Bridge Match 3 - Board 7

Board 7 - Dealer South - All Vul

Opponents convention card: Dutch Acol
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: ♠ 9 ♥ T 7 3 ♦ K 9 3 ♣ Q J 7 6 5 3

I open with a nice light vulnerable 3 club preempt. West bids 3 diamonds which gets passed back to me. Enjoy 3 diamonds!

Partner leads the 4 of clubs. *snicker*

	NORTH ♣ 4
		EAST ♠ K Q 8 7 4 3 ♥ 9 8 ♦ T 4 ♣ K 9 8
	SOUTH ♠ 9 ♥ T 7 3 ♦ K 9 3 ♣ Q J 7 6 5 3

West	North	East	South
			3♣
3♦	Pass	Pass	Pass

4-8-J-A. West plays a spade. J-6-Q-9. Now he draws trump. 4-3-A-7. Another diamond, this one to partner. 2-J-T-9. Partner cashes a heart. A-8-3-6. And another. K-9-7-2. He tries for yet one more. Q-3 of spades-T-5 of diamonds. Now a spade. A-2-4-?

Am I supposed to ruff this? Partner should have an even number of clubs... I had 1 and East had 6. Which means either partner has 2 and declarer has 4 or the other way around. I don't see how that helps me. I am a little worries that partner has the Q of diamonds and declarer could make it drop if he drew trump? But that would mean he only had 5 diamonds for his bid. Could declarer really be 4-2-5-2? If he is 4-2-6-1 do we have a play? He's up if he is. What if he's 2-2-6-3? Then he could always throw me in and force me to lead a club for him. So I might as well assert partner has the Q of diamonds and ruff here.

I ruff and play a low club. Partner shows out. Declarer ruffs a spade, plays a club back, and is up. Making 3.

	NORTH ♠ T 6 5 2 ♥ A K Q J 5 4 ♦ J 7 ♣ 4
WEST ♠ A J ♥ 6 2 ♦ A Q 8 6 5 2 ♣ A T 2		EAST ♠ K Q 8 7 4 3 ♥ 9 8 ♦ T 4 ♣ K 9 8
	SOUTH ♠ 9 ♥ T 7 3 ♦ K 9 3 ♣ Q J 7 6 5 3

Two tables played in 3 diamonds just in. One played 3 spades making 4. One played 4 spades making 4. One played 4 spades making 5. Three times my side went down 2 tricks in 3 hearts. All told this means we get a whopping 13 MPs for a split top board. Woo!


Captain Jack thinks my hand isn't good enough for a preempt. Well, Jack, did we keep them out of their spade game or not? That's what I thought!

Ranking after board 7/60: 8/16 with 55.1%

2014 WBC: Day 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2014 WBC: Day 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2014 WBC: Day 2

Sunday, Sunday, someday... A day for more wargame tournaments and some really long civilization games. Advanced Civilization and Through The Ages in particular. I've only partially played an AC game but I play a lot of TTA online so that was my game of choice for the day. The last two years I've been prevented from really giving the tournament a try because it conflicted with A Few Acres of Snow but since I gave up on GMing AFAoS and no one else stepped up it died off. Now there's nothing to stop me from winning TTA!

The first heat was at noon. Many people like to bring their own copy of the game in order to avoid being stuck playing with other people who own the game in a heat. The theory being that the set of people who own the game rate to be more sharklike than the set of people who don't own a copy of the game. This is great logic if you want to advance to the semis. I'd rather play good games now, and to me good leans more towards one that is interesting and challenging and less towards one where I dominate the competition. So even if I had a copy of the game I wouldn't bring it! Pair me with a shark! So my first heat is of course against Robb and Jason. My former teammates... Jason always picks TTA as his team game and has won multiple times. Good game, woo!

I ended up going first and took pyramids to start. My first real turn got Caesar for 1 so I played him and made a bronze. From there things really went my way and I ended up with all of the good Age I cards. Knights, iron, alchemy, theology, irrigation, Leonardo, medieval army... I then transitioned that board state into most of the good Age 2 cards. Eiffel Tower, Napoleon, constitutional monarchy, classic army, strategy, riflemen... Leonardo's free rocks made it so I was able to exactly jump from 10 strength to 31 in one turn. I also ended up grabbing all of the Age I and Age II copies of breakthrough and revolutionary idea. An early Age III air forces sealed the deal. In all I hit Robb with a war over technology (for 2 bulbs total, not the best war ever), then I raided Jason's science buildings away (he never made another bulb for the rest of the game after that), then I hit Robb with a 38ish point war of culture drawing a concession. I followed that up with a war of culture on Jason and he responded in a way I didn't expect. He took Churchill, disbanded every single building he owned, and stuck them all into army. I was still ahead, but it was a sticky situation since I have to choose if I want to sacrifice first and I get less from sacrificing since Napoleon's 18 point bonus doesn't come along for the ride.

I went through some scenarios and decided that if I didn't sacrifice and Jason didn't sacrifice that I would just win. I'm ahead in strength and I'm still making food and rocks and science and points and he's making nothing at all. I also decided if I sacrificed everything and so did Jason that I would also win for the same reasons. It would be even more secure since he wouldn't be able to even rebuild a building if he wanted to if he sacced his entire population. If I didn't sacrifice and Jason did then he'd actually have a big point lead on me that I might not be able to make up over the last 2 or 3 turns in the game. Unless I had another war in which case I would win for sure. But I knew my hand and it didn't have any more wars. So this scenario is one where I might lose. If I do sacrifice and Jason doesn't then I score up a TON of points (something like an 80 point swing) and he almost certainly can't win. If he has a war to declare back he has a chance since I won't have any strength but in that case I can disband all my buildings too and rebuild up to a decent strength total. I felt like in this case the 80 point swing coupled with Eiffel Tower would be enough to win me the game. My only losing scenario was if I didn't sacrifice so I went all in. Jason didn't have a war of his own so he also went all in. He won the war by 2 points but could no longer play the game. I got Sid Meier and computers rolling and scored a ton of points by the end of the game to win something like 117-74-WITHDREW. So I got revenge on my old team for kicking me out? And beat a former champ? Woo!

Went out to eat at Red Robin I think. Yum! They took steamed carrots off the menu and replaced with steamed broccoli. Whoever made that decision should be shot. They also added in a fruit salad though and I figured it probably wouldn't kill me so I went with that instead. It turns out to be mostly cut up apple with some bonus fruit but it was good enough.

6pm brought the next heat of TTA. Fresh off a win I was looking at likely needing a close second to advance to the semis. I ended up getting a table for this round with Randy Buehler and Nick Henning. Hurray for not getting stuck with soft tables this year! Randy is the GM and has won the event multiple times. Nick hasn't really played the event before (the last two years at least he was playing A Few Acres of Snow with me) but he's apparently been playing online and is really good at games in general. He made a few mistakes in the game I think but he actually ended up winning the whole tournament (spoiler alert!) so definitely not a pushover at this game! Randy ended up being start player and got off to a good start with Michaelangelo piloting 8 happy faces thanks to St Peter's Basilica and a pair of theologies. Neither Nick nor I was set up to punish him for scoring 12 points a turn and that was very unfortunate. Randy and Nick snapped up both knights so I was stuck playing great wall as my military 'strategy'. I actually ended up being the strongest at some points in the game with 7 warriors! I think I played this game entirely on bronze. The midgame featured Randy still happily scoring 12 points a turn while Nick and I got in each other's way militarily. Nick got Napoleon but only drew tactics using archer cards and kept saccing his medieval armies to colonize territories. I was great wall so I kept taking archer cards in the hopes of eventually drawing a tactic to use them. Really we needed to find some way to share and then beat up Randy who was amassing a ludicrous point lead. At one point Randy was making 2 rocks and no food and offered Nick a pact so that Randy could make a 3rd rock per turn if Nick made his 5th or 7th food. Nick snap accepted which felt wrong to me, but then I was in the 3rd seat and have a hard time making an impartial call there. It felt like Randy was going to win if we didn't do something to stop him and giving him 50% extra rock production was going to give him more of a chance to recover his infrastructure and be able to keep playing after Michaelangelo died. But maybe Nick needed the food to set up a good play?

At any rate, I ended up drawing the classic army and eventually decided to play tanks and run out a 7 warrior and 2 tank army. Randy also bumped up his strength and Nick did other things. I attacked Nick with an 8 strength lead for 7 points, then Randy attacked Nick with a 6 strength lead for a raid. This would kill all of Nick's science production and blow him out and he didn't have a defense card. He decided to sac a medieval army to defend. Then he resigned from the game since he decided the best he could do on his turn was get back to the same board state and then get pummeled by the two of us for more stuff over and over. I'm not sure I agree with that (since I was actually out of attacks I couldn't have hit him again) and maybe he can keep saccing to hold off Randy? But even then he's really spending every turn to take out 2 or 3 of Randy's red dots and I might draw another attack and Nick is not winning this game regardless. So I can see withdrawing. He considered letting Randy's attack through since he let mine through and wanted to be fair but I feel like that would have been poor. He wasn't going to resign after my attack and it was strong enough he couldn't have realistically defended. Randy's attack knocked him out of the game and would have done so even if I hadn't attacked. I don't like rewarding the person who knocks me out so I like defending and then withdrawing rather than giving up free stuff and then withdrawing. It's the same logic for why I was fine with Robb withdrawing in the first heat. I played a card that said Robb can't win. Then Robb got to take an action to deny me a reward for eliminating him.

With Nick gone I seeded an event which punished the new weakest player, Randy. This made him very bitter. I then went all in on scoring points (again with Sid Meier I think) and tried to close the massive point lead that Randy had. It came down to the wire but Randy managed to stay ahead by a mere 7 points with something like 162-155. I could map out a way the game could have played out that let me win and part of me wants to say that's what should have happened. Gang up on the leader! Michaelangelo for 12 points is insane and everyone else needs to drop everything to beat them up. But that line of play likely results in Nick still coming 3rd so I'm trying to argue he needs to kingmake for me instead of Randy. I do want that, I guess, but it sucks. I don't know. I just hate when someone gets an early lead and gets to ride it to victory. I feel like I expect everyone to gang up on me when I do it! But then everyone certainly should play their own game and this game was fun so it's all good. This second might or might not be close enough to advance so I probably need to come back for the 3rd heat to try again. And get more practice? People keep doing well without iron... Maybe I need to stop putting such a priority on it.

The rest of my team had shown up by this point so we hung out for a while and then went to Waffle House once Robb finished playing his slow game of TTA. Waffle House didn't make me sick so hurray!

Bridge Match 3 - Board 6

Board 6 - Dealer East - EW Vul

Opponents convention card: Dutch Acol
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: ♠ A T 6 5 ♥ J ♦ A Q 9 7 6 ♣ A Q 8

I open 1 diamond in second chair. West overcalls a heart, partner makes a negative double, and East bids 2 diamonds which is alerted as a constructive raise. That's a little confusing since I feel like my team has all the points but I guess someone is lying! I wonder what my double here would show? Desire to double hearts? Good diamonds? Takeout of hearts? I won't look at what it gets alerted as until the bidding is over but I'm curious so I bid it. West retreats to 2 hearts, partner bids 2 spades, and East passes. I bid 3 spades which gets alerted and then passed out. Huh.

East leads the 7 of hearts.

	NORTH ♠ K Q 4 3 ♥ T 9 4 ♦ J 4 ♣ J T 7 2
		EAST ♥ 7
	SOUTH ♠ A T 6 5 ♥ J ♦ A Q 9 7 6 ♣ A Q 8

West	North	East	South
		Pass	1♦
1♥	Double1	2♦2	Double3
2♥	2♠	Pass	3♠4
Pass	Pass	Pass
1Negative
2Constructive raise
3Support double (exactly 3 spades, forcing)
4Limit raise

7-J-A-4. West returns another heart. 2-9-K-5 of spades. Ok, where are we at in this hand? We lost a heart and have potential king losers in the minors. Spades may have a loser if they split 4-1 or 5-0. So it feels like 3 spades is a pretty safe place? Assuming we have a source of tricks, anyway. I feel like both minors are reasonable sources of tricks so that's good too. Can I afford to draw trump? I need to make use of the high spades in hand to finesse the minors, but otherwise I feel like yes. So I draw a round of trump and lead a low club. 6-8-K-2. 2-9-Q-5. Hurray? I don't know how happy I am with a winning finesse though, which means I probably shouldn't have taken it. Sigh.

Ok, mistakes were made. I think it's time to just lose some tricks. I fire out a low diamond. 6-8-J-K. East returns a heart, so I get another ruff. I probably should have done that myself. 8-T of spades-6-T. I draw another round of trump and get sad. A-3 of hearts-3-7. So East still has 2 more trump. Guess I should cash more minors. I cash two rounds of diamonds, with East mirroring my club pitch. I end up being afraid West held up in clubs and just cash out for making.

	NORTH ♠ K Q 4 3 ♥ T 9 4 ♦ J 4 ♣ J T 7 2
WEST ♠ 8 ♥ A Q 6 5 3 2 ♦ T 8 5 2 ♣ 5 3		EAST ♠ J 9 7 2 ♥ K 8 7 ♦ K 3 ♣ K 9 6 4
	SOUTH ♠ A T 6 5 ♥ J ♦ A Q 9 7 6 ♣ A Q 8

4 tables played in 4 spades with 1 making 5 and 3 making 4. Someone was in 3 spades making 5. Someone else was in 3 spades making 3. And some poor saps set 2 hearts the other way, but only 1 trick so they got a bottom. We end up with 3MPs, which was pretty terrible. I needed to go all in on playined East for having his bid and that goes a lot better.


Captain Jack disagrees with my crazy weird double. He just wants me to jump to 4 spades. He then disagrees with my 3 spade bid and wants me to jump to 4 spades. He also wants me to draw trump in the middle of the hand and to not randomly throw away a trick at the end. All of those are fair concerns, Jack. My bad.

Ranking after board 6/60: 9/16 with 48.81%

2014 WBC: Day 1

The first Saturday of the World Boardgaming Championships is a day with very few events running. Most (all?) of the games played are wargames with long play times that I assume very few people play, but enough people want to play them to totally justify them existing as events. This is great and catering to a wide range of gamers is one of the reasons WBC is so great. But it does mean showing up early on Saturday is not really a thing my group needs to do. There is still open gaming with people we haven't seen in a year which is pretty great too, but if it turns out we're an hour or two later than expected that isn't a big deal since there's no real start time for 'Hanabi with Sceadeau'.

Which is a good thing since it turned out WBC once again started on New Brunswick Day long weekend and the traffic into the US on Saturday morning was a little extreme. We left a little before 8am and still ended up waiting for almost 2 hours at the border. Or so I was told, since I was asleep in the back. ~2 hours of sleep and sitting in the back seat of a car is a good combination for not being able to stay awake.

Eventually Robb wanted to nap so they woke me up at a rest stop and I took over being the navigator. Or rather the nice outdated GPS lady took over, but I held her and made her feel needed as we did the last few hours of the trip. We ended up getting into Lancaster around 6:45 or so which meant the trip took around 11 hours. That's a fair bit more than the expected 8 or 9 hours. I blame New Brunswick Day. We were also hungry so we ate at the Texas Roadhouse before actually going to the event site.

Once there we played Hanabi until it was fairly late and then went to bed. The toilet in our room doesn't flush easily (I've already had to take the lid off the tank and fix it once) and the sink is cracked but I'm sure the Host won't get more terrible as the week goes on... Honest? Pretty please?

Bridge Match 3 - Board 5

Board 5 - Dealer North - NS Vul

Opponents convention card: Dutch Acol
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: ♠ A J 8 3 ♥ A 4 ♦ Q J T ♣ T 8 7 5

Partner opens 1 club and East passes. I respond 1 spade. West jumps in with 2 hearts, partner bids 2 spades, and East bids 3 hearts. I feel like my 12 points plus partner's opening hand and our known fit should make for a decent game and I don't know how to really figure out otherwise. I have a heart stopper so hopefully nothing disasterous ends up happening. I do wonder if I should give partner choice of games. My hand is super flat. I feel like I probably should bid 3NT and let him decide but I don't know that he'll be able to make that decision. So I just bid 4 spades which gets passed out.

West leads the K of hearts.

	NORTH ♠ T 7 6 5 ♥ T 8 6 ♦ K 4 ♣ A K J 9 6
WEST ♥ K
	SOUTH ♠ A J 8 3 ♥ A 4 ♦ Q J T ♣ T 8 7 5

West	North	East	South
	1♣	Pass	1♠1
2♥	2♠	3♥	4♠
Pass	Pass	Pass
1Walsh

Well, we sure go down in 3NT! We're going to have trouble in 4 spades too. We have a diamond loser, a heart loser, a club loser, and probably 2 spade losers. That's 2 losers too many! The red suit losers aren't going anywhere unless the opponents misplay and let me pitch a heart on a diamond. Nor is one of the spade losers. So I need to pick up the spade suit for only one loser, and I need to pick up the Q of clubs. I feel like I should cut the enemy communication by losing my red stuff first so my plan is to win this and pound out a diamond. That forces them to take their heart or lose it and we'll see what happens after that. K-8-5-A. Over to diamonds. T-8-K-A. East cashes a heart. J-4-2-T. He returns a diamond. 9-Q-2-4.

Ok. Now I think I need to lead a spade up to my hand? Which means a club to the A. 5-2-A-4. Assuming they're not lying with their signals they each have an odd number of clubs with West having 3. That bodes well! I lead a low spade. 5-9-J-K. East returns another spade? 2-6-Q-A. It now feels like I can draw the last trump, finesse clubs, and be up?

I don't even need to finesse clubs since West drops the Q when I lead low. Making 4!

	NORTH ♠ T 7 6 5 ♥ T 8 6 ♦ K 4 ♣ A K J 9 6
WEST ♠ K 4 2 ♥ K Q 9 7 6 2 ♦ 8 2 ♣ Q 2		EAST ♠ Q 9 ♥ J 5 3 ♦ A 9 7 6 5 3 ♣ 4 3
	SOUTH ♠ A J 8 3 ♥ A 4 ♦ Q J T ♣ T 8 7 5

Turns out everyone made it to 4 spades. 1 table made 5, 5 tables made 4, and 2 tables went down 1. So we get 8 MPs here.


Captain Jack agrees with me all the way!

Ranking after board 5/60: 8/16 with 54.29%

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!