Movies: Duma | Main | Visit from an old friend

August 08, 2006

World Boardgaming Championships

Took my usual vacation to the WBC in Lancaster, PA. Had better luck with the hotel room, partly because Rick came down early for the pre-con and was abel to grab us a better room. Michael and I did a horrible job navigating both ways, missing a total of 3 major turns, one of them by almost 2 hours. Probably didn't cost us a ton of time but felt pretty dumb.

I played fewer non-Titan tournament games than usual. A lot of the Euro games really feel so much the same and so luck dominated that even if I were to win the tournament, I'd barely feel much of an accomplishment so don't bother with too much of an effort to make or play in semis. Battle Line was the only one I played at all seriously and got to the semifinal, only to lose to an incredibly lucky player who I am pretty certain I was significantly better than. He got 6 straight flushes (5 of them natural) and I think the other 3 were Trips which was the best board I've ever seen. I with perfect play could only possibly have gotten 1 straight flush. Even so, it seemed I had a shot until the very end when he seemed to go on a run of "play perfect card, draw perfect card" to win 3-4 fights.

In the Titan tournament, I got to the semis in multiplayer pretty easily but then had no luck at all and basically just hung around to take 2nd but never with any real shot at winning. Was still a strange and interesting game, however, with Kyle probably leading initially until he caused a couple of really bad battles for him and then David P. leading for most of the game until Kevin also got 'port and had the better Titan stack and won the game (and went on to win the final). In the 2p tournament I got to the quarterfinals relatively easily and then had a game where I was totally dominant on the masterboard but had horrible luck in the two battles and lost my Titan and the game to two Cyclops swings (6 6s in 18 dice) but I could have avoided this 6% possibility and really should have, my only major mistake of the week.

Over the years, I have been training up a bunch of the Titan players in Tichu and this year it has really started to pay off. Didn't need to teach a single person from scratch and yet had 8 or so people happy to play a bunch and played at least 7 full games and a bunch of partial games and had a really fun time with it. I am thinking next year of making an announcment on Consim in advance of a semi-regular Tichu game in the nights as there are lots of other Tichu players at the convention who might like to have a regular place to congregate and play.

Posted by aarondf at August 8, 2006 03:02 PM

Comments

Post a comment