Havre - 3
Through The Ages - 1
Can't Stop - 1
Copycat - 1
Liar's Dice - 1
Facts in Five - 1

19 games played with only 9 games covered. Compare to last year where I had 57 games played in 23 different games and there's a noticeable drop. A third of a normal year, in fact. The bottom line is that being sick sucks. I didn't even get to play Toboggans of DOOOOOOOOM!

Oddly enough, despite playing in only 7 tournaments I still managed one of my better results. A 1st and a 3rd, with the win in a century event so I get a shirt for the first time since 2008. The win was even in my team game! Well, it would have been, if we had bothered to submit a team. But I'm sure that didn't matter, right? RIGHT?

Assuming we had submitted the same team as last year, with the same team games, we would have had a 1st, a 1st, a 2nd, and a 3rd. Robb might well have changed his team game again, and if he had it would have been back to El Grande which was his team event a couple times in the past. And he won that one instead of the 2nd in Dominant Species. So it's entirely plausible we would have had 3 wins and a 3rd. Of course actually having team games might have caused people to play differently, or it might have caused us to play differently. Butterflies in Africa and all that jazz. But if we were to ever have a year, this year was it. And we didn't bother signing up. I had several people come up over the course of the week and mention they were disappointed we hadn't submitted a team because they were going to bet on us to finish in the top 10 as a sleeper pick that the normal oddsmakers wouldn't have found. It would have paid off for them if we had! Oh well!

Thermos tech came home for the second straight year. I once again had to drink a Coke for the 9am Le Havre final, and I actually drank a fair number of Sprites in the room to keep hydrated and caloried up while feeling sick. But when I was playing events, or even just wandering around watching games, the thermos was awesome. Not having to go searching for water in the middle of a game is really key.

I was surprised at how well eating worked out. Red Robin was a real life saver. Eating steamed carrots seems like it isn't something I do, but with enough salt on them they were really quite good. And beef, cheese, and pickles wrapped in lettuce is actually really tasty. I was happy with the service at the Texas Roadhouse and surprised that the mediocre service at Waffle House didn't kill me. I also brought lots of gluten free snacks from a grocery store in Waterloo. No one except Ian would eat my cookies, but there are worse things in the world than having snacks other people won't eat. More for me!

GMing an event was in some ways better than expected, and in some ways worse. In my worrying before the event I was fretting a lot about needing to make a ruling on my own game and not having assistants around who were willing or able to step in fairly. What I should have been worried about, in retrospect, was how to deal with games going long. How to time them properly, and how to actually adjudicate them fairly. Having to come up with that on the fly for a game with alternate victory conditions like A Few Acres of Snow was a disaster waiting to happen. Not having enough copies of the game around sucked, and I also didn't have a plan for what to do when that happened. On the plus side I was surprised at how well received the demo was, and how many people thanked me for GMing. It's not something that ever crossed my mind in the past. Because I'm a selfish jerk who can't talk to people. Buying a box of pens and some index cards from the nearby Staples worked out well even though I really didn't need the pens. I ended up giving them to the Facts in Five event because everyone in that event needs a pen. But with 60 pens for $7 it's really hard to go wrong! I'm not sure I can do it again though. It made WBC feel like work instead of like a vacation, and I don't know that I like that feeling. But I'm not really sure how much being sick was impacting it. It's possible I would have been all good to go on Tuesday when my event ended if I was feeling fine. But it's also possible that being sick during the event kept me from freaking out more from the situation.

Next year WBC shifts to a week later because of the way our years don't have an even number of weeks. Aug 2 - Aug 10, 2014. More people need to go! So many games! So many tournaments! So many gamers!

2013 WBC Day 9

Sunday, Sunday, Someday. Sunday is a pretty slow day at WBC. A couple of finals and a couple of very short events. (Including Attack Sub, which I had never played but which I'd read about so I knew it was a card game and not a wargame... This lead me to suggesting to the Hanabi players that they should play it in the morning so that Randy could squeeze in yet another event.) The first three years I went to WBC we played in finals on Sunday and in each case we ended up leaving Lancaster much later than Pounder wanted. Then we had a year where we slept through the alarm (or failed to set it) and left pretty late. And the year where Pounder's car died Saturday night on the way back from Waffle House and we ended up leaving really late. So ideally we won't play anything on Sunday, and we'll wake up early, and we'll leave on time, and Pounder will get home before midnight.

In a twist from past years, things actually went according to plan this time. Both Robb and I had stayed up later than we should have, so we were a little sleepy, but we managed a reasonable shiftwork setup where I slept the first few hours and Robb slept the rest of them. A reasonable delay at the border, two reasonable stops for food (another baked potato at Wendy's and an actual meal at Swiss Chalet) and no other issues at all. Normally we eat at a big buffet place for lunch before leaving Lancaster, but that really adds about an hour to the trip since eating at a buffet takes a long time for slow people like me. It also puts a break at a bad spot, right at the start, which isn't terribly useful.

So, no games on Sunday, but I can't blame that on being sick. Both because I felt fine, and because we don't normally play games on Sunday anyway. By the time Sunday rolled around I was actually feeling like I was ready for WBC to start! Terrible timing on getting sick, but next year will hopefully be different!

2013 WBC Day 8

Saturday at WBC is a day mostly for semifinals and finals, or for more compact events. They run continuous tournaments for some of the more popular games for the people who can only make it for the weekend. Things like Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride. I'm not a big fan of those games anymore, so I rarely have much to do on Saturday. Sometimes I randomly play one of the few heats left running, which is how I got 2nd in Tigris & Euphrates a few years ago. Randomly show up, accidentally win a heat, keep playing because I have nothing better to do. But with being sick and having gotten up early on Friday for the Le Havre final none of that was on the docket this time around. I wasn't planning on playing anything, and just slept in quite late. And when I got up, I played Rogue Legacy.

6pm did bring the last seminar in the winning at life series so I went down to that. A lot of it was a rehash of the first seminar with talking about brain chemicals and how games work to make you feel good. She went into more detail about some things I'd heard before, about "free won't" and how working to say no to things wears down your ability to say no to other things. So avoiding getting into situations where you need to say no is a reasonable idea to keep in mind. Also a bit about how human multitasking is a myth and it's pretty expensive to keep swapping between tasks so if you want to be really productive it helps to limit distractions and just focus on the one thing at a time.

Unfortunately the room was booked at 7pm for Wits & Wagers and there was quite the crowd for that event so we got kicked out right on time, which unfortunately was a little before she was done. I like hearing about this sort of thing, and it makes me miss being a student.

I didn't stick around for Wits & Wagers. Instead I went and watched the end of the Agricola finals.

9pm brought Facts in Five, an interesting trivia game. 5 categories, 5 letters, name things that start with those letters in those categories. There are 5 rounds that get progressively harder. I was off to a good start with 15 points in the first round (thank you, Simon & Garfunkel) but things went steadily downhill from there. The worst was when a category came up for Dancing With The Stars which is my favourite television show and I didn't get a single one. I just couldn't remember any last names at all. Oh well! Some of the categories seemed familiar from previous years, like justices of the supreme court and islands in the Caribbean, but since they can change the letters I guess that makes sense. There's a lot of US centric categories which I guess makes sense since most of the people there are from the US but it sure puts me in a hole. I don't know US geography or justices or history. Except that we burned down their white house when they got uppity!

Pounder and Robb went out to eat while I was playing Facts in Five, but they brought me back a burger from Red Robin which didn't make me sick. Woo! Eating the same thing every time I go somewhere makes it feasible for people to order for me.

I met up with Sceadeau and Andrew after Slapshot which they may have played. I didn't. We wandered around a bit and finally gave in to learn a game from Jason Levine called Coup. You get dealt two cards which tell you which actions you're allowed to take. Except you can take all the action in the game as long as you're willing to pretend you have the card. After you declare an action anyone can jump in and accuse you of lying, with the losing side of that challenge having to discard a card. Last person with cards left wins. It seemed pretty terrible, since bluffing was a bad idea because it was so costly to get caught. We played a few times, though I didn't like it much, until Randy showed up with his proxied Hanabi deck. I didn't think 5 people could lean in well enough to play with it so I stepped out and watched. For about 5 hours. I played the role of coach even though I couldn't see two hands without moving, and I wasn't able to move. Then off to bed.

2013 WBC Day 7

Friday morning brought the Le Havre final at the stupidly early hour of 9am. One advantage of being sick all week is I'd gotten plenty of sleep the last few days, so my sleep batteries were all charged up. I got around 6 or 7 hours sleep, woke up, bought a Coke, and was in pretty good shape relatively speaking. I was still a little sick and I absolutely detest waking up so I still wasn't in a very good mood and wasn't thinking perfectly clearly but compared to previous years it was just fine.

The format this year had 3 semifinal games with the closest second also advancing. One of the winners said he has a hard time waking up and might well just sleep through it since we wouldn't move it. Which provides a bit of a conundrum... If that happened, should the final switch to a 3 player game? Should they advance the next closest second instead? That would mean he needs to also wake up at 9am and might not even get to play. What if he doesn't show either? The next next closest second? How far down the chain do we go to find a 4th player? Any warm body? Making the situation even stickier the person who is 2nd in line is the GM himself. So if he rules that we keep taking people it's to his own benefit. But if he rules that we stop at him to avoid looking like he's ruling in his own favour he actually ends up ruling against himself which is really terrible. GMing is rough enough as it is, you don't need any rules swung against you. He ended up deciding to let #5 in if it came up, but was going to decline his own spot. I think that will seem fairer on first inspection for most people so it's probably a good thing, but I think it sucks for him. It ended up not mattering since the actual 4 finalists did show up.

The final table included one of last year's finalists (another Nick) and two people new to the finals this time around. Another Nick was on my immediate right and was one of the people in last year's finals who got screwed by iron parity, and was well aware that that was probably why he lost that game.

I was in third chair. I haven't yet found the time/inclination to work out which seats may have an advantage or not. I'm pretty sure first chair is strongest, especially if a wood tile flips up first. Which it did in this game. I believe second player got 3 clay, and then I got 2 wood myself. It also seems like people don't like to spend their early money, so I also got to buy the 4 cost building firm. Interestingly no one took money to buy the marketplace. Not only that, but first player who took wood also didn't build the marketplace! So when it got back to my turn I was able to build it with my wood. I mentioned how I got both the 4 cost building firm and the marketplace in the semis and how Robb imprinted in my brain how ridiculous a setup it is to let someone have both. And here I am with both of them again. Will it continue to be ridiculous?

The location of the iron tile meant that 1st and 3rd seats were going to have good iron parity. We would always get first crack at 2 iron until someone snapped and took the single iron. For the second year in a row the other finalists refused to take 1 iron, so myself and the guy opposite me got to scoop up 2 iron offer after 2 iron offer. On top of this source of iron, and my marketplace, I also decided that my conclusion from the last game with the hardware store was a reasonable one so I was jumping over to it as well which was giving me an absolutely ridiculous amount of iron. I may even have used the black market once to get 2 iron and 2 of something else!

One key play, for me, was how everyone seemed to be neglecting the harvest phase of the game. Another Nick quickly took 2 cows and a grain but no one else was harvesting anything at all. Which meant the cow offer kept getting bigger and bigger. Eventually I took it when it was at 5! As the second person to get cows that's mind boggling. Of course I didn't take it at 2, 3, or 4 either, so I don't know that I can say other people were making mistakes either. But that one action probably gave me the resources to score 60+ points.

I had marketplace control again, which meant I got to manipulate the special buildings. There wasn't one I wanted to keep buried this game, but there was one I wanted to make sure came out. Harbour watch, which is probably the single most game warping card in the deck. It's a building that lets you use any occupied building by paying them a dollar. This means you can't block people from building boats, or from getting in all the shipping phases they want, or from picking up coal in the colliery. It means you basically get to ignore the opposition for my preferred line of play. It also means owning the colliery is even more critical than normal, so as soon as I saw this building existed I went out of my way to make a plan to get the colliery. The colliery was buried under the clay mound and the arts center I think. My play ended up being go to the construction firm, build the arts center, sell the arts center, buy the clay mound, build the colliery. A short time later I got some money (maybe by going to the cokery) and bought the harbour watch. I tried to convince people that they should be using my harbour watch in order to use my colliery but it rarely happened.

A little later on the feed lot came out, and no one had much interest in it, so I was able to do a big shipping phase to get down to 2 cows and then buy it like in the semis. Then I got to make 2 cows a turn for a while for lots of extra things to ship.

As the game played out I pretty much ignored steel entirely. The steel mill was late to come out and Another Nick was waiting on it instead of building iron ships. I think this ended up setting him back way too far. When it finally did come out he was able to make 11 steel and then was able to start building boats and setting up to ship all the stuff he'd acquired over the game, but by that point I'd already flat out bought 2 of the 4 steel ships. Guy on my left had made 2 steel with the business office and had built one also, so there was only one left for Another Nick which was really bad for his position. I ended up with 2 steel ships, 2 iron ships, and a wooden ship. The 2 steel and the wood I had bought with cash money, the iron I had made with all the iron I'd picked up.

I was paying attention to when the town was going to build a building late in the game this time, and spent the money to buy the bridge over the Seine in order to force the town to build the town hall. One of the other players was set up to build it and I wanted to keep that from happening.

I also got a late grain offer with 9 or 10 grain in it, which let me bake the full 20 loaves of bread near the end of the game. I got to ship many, many times thanks to the harbour watch. Probably 6 or 7 times, with some of those times being for 16 goods. Lots of cows, bread, and coke. I ended the game with no goods left at all.

The other players at the table were pretty much ready to concede early in the game because I had such a big lead. I thought Another Nick could catch me, but he waited too long on steel and ran out of time. I don't remember final standings, but I think he did come second. I won, by a pretty good margin. Good thing we didn't submit a team this year, it sure would have sucked to win my team event. 8P

1 o'clock brought the single elimination Innovation tournament. The caffeine from the first Coke I'd had in many weeks was keeping me ready to roll and I wasn't really feeling super sick anymore. Still sluggish with a cough, but not like I wanted to die. So I went to that. I got paired up with Rob Kircher in the first round which is a bit of a tough draw because he's really good at games and I'm really good at games. I hardly play any Innovation and I know I'm a lot worse than Robb and Pounder so I didn't have terribly high hopes. Andy (the GM) came by to watch us because he said we were the tough match for the round. (There was a mulligan round, so a lot of the really good players weren't playing in this round at all.) I ended up in a relatively bad position and Rob had enough points to get his last achievement but needed to get a 7 into play. His last turn was to draw a couple 7s and I didn't have a way to make him discard both of them. So he was going to get to play one and achieve to win the game on his next turn. I had a bunch of cards in play and finally came up with a viable line of play. I could reveal a green card from my hand and steal all his green cards. If both of his 7s were green then this play would prevent him from winning on his turn. Also, if they were green I would get to meld them all, and all my green cards, which included the card that lets you auto-win if you have 10 or more green cards in play. I had 8 of my own, so if he had 2 of them I would win on my next turn! I'd seen 3 of the 7s, and none of them were green, so there was a non-zero chance this play would work. 1 in 21, I believe! It turned out his 7s were a yellow and purple so it didn't work, but it made me happy to at least find a line of play that had a chance of working. It's like I'm changing the rules for victory and gaining status even though I lost! Yay, dopamine!

Most of the games I would normally play are done by this point in the week. There are still semis and finals and such, but I didn't make any of those because I didn't play any games earlier in the week. And I still wasn't really feeling like playing a lot of games. So I just sat around and watched the rest of the Innovation tournament. I feel like I probably went to Red Robin with Pounder after the Innovation event, but I may be misremembering. Maybe I just ate gluten free cookies. Then I played some Rogue Legacy back in the room after doing a blog post.

11pm brought Liar's Dice. I couldn't turn down my chance to be the LIAR'S DICE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD!!!!!! even though I didn't want to be in a room with 1250 dice being rolled at once with my foggy brain. I played at a table with Robb, Sceadeau, Pounder, and a couple of random dudes. I lost very quickly. Sceadeau was very mean to me and knocked me out. I wasn't the first one eliminated in the whole event so I didn't get made fun of by the whole room but it was pretty close. Pounder 'won', but he didn't want to advance so he conceded to the kid at the table who was very confused about the outcome. It's a little sketchy to me (I'd rather have Pounder eliminate everyone and just not show up to the next round if he doesn't want to play) but with a game like Liar's Dice I don't think anyone actually cares.

Hanabi was the open gaming game of the convention and Robb was one of the few people who owned a copy of the game so he was swarmed by people to play it after Liar's Dice. I sat around and watched for a bit, and then was learning some weird Flower Fall game from Matt when Randy came up and asked if we'd go learn Copycat instead. I don't have the ability to interrupt the start of a game and convince the people in it to do something else instead, but Randy does, and I'd rather learn Copycat than Flower Fall so it was all good by me. Matt ended up winning the Copycat event later in the week so he was probably just fine with getting in an extra game too.

Copycat is a game that copies game mechanics from all kinds of games and tries to kludge them all together into a good game. Some of the people I talked to thought they did a great job. I thought it was very mediocre personally. It was incredibly bland, and while the mechanics from different games were all there it didn't feel like the fun parts of those games came with the mechanics. You build a deck like in Dominion, but with the game lasting at most 11 turns and with new cards only getting shuffled in the turn after you buy them it felt like building a good/fun deck didn't matter enough. There are decisions to make on which cards to buy and which cards to trash but the game didn't last long enough for it to really feel like it matters like it does in Dominion or even A Few Acres of Snow. That said, the game was still pretty long and felt like it was dragging. Worker placement from Agricola is probably at fault here. You're placing workers down on pretty minorly relevant spaces, but there are a bunch of them and you get presented with the illusion of choice. Do I want to draw a card, or make a dollar, or earn a point? But when it comes right down to it drawing a card is worth a dollar or a point and neither of those really matter either. So it again feels like you're making decisions (which takes time) but the decisions you're making have no theme or major consequence. Through The Ages and Puerto Rico show up with mechanics, but they didn't get the good ones out of those games.

Perhaps worst of all, I didn't get to end the game on the score track. I ended with a score of 91, but the score track went 90-92-93-94-93-95. No space for 91. I fell off into the abyss never to be heard from again.

The rules are also very badly written. It wasn't at all clear if we could do some of the abusive things we wanted to do, and that made the game experience suck for me. A lot of the cards and actions are about copying other cards or actions (the 'theme' of the game being copying stuff) and one of the rules shows up in bold talking about how you can only use the base of any given card twice total. Once for the card, once for a copy. That is all. But then the explanation text for a card goes on to say how you can end up tripling some cards. And there's a card that says it comes in as a copy of a different card, not that it copies the effect of a card. So can you play that card as a copy of a good card, and then use two copy effects to copy both of those? In some senses you're getting the base of the first card 4 times. In other senses you're getting 2 cards 2 times each.

No one knew how to actually resolve it, which meant part of me was stuck feeling like I'd been cheated because the other players had done some super copying, and part of me was stuck feeling like I should be able to do the same things but would be cheating myself. It just didn't feel good. Come back, dopamine! Come back!

We then went to Waffle House, but made the mistake of showing up at 2:30 am on a Friday night. So the bars had just recently shut down and all the drunk people were at Waffle House, filling it up and making service very slow. I was more than a little worried about contamination issues but they managed to keep me from getting sick for a third time with the scrambled eggs, hash browns, and ham.

2013 WBC Day 6

It turns out the Lancaster Host has a thermostat in the hotel room which implies you have the ability to set the temperature that you want for the room. The three of us want drastically different temperatures so there is normally some minor bickering which ends up getting resolved by setting the room really cold and Pounder giving me the blanket off of his bed. Last year the AC just didn't work very well at all so the room never got into the really cold range despite Pounder's best efforts. This year we were in a different room and it was very mild outside so the AC was definitely able to win the fight. It won so well, in fact, that I was able to work out how the thermostat actually works. Short answer: ZE THERMOSTATS! ZEY DO NOTHING!

Maybe it does something in the winter when the heaters are able to run, but in the summer it doesn't matter where you set it. Higher than current temperature? No impact. Lower than current temperature? No impact. Instead there's a light switch on the wall that toggles the state of the air conditioner. You can either have it running full blast to continuously lower the temperature in the room or you can have it turned off entirely. No middle ground. No intelligent control system using the information we know is available (current temperature and desired temperature). On or off. That is all. By this time of the week I'd finally figured it out and we had a plan for how to try to keep the room in the right range. Run the AC during the day so the room ended up really cold, but turn it off when we went to sleep. This would have the room slowly warm up during the night but hopefully not so hot that it would disturb sleeping. Or if it did then someone would just stand up and flick the switch again and start it cooling off. Definitely a better situation than completely freezing or stupidly warm!

At any rate, super temperature tech meant I was able to sleep in without waking up super cold or covered in sweat which meant I got to sleep a long time. Eventually I was up and around before 3, which had the second heat of Le Havre. Now, we're lazy so we didn't actually submit a team this year but if we had Le Havre would have been my team game. So even though I'd only felt like playing 1 game of Can't Stop over the previous couple of days I felt like I should probably put in the effort to play at least one game of Le Havre. Other factors weighing in favour of showing up even though I still didn't feel great are that it is my favourite game and the GM had asked me a couple times in passing in the hallway if I was going to make it. GMs want lots of people to play their games in order to maintain prize status and such, and I have made the final every year thus far so there is some history to preserve by having me show up. And I try to be a nice person, so maybe that helps too.

Le Have ended up with 15 people for this heat, which would mean 3 4 player games and a single 3 player game. I was randomly assigned to the 3 player game. Yay! I'm much better at the 3 player game than the 4 player game and my brain wasn't really working well so it would probably be for the best to have the more natural number of players for me. Then a 16th person showed up so we had a 4 player game as well. Boo!

I actually hadn't played Le Havre since last WBC. It's my favourite game, but I don't own it. When I first learned it a few years ago at WBC in open gaming I liked it so much I made my friends play it (on Pounder's copy I think) a bunch and so many of them liked it that they all bought copies too. Sky, and Pounder, and Robb, and Aidan, and Duncan all owned the game so if I ever wanted to play it most of the people I was gaming with could bring it along. No need to buy it myself!

Combine that rustiness with being sick and things weren't going so well. An early special building was the one that lets you turn 15 energy and 1 iron into 2 steel. I'd ignored that building the last time I saw it in play (the finals at WBC in 2010) and the two people who used it blew me out. So I went looking for a good way to use it. I ended up building the cokery and had a bunch of coal ready to convert immediately before the first steel ship was going to come up for purchase. Everything seemed to be coming up Milhouse! Then the guy on my left went to the cokery to build up enough energy to use the special building himself. He was going to be start player the turn when the steel ship came out, so he was going to get to build it before me. At this point I could abort, do other things, and wait two more rounds for another steel ship while hoping no one else set up to build it on me or I could go crazy. Ignore coke and instead spend 5 coal getting the steel right now. That would get me the first steel ship and set up a decent shipping phase I thought, so I went for it. Unfortunately the guy on my left owned the special building, so he could have vendored it, gone to the now vacated building, and beat me to the steel ship after all. Doing so would cost him 6 points, but I'd thrown away probably 20 points with my play (5 points from the cokery conversion and 15 points from not having 3 extra coke) so if I thought my play was right then I should have thought his counter play was right. I did see his counter play, I just ignored it. I think maybe my game plan was hope for opponent misplay which is a terrible, terrible line of play. Even if it works I'm not going to be happy because I like to win games by beating the best my opponents have to offer, not by having them goof the game away.

It turned out he didn't sell his building, so I did get that steel ship. Which put me in a great position. So great, in fact, that the player opposite me decided to go out of his way to keep me from shipping an extra time in the end game position. Probably right anyway, but he said he only did it because he thought I was so far ahead. Doing so the way he did actually gave my right hand opponent an extra shipping phase. The end result of the game was the guy opposite me won by like 6 points, but the guy on my right came back to tie me with his extra shipping action. He had 1 extra franc in unshipped goods which is the first tie breaker, so I came 3rd in the only heat I was able to play.

Oh well. I was annoyed that I hadn't played well enough to win but I was sick so I didn't feel too badly about it. And the 3rd seminar by the win at life lady was happening in an hour so I could just go to that instead. It was going to be on physical movement and how terrible shoes are for people. I feel like I was going to know most of what she had to say from listening to Sky talk about his barefoot adventures but I still wanted to go and see if I could pick up any info to pass along to him.

I had the hour to kill first, so I swung by the Le Havre semis just in case. The GM had said in advance that he was going to take 16 semifinalists no matter what, and he only had 30 people across the 2 heats, so a close 3rd might actually be good enough to advance. I showed up and it turned out they only had 9 people who wanted to play in the semis including me. They'd also stated in advance that they were going to have a 4 player final table, so their plan on how to get there was to play 3 semifinal games of 3 players each and advance the closest 2nd place. That's pretty standard for previous Le Havre tournaments. I'm not a big fan because there's just something I don't like about having someone who didn't win a semifinal end up winning the final. One year I beat Daniel in the semis, but he advanced and beat me in the final. So we were 1-1 against each other that year, but he got to be the overall winner because of the ordering of the wins. It works according to the rules and all, but I don't really like it. Of course when you only have 30 people show up and only play 9 heat games total I don't know how to build a better format! They had to advance a 3rd place dude just to get to 9 people in the semis as it was! I think I prefer just playing a 3 player final with this setup because Le Havre plays well with 3 or 4 people but you have to do what you spelled out in advance.

I ended up getting paired against the GM (and last year's winner) Ken and with Rob who I vaguely knew through Sceadeau's Vent server. He didn't seem too happy with the pairings. Apparently our table with the 2nd and 3rd people on the laurels list for this event is going to be a rough win. Closest second gets to advance though, so no problem!

In this game I ended up in first chair, and the first tile came up with a wood on it so I was able to take my optimal first turn of grab 3 wood, buy the building firm for 4. I believe I then got to build the marketplace on my next turn. When Robb first taught Pounder and I to play Le Havre he made it very clear that letting someone do this would be game losing. So someone has to pick up dollars and buy the marketplace if the first player takes wood and buys the building firm. I don't know if this is actually true, but it's been an axiom in my Le Havre strategy since the very beginning. I got to get them both in this game, and it was pretty awesome. Especially as I learn the different special buildings and figure out which ones I want to come out or not, marketplace control seems really important. Being the one who owns it means you're more likely to be able to go to it when it matters, and you can sell it off at a truly important time if you have to.

As the game progressed I commented on how the Hardware Store actually seemed to be a lot better than I'd previously given it credit. Ken was using it a lot to good effect. From the finals last year I knew Ken was eyeing a way to end up buying or building the colliery. So I needed to do the same thing. It was sitting under the brickworks and the abattoir. The town was due to build the abattoir soon, and Ken would get to go first right after it did so. We both were sitting on the raw materials to build the brickworks and the colliery. But there is another option... Buy the abattoir for 8 and then build them both in one action! Things set up with a 6 franc offer which I was able to take on my second to last action before the town built the abattoir. Which meant my last action was to go to the construction firm, buy the abattoir, and built both buildings. I was just in on the money to do it.

I think the colliery is by far the best building in the game. Practically every way to score a lot of points involves coke in some way. You need a ton of energy to make steel, or you need a ton of energy to power the shipping line. There may be a hardcore builder plan that can ignore coke? But everything else wants coke. And because the cokery gives you a dollar for each coke, and because coke is the second best thing to ship, having extra coke is just fine. How do you get more coke? Having more coal. How do you get more coal? Hit the colliery every single chance you get. As a result I feel like it's the most used building in the game, and it has a relevant entry fee, so owning it is worth a ton of stuff. Or maybe you can convince someone to not go to the colliery on their turn to do so and then you get way more coke than they do. So you get to win.

Anyway, I now have the colliery. We also got what may be my favourite special building in the game to come out: the feed lot. I love it, because it lets you do a really early shipping action, buy it, and then replace the cows from that early shipping action. It probably lets you take an extra shipping action, and gives you 6 extra cows, so just buying it is like gaining 16 points. And you get extra cash in mid game, which can let you buy some relevant things. I think I ended up shipping using coal for power instead of coke in order to scoop it up, but it was still worth it. I think I used the money from that shipping to also buy the building that gives you a brick off the cost of every building. Which itself let me take an action to buy a 12 point building for free in the saw mill which was nice.

Rob ended up making a mistake I'd made in the finals a couple years ago. He set up to build the town hall, but then did something else first and then the town built it on him. I remember being really bitter at myself when it happened to me, so I can imagine how he felt. I legitimately hadn't noticed it was going to happen to him either, or I probably would have mentioned it. I just flat out missed that the town was building a building that round. That was probably a 30ish point play that just vanished on him, which is a big problem.

At any rate, with owning the marketplace early, and the colliery mid game, and the feed lot to get free cows I ended up with a pretty ridiculous score. 303 points, with Ken around 250 and Rob in the 220 range. Looks like I get to play in the finals. Woo!

The finals were scheduled for 9am the next day, which I really didn't want. I wasn't really expecting to play another game all week, so I could move it to pretty much any time slot that didn't involve having to wake up early while sick. The other two table winners concurred, but the closest second place guy wanted to play at 9am. Maybe that was because he saw how badly we wanted to move it? Maybe because he had something else to do all the rest of the day? Maybe he just doesn't like change. I can cop to rejecting a final move for that reason in a previous year so I can't really complain. I guess I'll just have to set an alarm and get up early on Friday.

I wandered around a bit, posted a blog post from the room, and eventually went back to Waffle House where I got the exact same thing for the second night in a row and still didn't get sick. Woo!

2013 WBC Day 5

Wednesday is the first real meat and potatoes day of WBC. Tuesday has the auction and earlier days tend to have fewer events for the early arrivers. Things really kick off on Tuesday and keep on trucking all day Wednesday. Just looking at the schedule I made up beforehand I was looking to play two heats of Race for the Galaxy, a Vegas Showdown, an Empire Builder, a Ra Dice, and Egizia, attend a demo, and win Can't Stop. There was even a gap in the middle for eating or squeezing something else in. Especially when I ultimately skipped crayon rails to play two things instead. So I had lots of grand dreams of things I was going to do.

Instead I slept in until after 2. Then I got up and jumped in the tub for an hour and read a book. Then I went and watched Sceadeau play a heat of Goa. Went back to the room, wrote a blog post or played Rogue Legacy or something.

7 o clock brought something I could sort of do... I went to another seminar from the life as a game lady! This one was on nutrition and how conventional wisdom is tricking everyone into doing it wrong. There was a lot of lead-in and discussion about evolution and other mammals. A talk about how the 'bad' LDL cholestrol actually works and how it only actually causes heart disease when it gets oxidized, and that the stuff that oxidizes it only gets made when your muscles are stuck processing carbohydrates instead of fats. So while LDL is a thing made of fat and protein and it is the thing that does eventually cause heart disease it actually only gets bad when you cut down on fat and ramp up on carbs. She went on to talk about how the early studies that showed saturated fat was terrible have all been refuted and showed the results of a 2010 metastudy that showed that there is no link at all between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. Following from that was a pretty linear trend line showing how heart disease goes up as you eat a diet composed more and more of carbs. Certainly something worth looking into more for some people I would think. Personally I eat plenty of fat and protein and try to avoid carbs as if they will kill me!

She talked a bit about how hunger signals work, and basically said the body doesn't have a good way of telling you when you're short of something in particular. So if you're down on carbs or down on fat or down on vitamin C basically the only thing your body can tell you is to eat more. Maybe the next thing you eat will solve the problem! But for most people the next thing is going to be the same sort of thing as the last thing, which sucks. If you're eating too much fat before you're going to end up eating even more fat and still not enough vitamin C. Or if you need more fat and fewer carbs you're going to end up eating even more and more carbs until you get enough fat and that's going to result in way overeating. Then eventually when you go on a diet you end up starving yourself in the same proportion and your body goes into a crazy conservation mode and slows down your metabolism and making you really hungry which screws your goals and makes you miserable. But if you changed to following the right rules and actually got the right split of everything in the first place you'd end up eating substantially less overall, get a health metabolism, and end up at a reasonable weight. Made sense to me! I know when I started eating worse when I had to work a regular job I ended up putting on weight and now that I'm eating what seems like a better mix of food I'm losing weight at a pretty decent clip!

She then talked a bit about why plants may have evolved the way they did and why that may make them worse for humans to eat than animals. Basically if an animal wants to evolve in order to avoid getting eaten it will evolve stealth, or speed, or claws. Maybe it will become poisonous like a toad, but for the most part animals use methods to avoid getting caught and eaten at all because it's very bad for them evolutionarily if I eat them. Plants on the other hand are stuck in the ground. I can see them, and I can walk up to them, and I can eat them. They could also become poisonous like a toad, but the sneakier thing to do is instead to evolve to abuse the fact I'm going to eat them when I walk up to them. A smart plan would be to trick me into eating their seeds and then get me to go poop them out somewhere else. As long as I don't destroy the seeds in my digestive tract this is a winning scenario for the plant. Especially if the seeds taste good and the part of the plant without seeds tastes terrible. The idea she talked about is that this is why gluten exists. Not as seeds themselves or to taste good, but to disrupt the digestive process. Make it so my body gets a little sick and can't digest things as well to give the seeds the best chance of making it all the way out. Evil plant! I won't fall for your plan! I just won't eat you at all! Come here, cow! OM NOM NOM!

The end ended up talking about how she used to be a vegetarian but is now into the paleo diet and thinks it's awesome. I don't know details about it, but if it avoids glutens and eats meat it's probably pretty good in my books. I liked how she presented information this time around, showed some now disputed studies to give an idea of where the random anti-science rant came from last time, and gave some interesting info to think about. It didn't seem to come across as a recruitment drive for a paleo diet, though she did endorse it pretty strongly as having worked well for her. And one thing I definitely noticed is that she was rather slim compared to most people at WBC. Maybe she's just "lucky" with a "good metabolism" or maybe her plan of blending a stick of butter into her coffee every morning actually has something going for it.

After that I think I went to watch some Brass, or went to the room and surfed the internet for a while.

11pm actually brought Can't Stop. I was still feeling pretty badly but I figured I could probably roll some dice and actually play a game for 10 minutes without wishing I was dead. Can't Stop also has the advantage of letting you play against your friends if you want to, so I played in a game with Robb and a couple of the people I know through Sceadeau (Matt and Andrew I think). I rolled a lot of trips and fell often. I did manage to get the 2s done, which made me happy. Then I lost and got to leave.

I hadn't actually eaten all day (well, I had a lot of gluten free snacks I brought, so a granola bar type thing and some ginger snaps) so we went to Waffle House. It was pretty empty and I spelled out what I needed to the waitress who seemed to be able to hook me up. I did get an onion in my hash browns which implied some cross contamination was going on but it didn't make me sick so I guess the scrambled eggs, hashbrowns with ham, a random onion, and salt are all nicely gluten free.

2013 WBC Day 4

Tuesday is a big day for some people at WBC. The morning and afternoon are devoid of events in order to run the big auction and auction store. I am not one of the people that care about these things at the best of times. Normally I will either sleep in, or I will get up and open game. This time around neither of those things were really in the cards. I woke up early (around 6am I think) feeling absolutely terrible. Both Robb and Pounder were snoring (both sounded stuffed up; my thinking was I'd probably spread the plague to them) and I couldn't find a way to either be warm or fall back asleep. I decided that since I was awake the best course of action was probably to just get dressed, grab my book, and go read in the lobby or something. I put on some headphones and turned on my mp3 player and did just that for an hour or two. The lobby was still pretty cold, and I felt pretty terrible, but the sun was up. I figured I'd go outside to see if it was any warmer and maybe read out there for a bit. It was a little warmer lying in the sun with my long pants and jacket on so I read for a bit. I got tired soon enough and figured I'd just take a nap.

Then it got dark as someone stood between the sun and the hat that was covering my eyes. I had my headphones on so I couldn't hear, but I struggled awake, took them off, and tried to figure out what was going on. It was someone from the hotel who thought I was a hobo trying to sleep on site without paying. He asked for my room number and to see my room key both of which I was able to do. He looked at me weird but I told him it was too cold in my room and warmer out here and he left me alone.

Eventually I got bored of sleeping outside and wandered around the hotel for a bit. Robb and Pounder were still asleep so I couldn't go hang out in the room. Instead I watched some demos in the sampler showcase and then went to Nick Henning's Legends of Rock demo. I didn't know what that was, and I knew it wasn't an event, but it was something to do. It turned out to be a game he's been designing for the last year that he wanted to demo and get feedback for. Being sick I was unwilling to actually play but I did stick around to watch other people play because I had nothing better to do. I don't generally like 'beta testing' games in either video or board game form anyway. It did seem like an interesting enough game with decisions being made and a neat theme. I particularly enjoyed that you had to name your band at the start of the game and then when you recorded an album you got to name that too. The game I watched featured Robot vs Deep Slurple vs The Happy Turtles vs Amish Rake Fight. Much cooler than just refering to people as green or red.

After that I wandered around the auction store. There were some things that looked interesting enough, but I'd decided that maybe I should be frugal what with being unemployed and all and didn't spend any money on long out of print games I likely would only play once. I ran into Pounder at the auction store and we wandered around a bit afterwards.

Robb was still asleep, so I couldn't go be miserable in the room, so I just hung out in the lobby being miserable instead. Say hello to people; refuse to shake their hand. Sceadeau wandered by and made fun of me for being Patient Zero and then took Pounder away to play Hanabi and left me behind. I tried to help by pointing out a nearby store that sold board games and might have Hanabi in stock but Elaine called them up and they didn't. One thing I'm learning is I could have made a fortune this year if I'd bought all the copies of Hanabi in Toronto when the shipments came in and brought them to WBC and sold them at a markup. Everyone is looking for a copy. It really is the co-op game for gamers.

I decided I was too cold in the lobby, so I went back outside to nap in the sun. If someone had told me that I was going to go away on vacation in order to play fewer games and sunbathe I would have told them they were off their rocker but here we are. There was a slight breeze which would make me shiver but the sun itself was pretty warm. I covered my face with my hat but ended up lying with my hands exposed. I was only out for an hour and a half or so but I got a bit of a sunburn out of it. No pain really, but my hands are definitely redder than they should be.

By this point plans had been made to go eat at the Texas Roadhouse at 4. It was a little past 3 so I decided if Robb was still asleep I didn't care and I was going to the room anyway. I still had to try to find a way to post Monday's blog post, after all. He was gone, but I still had no internet. Pounder came back and he had internet just fine. I guess it's a problem with my computer then. But I have a USB key (thanks Bell) so I just transfered the text file to his laptop and posted it from there.

Robb came in at 3:50 and said it was 4 and time to eat. I said it wasn't 4 yet and kept fiddling with my computer. Apparently the implication was that we were leaving early to go eat. But I was sick so I wasn't up to that particular deductive leap. They dragged me off anyway. The Roadhouse itself was very nice about my gluten issue. They don't preseason or marinade most of the steaks and they were more than willing to isolate part of the grill for my steak alone after scrubbing it down. The sides were really sketchy but they ended up letting me just get two sides of apple sauce. No spoon for most of the meal, sadly, but I did eventually get to eat everything and it didn't make me sick so score one for the good guys. And now we have a second place I can eat which will make Pounder happy since I think he was getting tired of Red Robin.

Actual games start at 6 and there were plenty of things I wanted to play. But I didn't feel like playing any of them. Instead I just went to the room and felt terrible. At 8 was a seminar titled 'How to Win at Being Human' and I feel like I tend to lose at being human so maybe they'd have something interesting to say. At the very least I could huddle in a corner of the room there feeling miserable just as well as in the hotel room.

The seminar ended up being put on by a nice young woman who has been coming to WBC for 6 years and wanted to just share some of the things she's learned. It sounded like maybe she was considering going back to school to do a masters on this stuff, or maybe she's going to become a wacky health guru on the internet or something. She had a background as a massage therapist and an art degree or something like that. At one point of the seminar she briefly trashed science as a thing which caused a ruckus around the room as one guy chimed in with some stories about how big business is ruining everything by corrupting science and another guy who is a scientist sniping back about how science is awesome but sometimes people twist it for their own means. Considering a lot of what the presenter had already talked about had been generated by science itself I feel like she was actually more in the second guy's camp but it seemed like she may have been treading a little into conspiracy wack-job territory herself.

It reminded me a bit about a Penn and Teller episode I watched recently about vaccinations. They talked about one study that was funded entirely by a lawyer that wanted to sue vaccine makers who paid a scientist to come out with a fraudulent study linking vaccines to autism in children. The guy published the study and it's been a huge problem. Science itself has completely refuted that study and I think the scientist has been charged for fraud in some manner, but the damage has been done. Crazy people refuse to vaccinate their children because of one fake study and their own paranoia.

At any rate, back to the seminar. The meat of what she was discussing is how games make people feel good because the limbic system likes to reward things like status, consistency, and fairness all of which are abundant in the structure of board games. Her theory is that we need to change the way we approach life to line up better with what the limbic system rewards in order to make us feel better and make good decisions. It seemed like it made sense if you could come up with good rules, anyway. She is running a series of 4 seminars and went over a bit of what was coming up in future days. The next one was going to be about nutrition, and how current conventional wisdom is terrible and causing the problems it's supposed to be preventing. Misunderstaning cholesterol and such things, and how meat isn't nearly as bad for you as the grain industry wants you to think. The second one would be about how absolutely atrocious shoes are and how we should all go barefoot. That one made me think of Sky, because he only goes barefoot and likes to rail about how terrible shoes are. The last one was about the brain but she ran out of time before she could really go over what would be going on in it. (There were technical difficulties getting her computer hooked up to the projector.)

The bottom line was she at least had interesting things to say. I'm a big fan of critical thinking and that means showing up and learning new things about what people think is a good thing. Maybe she's a crazy person, maybe she isn't. But having a new way to look at things can't hurt as long as I think about it and come to conclusions myself. Which, I hope, is where she was going with the science rant in the middle. Science is awesome, but we can't just take what any given scientist says as law. You need to look at the studies and interpret things yourself. If only everyone had the time to do all this research!

After that I went back to the room, played a little Rogue Legacy, felt terrible, and went to bed. One thing I did before going to bed was pop a couple extra strength Tylenol that I'd apparently packed in my bathroom bag. They claimed to deal with fever and maybe that would cut down on the shivering. Turned out yes, since I actually couldn't get to sleep because I started sweating under all my blankets! I actually had to turn the AC back on and take off Pounder's extra blanket before I was finally able to get to sleep.

2013 WBC Day 3

Monday had the A Few Acres of Snow demo at 11am as the first thing on my agenda. I didn't want to sleep through it, so I set the alarm in the room for 10am. I ended up actually waking up more around 9 or so, frozen solid despite Pounder's extra blanket, so I once again jumped into a hot bath. Which helped a little while I was in it, but I didn't like getting out of it. At some point Robb started yelling about how it was 11am and I was missing my demo. This seemed odd since I was pretty sure I wasn't in the tub for more than 2 hours. It turns out the alarm had gone off at 10 and confused him and somehow that made him think it was 11 or something. He was probably still sleeping. And apparently the alarm is very hard to turn off.

Anyway, I was up and about and went to the demo area to set up. In retrospect it was probably a mistake to show up to the demo area so much earlier than my start time. I had time to set the game up, which was nice, but then people started showing up. I could tell that making small talk was what was supposed to be going on, and that as the person 'in charge' of the table I was obligated to stay on top of that, but that's just not something I can do. Especially when sick. So I just sat there being antisocial. Eventually enough people showed up that they gave up on me and started talking amongst themselves instead. Yay?

Did the demo in about 45 minutes. I missed some things that came up later (disconnected locations becoming unplayable, the actual legal attack path) but it went reasonably well. I was very susprised at how many people showed up to the demo. Probably in the 15-20 range. WBC is still mostly stuck in the old idea that the convention really starts Tuesday at 6pm so things that run on Monday don't really have that much competition I guess. There was one other demo going on for a much longer, more hardcore wargame. So I guess A Few Acres of Snow was the casual option for the day. Several of the people from the demo came to play in the first round, which was good.

What wasn't good was the mix of people who showed up for the first round. 24 people showed up to play with 3 mulligan round losers showing up, for a total of 29 people for the entire event. Down a little from the 33 of last year, but not down by too much. But of those 24 people only 6 had a copy of the game, which meant 18 people without a copy. I had my copy some people could use, but that still left 10 people with no game to play. One guy knew someone who had a game lying around (one of the mulligan round winners as it turned out) so that took care of 2 more people. Robb ran off to check the open gaming library but no copies were there either. So I told the remaining 8 people that if they wanted to check back in an hour I'd start games there on any boards that had finished up and were available for use. 3 people ended up coming back in an hour and one board was opened up so I got to squeeze 2 more people into the tournament. 6 people got turned away, leaving only 23 actual entrants. My suspicion was that we barely made it into the century last year and probably could have snuck back in with 29 people playing but falling down to 23 is probably a death knell. If only more people owned the game!

Because of all the hassle with looking for games I didn't have good timing down on the rounds. The rounds are supposed to be two hours long. Last year I think only one game went long, or if more did the GM did a good job of controlling them. I did not. Multiple games were brushing up against or going over the 2 hour mark. But I didn't know exactly when people started, and I didn't really know what to do about it. The problem with A Few Acres of Snow is the optimal winning strategy for one of the sides basically ignores victory points. So adjudicating a game based on points on hand is really bad if the British are trying for the auto win with a military victory. Officially you need the GM and both assistant GMs to adjudicate a game to make sure it's as fair as possible, which makes sense. But both my assistant GMs skipped the first round entirely since they won the mulligan round! Pounder also took off after losing in round 2, so I didn't have two assistant GMs after that. I ended up giving most of the games that went long extra time by ignoring them while assigning matchups for the winner of those games. That meant people got to get playing the next round sooner unless they were matched up against a slow winner, but it also meant the rounds got a little out of sync. At other Nick's suggestion I eventually randomized out a whole bracket and posted it so people would know who they were playing in the next couple rounds which made sense. I was trying to avoid doing that because I needed to award byes and I needed to make sure mulligan round losers didn't meet again until the finals but only one mulligan round loser managed to win even a single round of the main event so it ended up being pretty easy.

After all the shenanigans with the half round start and such I ended up with 13 people advancing to round 2. This meant 6 games and 1 bye, followed by 3 games and 1 bye. At WBC you have to give byes at late as possible in order to keep as many people playing as soon as possible. You also have to give byes preferentially to previous winners. This meant I had to give myself the bye in the round of 13 and someone who wasn't me the bye in the round of 7. I shuffled up 6 cards and had other Nick give me a number from 1 to 6. This assigned the bye to Kevin (last year's 3rd place and the guy I beat in the mulligan round) which meant I could build the bracket out with me on the other side from him and just assign the other 5 cards at random.

I was matched up against one of the guys from Quebec who come down for WBC. He let me play as the British for a bid of 1, which seemed really low. He started a quick siege of Pemaquid and I countered by thinning my deck, staying even in that fight, and starting a siege in Port Royal. I made one small mistake by letting him ambush me twice while he still had his Siege Artillery in his deck which let him threaten to win either fight if I commited anything to the other one. What I should have done was not cared about that, put pressure on the Port Royal fight, and kept him from getting off the ambush at all. Instead I guaranteed a win in Pemaquid but lost 7 dollars from his successful ambush. This also meant my bad cards and his good cards recycled into the decks. I was still able to pull off a quick siege and victory in Louisbourg but he got off a couple more ambushes in the meantime. I didn't have the strength to keep going. I tried anyway, jumping into a fight in Gaspe, but ended up losing that one. (Gaspe was still a cube and I wanted to keep him from putting a disk on it while I built up an army again.) Ultimately I bought an Indian Leader and managed to use that to stop the siege bleeding. I then bought some more guns to even us up. His deck was pretty watered down with lots of indians and guns. So was mine, to be fair, but I felt like I had inevitability on my side. Eventually I started a siege in Gaspe again, but only put a couple boats into it to start. He pulled out his reserve and overcommitted to the fight, guaranteeing his victory but taking several military cards out of circulation for one shuffle of his deck. I felt like that was going to be enough of a window, so I jumped into a fight in Trois Rivieres. Note I waited to jump into Gaspe until I was about to reshuffle, in order to be able to attack quickly again after losing the fight. He had no response to the fight in Trois Rivieres since he couldn't redraw enough guns fast enough. I think he had enough in his deck, but couldn't bubble them to the top in time. I won that fight and pretty much won the game as well. He didn't concede so I went through the motions. Attack Tadoussac, win. Raid Montreal from Trois Rivieres. Have 12 points in spoils and end the game that way, with a massive point lead.

In the middle of this game other Nick brought to my attention that one of the other games was going really long. It was a round 2 game still! The last one of those to start thanks to not adjudicating round 1 games, but it was going really long. And they were cheating. So I went over and pointed out the illegal move (putting a disk into a location not worth points) and then looked to see if the game was going to end soon. They'd been playing for way more than 2 hours at this point and weren't anywhere near any of the victory conditions. So I ended up counting the points. The French player, unsurprisingly, was in the lead. But I couldn't see any way to adjudicate the game other than give them the win. The British player hadn't won any fights at all and had bloated his deck with junk so even if he could win with a strategy shift and another 2 hours I couldn't give it to him. I wanted to get other Nick to concur but the British player said he thought the ruling was fair and gave up.

The top 4 shook out to be someone from the bonus round 1.5 game and last year's top three. Myself, other Nick, and Kevin. I was playing other Nick in one semi. He won the randomizer to make the first bid and started with 7 for the British. Here was my thought process... I knew other Nick and Kevin played the game together a lot. I knew they used the WBC bidding system in their games. I saw how close Kevin came to beating me in the mulligan round with a bid of 5 when he failed to use any of the actions. So I was a little worried that 8 for the British was going to be just too high. On the other hand I haven't played much at all, and I was sick, and I know my British game is better than my French game. Maybe I should have bid higher but I decided to just run with the French and see what would happen.

I ended up with a terrible opening hand and used one of my bid actions on the first turn. This let me start a siege in Pemaquid. I was then able to settle Halifax myself and start disking things up while keeping that fight going. My plan was to get close enough to ending the game by the time he broke out of the fight that I could use ambushes to keep him from getting beyond Louisbourg before I could win. Right as he was going to win the fight in Pemaquid I had a decision to make... Spend 7 dollars on some guns to slow him down as he tried to break out, or buy a settler and end the game one shuffle through my deck earlier. At this point I still needed to upgrade Montreal, Fort Frontenac, and settle and upgrade Oswego. I went with the Settler and used a bid action to reshuffle or something. I had used a couple more bidding tokens to get out of some awkward hands and thought I was in a reasonable position.

Other Nick started a fight in Port Royal with enough to win it and I had a choice. I had siege and regulars in my reserve so I could dig them out and throw them in. He had two regulars in his reserve though, so this was just going to eat up time and cost me the regular when I lost the fight. It would also use up all of my money and not get me any closer to ending the game since I would be spending cards from the reserve instead of from my hand. Instead I went with a double ambush. I killed off his reserve, got to draw 2 cards, but spent the money I'd need to play the siege artillery myself and lost the fight in Port Royal. Other Nick was very sad since it turns out he didn't have a settler icon in his hand. Prolonging the fight would have meant he'd draw one for sure, so this was almost certainly the right course of action for me. He'd need to cycle through his deck to get Boston again, and then either attack Halifax or settle Port Royal, and then cycle into that card to attack Louisbourg. I would almost certainly have enough tempo to end the game before all that could happen. Yay!

Then he attacked Halifax with the Pemaquid card. Huh. He'd bought a governor but he'd only ever removed St Mary's from the game. He kept Pemaquid around for some reason (he had upgraded it to a disk for 2 points prior to this, so he probably just didn't have it in hand when he used the governor) and was able to use it to start another siege on this run through his deck. I'd spent my money so I couldn't properly defend this one either. Instead I spent all but one of my remaining bid tokens to upgrade Montreal, grab Oswego, and reshuffle. I was going to lose the fight in Halifax right away, but I was going to be able to end the game on this next go through my deck.

At this point other Nick stopped to count points. If he was able to start a fight in Louisbourg, win it, and settle it then he would have more points than me and win the game. Otherwise if the game ended before he could do it, or if he couldn't settle when he did, I would win the game. My first hand after the shuffle... No settler. His first hand... No Halifax. By this point I'd used my last bid token (to ditch the useless Port Royal card and get one card deeper) and was able to settle one of the two needed locations. His second hand... No Halifax. I was pretty much at the bottom of my deck but still no Quebec. I did some junky actions to cycle deeper. He was then able to start a siege in Louisbourg. I could have ended the game with a different card ordering this time through my deck, but it was not to be. I was able to pull back my reserve to threaten winning the fight in Louisbourg and also put out my last disk. Siege artillery was in my hand now, but I had no money. I burned home support to draw 1 worthless card because it would let me reshuffle and draw 1 new card. (No point in having a hand of Home Support, Priest, Siege Artillery, Louisbourg, and Trois Rivieres with no cards in deck. Much better to have 4 worthless cards and a random one!) I pretty much needed to draw home support and use it to make 3 dollars in order to use the siege. Instead Other Nick ambushed my hand and put something into the fight in order to win it.

On the plus side, I had topdecked Home Support. All my disks were in play so the game was going to end at the start of my next turn if he won the fight in Louisbourg. I had no military strength in hand, so that was going to happen. I needed to score 3 points (while keeping him from scoring any points himself) or I needed him to not be able to settle Louisbourg or I needed to home support into something to keep the fight going I guess. I did use home support, but got no military strength. On the plus side, I did get both Trois Rivieres and a Native American card. I could use Trois Rivieres to make a dollar and spend it on the native to raid! I still had that priest card kicking around so I could get a range of 3. Enough to just barely reach Pemaquid! It had a disk on it, so this would be a 6 point swing and would win me the game. Except he was able to block it. With the Pemaquid card that he never got rid of and which was presumably crippling his hand the whole time.

The fight ended, he had no way to score more points, and he won the game by 3. But it was very close. On the last go through both of our decks my deck was very badly ordered for me (but not too unexpected since I needed to draw 4 specific cards) and his was not ordered very badly for him (but also not too unexpected since he just needed to draw 1 specific card along with a mix of many other viable cards). He was probably in the 60-70% range to win, but it wasn't guaranteed. I'm sure that having 7 bid tokens made a huge difference in that as well. I had several garbage hands over the course of the game and I was able to keep taking good turns by being able to cycle through the chaff. I'm not saying I played optimally, or that he did, but I do feel like the bidding system made this game into one that wasn't a guaranteed British win.

I didn't get to see the other semi, but Kevin won. He faced off against other Nick in the finals. Other Nick started the bid this time with only 6 for the British and won the bid. Maybe he started with a higher bid against me out of respect? Or maybe he saw something I didn't about how our game went and decided I should have won with the 7 bid? I don't know! The game started out very differently as Kevin bought a very early settler card just like he did in the Mulligan round and went to work trying to burn the game out. Nick went to work winning with a military force, but he didn't get the governor as early as I do (or maybe not even at all this game) and kept having to take actions for 3 dollars instead of 6. He did eventually get rolling, and got to a very similar board situation. Kevin was about to disk out, but Nick had just won the fight in Louisbourg. It turned out Kevin was able to put his last disk into play when Nick was about halfway through his deck. If he'd drawn the Louisbourg card and a boat he'd win the game by attacking Quebec. Otherwise he'd lose the game on points. He had the cards he needed, and won. But once again, he was probably only like 60-70% to get it done. A far cry from the base game, where I still firmly believe the British will win every game.

Because I lost to the eventual winner I came 3rd. This was good, since the event has prizes to the top 3. I filled out my forms, submitted them to registration, got my 3rd place plaque, and went off to die. There were lots of games I would have wanted to play in a normal year later in the evening, but I really, really didn't want to play anything. I did find Robb and Pounder in the open gaming room playing Copycat which looked interesting. We went out for food along with the random dude who played Copycat with them. We went to Red Robin because I didn't want to get even more sick.

Afterwards they went off to do something and I went to the room to try to make a blog post. Somehow my computer decided it was happy to connect to the network but that the network couldn't provide internet access. Eventually I gave up. On the plus side I figured out how to turn off the air conditioning in the room and did that so maybe I wouldn't freeze as badly in my sleep that night.

2013 WBC Day 2

Sunday starts off with Through The Ages at noon. All of last week I'd been going to bed around 9pm, so Saturday night I ended up going to bed earlier than Robb or Pounder. Again, maybe that was to get away from Space Alert, but I was also rather tired. I think I went to bed around midnight or so, which was going to leave plenty of time to wake up for noon so no alarm was set. I ended up waking up much earlier than that, since it turns out the hotel room was set to refrigerator temperature. I woke up with the chills and a bit of a sore throat. I assumed that was just because the room was so much dryer than I'm used to, drank some Sprite, and took my standard tactic for dealing with a low body temperature: hot bath! I settled in with my book (Shadow of the Giant) but didn't really warm up much despite a very high water temperature. Eventually I gave up and got up for good. I went to register while Robb and Pounder got up and showered and stuff. I got a nice collared shirt for being a GM. Woo!

In an attempt to bribe the WBCers to keep us from finding a new location (the AC dying last year was a mighty big straw on our little camel's back) the hotel gave everyone a free breakfast buffet for each day they were staying. This sounds pretty typical I would think (the place we stayed across the street in 2007 had free breakfast) but this hotel didn't have it before so one would think it was a step in the right direction. Unfortunately the buffet is really, really bad. The orange juice was so watered down I found it offensive. The bacon was rather cold and slimy. The honeydew was actually decent though, which was a bit of a surprise. Cutting up fruit isn't hard, but I would have thought they'd have found a way to fail. I stayed away from the eggs as I was worried of gluten contamination but Robb told me I wasn't missing anything.

Eventually off to Through The Ages. Randy changed the format this year to get rid of the conceding shenanigan I used last year with only your top two finishes counting this time. Not that it mattered for me, since I would only be able to play one heat anyway thanks to needing to GM A Few Acres of Snow. I showed up because there was nothing I could actually win at the same time, and because I really like the game, and because I was hoping to get put on Sceadeau's table so I could beat him. Unfortunately to use Daniel's term I was up against two stuffed animals. I ended up winning by a really large margin, and it could have been even more if I'd been focused on scoring points at the end of the game instead of on just making it to the end of a slow game without going crazy. One of my opponents had a hard time with making legal plays. I really don't think she was trying to cheat, just that she was sloppy or absent minded or felt rushed by the third player but she kept failing to spend food, resources, or actions to do the things she wanted to do. I had to pay close attention to maintain the game state. That's the sort of thing I like to do anyway (I hope to be able to learn from good plays if I watch the plays as they're happening and try to analyse them) but this game was pretty slow and it wore on me as the game went on. I'd also failed to bring my thermos down to the room with me, so I ran out of water, and my already dry throat from earlier was starting to really get to me. I got Sceadeau to do a water run for me which was awesome of him and helped some.

Despite my game being pretty slow Robb's game was nowhere near done. He was going to play in the next heat and wouldn't have time for food so Pounder and I went out for food just the two of us. Pounder wanted to go somewhere else but I decided I didn't want to risk gastro-intestinal issues while GMing a game so I pushed for another trip to Red Robin. I got the same thing, with a different drink. Burger hold most of the toppings. It's pretty great to start from a menu item and just list off most of the stuff as things to take off. Aaaaand the bun. During the meal I drank a lot of the melonade drink (lemonade and Sprite combined with some watermelon chunks) and discovered it wasn't making a dent on my throat. I had time to stop and think in the restaurant and came to the conclusion that this wasn't just a dry throat. I was sick. Super sore throat, stuffy nose, a bit of a cough, a headache, and a really warm forehead (which probably just meant a really cold hand) to go with the chills from the morning that just wouldn't go away. I haven't felt like this in a while, but it feels a lot like when I used to get throat infections as a teenager. Maybe it's the flu, maybe it's an infection of some kind. I've decided it's actually the plague, and Sceadeau has labeled me Patient Zero. Everyone is going to get to go home from WBC with my plague. I don't know if I picked it up here, or on the trip from Toronto to Kitchener, or what. Maybe I had a bad baked PoTaToE at Wendy's after all. But the bottom line is I felt terrible and didn't want to do anything but find a warm place to sleep.

So... Off to GM my event. Sunday night had the mulligan round for A Few Acres of Snow and I had to be there to run it. Pounder came along to help out and I talked to Nick Henning who agreed to also help out on Monday. Running the event started with a bit of a snag. Each game has a big triangular prism which contains things like the history of the event and a big picture of the event so people who walk into a room have a beacon to know where to go in order to sign up. They were all in the big row outside the demo area as expected... Except mine. The big concern was the registration sheets get stored with the kiosk, so not having it was going to be a real problem. Andy Lotto told me I could steal the one out of Innovation if I needed to in the short term because Don would surely fix things when he found out. A Few Acres of Snow was missing, and registration was closed to go eat. There was a sign saying they'd be back in an hour or so, which would be an hour before my round would start, so no need to panic yet. We had time to kill so Pounder went and got Innovation and we played a couple games without expansions. He blew me out both times. He plays a lot online so he knows what cards are good and which ones are not. I do not.

Eventually registration opened and it turns out my kiosk was just sitting in registration. In order to help out the events being run that day they'd set aside those kiosks in the registration room. Which would have been great, if it hadn't been locked when we wanted to pick it up. Oh well! I was able to collect it in plenty of time before the event started so no harm done. I was a little stressed out about it, so maybe a little harm done, but it all worked out in the end.

The mulligan round ended up attracting only 8 people which was a drop from last year's 16. A 9th person did show up, but they didn't know the rules. Rather than let them play I told them to come back tomorrow morning for the demo and maybe the real first round. There was nothing else the guy wanted to do, so he just stuck around to watch games. 6 of the 8 people had copies of the game which was pretty great. I wrote people's names on index cards and used those to generate pairings. I ended up playing against Kevin Lewis, who came 3rd last year. He was not happy to have to play me until he thought about it a bit more. Because I don't want the 2nd best person to get knocked out by losing twice to the best person I said I'd split up people who played in the mulligan round onto opposite sides of the bracket. If we were to play again it would be in the finals.

The game itself was over in very short fashion. He let me be the British with a bid of 5, but then forgot to use any of the bid tokens. That or he was saving them for a big flourish at the end which is entirely possible. He bought a very early settler card and I was quite scared that I he was going to be able to settle out before I could kill him even with him putting up next to no effort to stop me at all. He even let me ambush away his starting regular (though he later said that was a mistake)! Unfortunately for him the first card in my deck after my first military victory was the Port Royal card which let me attack Louisbourg quickly. He had fortified it (and Trois Rivieres) but I was still able to take it out in short order. And then my first card on the next shuffle was Louisbourg, so I was able to hit Quebec and win. The game took maybe 15 minutes from start to finish since we both had a plan and knew what each other was doing.

After that the guy who was watching asked if I'd play him a game for fun to teach him the rules. I had to stay until all the mulligan round games finished anyway so I didn't see why not. Rather then blow him out the same way I went a full British expansion strategy and ended up barely winning. Against a complete newbie who took many random actions, and had no bid tokens. Yeah, that's not actually the way to win a real game. Conquer or lose!

One game in the mulligan round went pretty long and one of the guys suggested I could just leave and he'd tell me the result later. That seemed super sketchy. I stuck around until the bitter end, and they ended up running right into the 2 hour mark. The guy who made that suggestion is someone who had emailed me a bunch of times with rules questions in the months before WBC, which was interesting.

Anyway, mulligan round over. Attendance down, but there was still the next day to boost that back up. I think Robb and Pounder wanted to play games (Hanabi I think) but I'd given in that I was sick and therefore should go to bed. The room was still cold, and I was still shivering outside the room, so Pounder gave me the blanket off of his bed. Sheet, comforter, super warm blanket, extra hotel blanket... Would that be enough to keep me warm through the night?