Things I learned at WBC 2010
-
This was my second year at WBC. Last year I played in a lot of games, didn't win much, but enjoyed the chance to play against good players, and wrote a geeklist entitled "What I learned" as a way of acknowledging that.
This year: same thing, except that some people may consider this a more successful trip by some metrics.
So why keep the title as "Things I Learned"? Well, it's still true. I still learned quite a bit. And I learned even winning a game can teach you something.
Note that there was certainly some open gaming mixed in here, but I'm not including it in this list, because, well, this is a lot already. Only tournament games and other official events will be listed.
Apologies in advance for any inaccuracies; I'm doing all this from memory, and if I conflate some sessions of the same game, it's not too surprising. Feel free to correct me.
-
 -
You have to do what your cards tell you to do. But if they tell you to do things you can't afford, you have to get rid of them as soon as possible, preferably before you spend all your money on a road to nowhere.
Okay, that sounds pretty obvious, but I had had very little experience with flushing cards prior to this. I was doing well early, making some money from quick deliveries in Eastern Europe. Then I started to draw cards involving Spain. When all three of them said the same thing, I started to draw--I should probably have counted out the cost, but my opponents were playing quickly, so I couldn't do it in the downtime. Eventually, I'll have enough experience to be able to better estimate.
In the meantime, nearly every event card came out of the deck! Floods, derailments, worker strikes, you name it. They hurt me a little, but on the whole I think they helped me by making the game long enough for me to recover from my mistake. I still ended with an embarrassingly low score, but due to the series of disasters, I wasn't that far behind the other players (aside from the winner, of course).
-
-
 -
Ingenious can be a pretty tense game, actually.
I didn't intend to play Ingenious, but my lovely husband, who attended WBC with me, was still in a game of Ra when I finished my Empire Builder heat and I thought I might as well play a game of Ingenious so we could go back to the hotel together.
I hadn't played much Ingenious for a while and wasn't sure that I'd remember to play well, but it ended up being a close, though high-scoring, game. Like me, I don't think any of my opponents had played it in a tournament before and one of them mentioned, at the end, that this was far more tense than games he'd played with his family.
This is a game I'm not remembering too well, but it was a pretty generous game of Ingenious; plenty of points for everyone all over the board and little defensive play. This contrasted strongly with the game I played later, as you'll see.
-
-
3.
Board Game: Goa
[Average Rating:7.75 Overall Rank:28]
 -
Uh.. a lot.
Okay, here is the thing about this game of Goa. I was in a game with Alex Bove (who was the GM, and who ultimately won the tournament) and some new players, so essentially this was a Goa seminar.
This is a good thing, but I certainly can't encapsulate it here and I don't think that many of the insights were really mine, so I'll just leave it at that.
Except for one thing: running out of cash hurt me a lot.
-
-
 -
Strategy advice is a good thing, but working directly from it leads easily to overcorrection.
I'm married to someone who's much better at Power Grid than I am (Doug Faust). We were talking about the game, and he observed that I often buy too many plants. He recommended that I buy five.
In this game, I only bought four. I wanted to be more selective about the ones that I bought, and good plants did NOT come out of the deck early.
We were playing with the US map and the alternate power deck. This also made it more difficult to adjust my plant buying strategy, since the plants are different from the ones I'm used to. They seemed to have different capacity patterns, different resources were good, and putting that together with trying to play differently... didn't go too well for me.
In any case, I bought my first two plants and sat on them until after the beginning of step two. This probably saved me some money, but by the time step two came, my opponents were making twice as much a turn as I was, so I don't think it was really helping me. At that point, I was able to build into many cities without going ahead in turn order, and I did go on to buy some more plants. It was a little late for me to jump back into the game at this point, though. The game ended early, before step three even happened, with me still far behind.
In the end, I finished fourth of four. I do think I came out of it with a better idea of what I need from a plant, though.
At some point I'll go through the alternate deck and see what's actually in it. It's certainly interesting.
-
-
5.
Board Game: Ra
[Average Rating:7.60 Overall Rank:48]
 -
I will never work out the timing of Ra unless I begin playing it more often.
I was disappointed that this was the only game of Ra that I was able to play at WBC, but whoever put together the schedule seemed to have done it with criteria other than my convenience in mind. Oh, well.
Last year, I stayed in auctions too long and didn't get to spend my suns. This time, I got out of the rounds more quickly, and it could have gone better for me, but, um, it didn't. I was able to build up some monuments pretty early, and a couple other things that made me one of only two players to score points in the first round. In the next two rounds, one of the other players did a much better job than the rest of us of building up his pharaohs. (Incidentally, I am beginning to think that pharaohs are quite important to get. ) He was pretty dominant by the second round, and nobody came close to catching him by the end of the game.
For me, the most important problem was that I got out of the third round pretty early. My last auction completed some sets of monuments for me, pulled me out of last in pharaohs, and, if I remember correctly, even got me a flood. I hoped at this point that the round would end soon. However, it just went on and on until everyone rocketed ahead of me.
Whether I should have expected the game to end when I did is a question I can't answer at this point. This requires more fine-tuning for me.
But I'm going to have to pay more attention to pharaohs.
-
-
6.
Board Game: Agricola
[Average Rating:8.25 Overall Rank:2]
 -
Pay attention to your cards.
Another game I'm very disappointed I could only play once. But I've been doing worse and worse at Agricola lately in any case.
This time around, there is really no reason I should have done as badly as I did with the cards that I had. I had a card that allowed me to upgrade my house directly to stone, one that gave me a free stone room, one that gave me a stone upgrade, and one that allowed me to eat rocks. If I'd actually played all of these at the correct time in the right order, I am sure I would have done very well. As it is, I got distracted and had real food problems I had to waste many rounds addressing. Only realizing at the end of the game that I could play the rock-eating card saved me from having to eat all my points and doing worse still.
I'm frustrated because I doubt I'll ever get a hand like that again, and I could have been eating rocks that whole time. They were all over the board and nobody wanted them. Sigh.
-
-
 -
At a high level, aristocrats are not enough. You need buildings, and building upgrades in particular.
I didn't make the St. Pete semis last year, but this year, I was determined to do so. So, here we go again...
Both the observatories came out in the same round, early in the game, and I was able to snap up the second one. I picked up some aristocrats, took an upgrade into my hand, built up my economy a little, and in general did normal St. Pete things.
Across from me, another player was focusing on buildings. He grabbed a Village in the first building phase and upgraded it as soon as possible. He also didn't mind picking up quite a few of the other buildings--inexpensive ones, I believe--and trading them in for something a little more lavish. If I'm remembering correctly, he was able to get the Smolny Cathedral and the Winter Palace very early on, among others.
Now the great thing about building upgrades is that they provide not just points, but money. So while he was racking up an impressive number of points each turn, he was also building up his economy and actually making it easier for him to get aristocrats. He didn't exactly have a shortage of them at the end.
He ran away with the victory. At the very end, I played my eighth aristocrat, which was just enough to slide me into second.
-
-
 -
Early cubes are very risky.
In the first round, I played a low card. It seemed a reasonable thing to do; I wasn't that attracted to any of the actions, and I wanted to start building up cubes early. Of course, this meant that the action card that was left to me when I took my turn only gave me a few cubes on the board, but I had plenty available to use in future rounds.
Theoretically. Unfortunately, however, in the second round, a card came up to send all the caballeros back to the provinces. I played a high card, hoping to get it, but not high enough! So, I lost eleven cubes on that round.
I never really recovered; cubes were a problem for me for the rest of the game. In addition to not having the cubes, I didn't have that card, either. I did manage to put myself back in the running somewhere in the middle, but I didn't have the cubes to sustain it.
-
-
-
Unfortunately, other players can count to twelve.
This time, we played Benelux. I had hoped this would make it a short game, but not in this case. It was an interesting one, though.
Attempt number two to buy an appropriate number of plants. I managed to pick up a good capacity fairly early, but unfortunately, I had to run it in coal. This was a real problem, as several other players were also in coal (and I guess this is the problem with coal generally).
Of course, at this point, nobody was really paying attention to me anyway. One player had managed to get a very good board position in the south, with nobody really near him. Everyone else was interested in the very cheap connections all over the rest of the board. So he looked pretty good early, and one of the other players declared that there was little chance for the rest of us to win.
Actually, though, in Power Grid especially, I'm not particularly interested in predicting the winner early. A lot can happen in a game of Power Grid, and only the end really matters. So, I focused on building up my capacity and maintaining a good position in the turn order, and I managed to do this much more successfully than in my other game, making a reasonable amount of money.
Eventually, the player with the early lead was close to being able to build to fifteen. His plants were certainly advantageous to him, as he'd been able to get into the nukes with little competition. His capacity was at eleven, as was that of the player to his left. The third player had considerably less.
I had, at this point, a capacity of twelve and had built up to eleven. This wasn't an especially conspicuous move because other players were at around that too. He didn't initially notice and planned out his buildings to fifteen, looking mostly at the other player with eleven capacity. I remained unobtrusive, at least until he started going around the table and looking at each player's position, at which point he did notice me and decided not to end the game after all. I would certainly have had more money than he did. Ah, well.
So, the game went another turn, in which the big plants came out. I bid aggressively and won one in order to keep people from getting greater capacity than I had, but in the end, it didn't matter, as I'd put myself too high in the turn order and had to burn a lot of money on both coal and the plant I got. I was left without enough cash to build much at all and came in third.
I'm not sure what I could have done differently here; building in the penultimate turn was absolutely necessary because otherwise the player who won the game would have just won a turn early. I think what I really needed was to get a nuclear or even a garbage plant at some point in the game, preferably the ones that other players got so there wouldn't have been competition for the resources.
-
-
 -
Seasonal workers are turn order, and turn order is a very good thing.
I'm no expert at Factory Manager, and this was illuminating. For the first few plays, I hadn't really understood why anyone would want to waste seven electros just to get an extra person. After all, I'd seldom run out of actions.
Haha. It turns out that seasonal workers are very good and it's often worthwhile to invest in them. One player not only made a point of getting into labor-saving devices early, he also bought seasonal workers nearly every turn.
I was a little surprised to see him do this, but it essentially put him in control throughout the entire game. Every round, he could get whatever turn order he wanted. Generally, this was first. Not only did this let him buy first--an obvious advantage--he was also able to exercise some control over what other people pulled down; by not taking what they wanted, he could force them to do so, and of course the early pulls do provide a certain encouragement to later players who are considering getting into one type of tile.
In the last round, he intentionally decided to go last. This wasn't about the discount, but again, about tile control. He realized that with the number of workers he had plus the extra pulls for going last, he could certainly guarantee the tiles he wanted, especially since other players had comparatively few workers. So, he was able to determine a good deal of what would be available for everyone.
I think this is also the point at which I realized that the point of this game is to prepare for the final turn.
In any case, the player mentioned above won, while I played by far the best game of this that I had ever played and came in second.
-
-
-
Yep, I was definitely right about the buildings.
This is the game I don't remember as well. The observatories both came out in the same round again, but this time I couldn't get either of them.
What I do remember is that the player who won had more of everything than the rest of us. More workers, more buildings, more aristocrats. How he did this I'm not exactly sure. Interestingly, he had both pubs and kept them until the end of the game, using both of them!
As for me, I tried to put what I'd learned about building upgrades into practice. I think I was a little slow about it and needed to get started on them earlier, but it did seem to help me keep up. In the end, another second for me. Enough to keep me hopeful.
-
-
 -
I can teach this game pretty well, actually.
I was disappointed in the turnout for this tournament. Where were you, Shipyard fans? And why doesn't everyone love Shipyard as much as I do?
It's also important to note that many of those who attended had just learned Shipyard from the demo. So it's possible that a lot of people who would like it just haven't had an opportunity to learn or play the game.
Given that, here's my offer: if you live in the greater Philadelphia or New York area and would like to learn the game, send me a geekmail. I'll see what I can do.
Anyway, we ended up playing three-player games. Neither of my opponents had played before, but they had learned the rules in the demo. They picked up the game well and were delightful people to play with. Since the game does ask new players to keep track of a lot of information all at once, I ended up doing some coaching and I think that this actually helped me to understand the game better myself.
They did very well, but I won with my experience. I noticed that fewer ship tiles than usual were taken--we barely dipped into the II stack. This was probably partly because I didn't want to take too many tiles myself, since I had a per ship contract and was making smaller ships, and I suspect that my opponents were following my lead.
-
-
-
Even if someone else needs the same color you do, you cannot depend on that person to open it up.
I didn't intend to play Ingenious this time either, but the game is totally unavoidable.
This was a much more defensive and less generous game than the first. These players wanted to get the points they could get and block out anyone else from getting any.
It was one of those games where we were all short on the same colors, so I felt comfortable getting the colors that were on the board before they disappeared. But the other players were very skillful at getting those colors one at a time and blocking them out as they did so. I noticed that one player in particular needed purples as much as I did, and so I was patient and waited for him to get some out. But I wasn't able to capitalize on any of them and I finished a much more distant fourth than in the first game.
-
-
 -
When you can't win with routes, it's all about tickets.
I don't generally make Ticket to Ride a priority, though after my long and complicated history with the game, I think I am finally coming to understand what it is really about. However, I'd played some games of it recently and I'd started winning them.
WBC is a pretty good antidote for this, and I thought that I'd better play in a heat, just so I didn't start thinking that I was good at the game. Friday morning was a good time for me, so I showed up to play.
My tickets emphasized cities in the middle of the map--some in the south, some in the midwest, some in Canada. This seemed reasonable enough, but as the game progressed, my opponents began playing large routes across the board.
I'd known I would need to take tickets at some point; I actually don't think there are very many situations in which I would want to rely on only my initial hand of tickets. However, even if I hadn't thought so, it would be abundantly obvious as my opponents' score markers started leaping ahead. I was lucky (or foresighted?) enough to choose just the right moment to take more tickets--I picked them up after I had reached Arkansas or so, coming up from the south. This was just the point at which I would need to branch off for the tickets I drew, and I was able to zig-zag appropriately on my way up to Canada.
I made it there without many mishaps, and I think this was the game in which I finished my tickets with seven trains left and was able to pick up a six-train route to end the game.
In any case, I believe I also picked up the longest route in this game, and after we carefully recounted all the points, I was the winner. So far, my plan seemed to have backfired.
I have to admit that I was a little pleased to hear one of my opponents say he hadn't seen anyone do that before.
-
-
 -
Experienced players buy early factories.
Since I was sure I'd be playing Shipyard the next day, this slot in my schedule was freed up for something else. I had thought I'd play Agricola, but it occurred to me I didn't get too many chances to play Merchant of Venus, and the Eurorails game above didn't exactly sate my desire for pick-up-and-deliver, so I found myself playing Merchant of Venus, a game I enjoy but haven't played nearly as much.
I got a pretty quick start by picking up some valuable IOUs early and rolling high numbers. Meanwhile, one of my opponents rolled so badly that he ended up switching his dice for others that he hoped would get him moving a little faster. (It didn't seem to make much difference.)
However, my inexperience caught up with me, as my opponents started picking up a lot of factory deeds. One in particular (the eventual winner), had perhaps twice as many deeds as the rest of us at any given time. The 50% commission on factory goods is pretty nice. I did buy some spaceports, but I didn't ultimately get much use from them. I also ended the game with a scout, which is never a good sign.
Still, the final scores were pretty close. I'd made a big delivery or two before the end of the game, and was on my way to make a bigger one the turn after the game ended (of course, this always seems to happen). Additional turns would have meant a lot to my other two opponents as well (beside the winner, I mean), of course.
-
-
-
Shutting down tiles is much much better than it sounds.
In the Factory Manager heat, the GM mentioned that second place players would probably advance, so I showed up to the semis.
We played three-player games, which I'd never done before. One of my opponents seemed to know the game quite a bit better than I did, and the other was Vien, a member of one of my myriad gaming groups.
The player I didn't know tore down a pallet in the first round, something that seemed at least somewhat reasonable, but which I'd never seen anyone do before. Certainly it saves some time.
One more thing that I'd picked up in the last game was that players generally shut down plants that add excess boxes--clearly the right move. But in this game, I tried doing it to save energy. This was a net gain, so I am sure it was the right thing to do.
The player I didn't know seemed to have the game well in hand throughout, but at the end, it was surprisingly close--only a five point difference. Since there were only three games, we knew that the closest second place player would advance, so we waited with great interest to see how close the other games would be.
They were close, but not quite as close as ours. I beat out the GM for a spot in the finals by a few hundredths of a percent. So--my first final table! My opponents and the GM generously agreed to reschedule the final for that evening, to avoid a conflict with the Shipyard semis the next day. By the way--I appreciate that a lot. Thank you, Factory Manager opponents and GM!
-
-
-
When pulling last, keep your options open.
After whiling away some time with open gaming, we reconvened. At this point, I felt like a bit of a fraud, playing in the final for a game I hadn't won--not just in this tournament, but, you know, ever. Nevertheless, here I was, along with Bill (another member of one of my gaming groups!), Barrett (who had beaten me in Agricola earlier this weekend) and the winner from my first game, whose name I wish that I remembered at this point.
I made a mistake in the first round by taking the bigger pallet and the smaller robot, which meant that I couldn't increase my boxes as much as I wanted to and kept my early income low. Bill also made a mistake--I didn't see just what it was, but it seemed to unfortunately put him out of the game, and he wasn't able to keep up with the rest of us in production.
In this game, we relied much more heavily on machines than I'd seen in prior games. This was me as much as anyone, and as a result I started running into some problems with energy and people. It did wonders for my production, though, and although I thought I'd fallen behind early, I thought I was coming back a little (though by this time, Barrett had already established a pretty dominant position and looked hard to catch). In the fourth round, I was able to save on both by shutting down one of my early machines, though I kept it in my factory in case I had the chance of buying another robot. In retrospect, I should have torn it down while I had the personnel to do so; next time I may make a different decision.
In the last round, I pulled last; I was still short enough on people that I didn't want to bid high on the early tiles, and in any case, there was a $4 discount for going last that I thought I could use. I wanted an optimization tile pretty badly. There was one that looked great; two copies of it, in fact. But it was blocked out by the crummy optimization tiles and would have taken all my pulls to draw. Machines, on the other hand, offered me several appealing options, though none as appealing as the optimization. So I pulled machines, and I am sure that was the right thing to do.
In the end, I got my boxes, though I had to make some difficult decisions about what to pull out, and (as the GM pointed out afterward), I should have pulled out a pallet instead--somehow I missed that. It was a good last turn and it ended up being close between me and the second place player--much like our prior game. So, Barrett was the champion, the second place player was second, I was third and Bill was fourth.
I was entitled to laurels--not too bad for not having won anything!
-
-
-
Count your money. Count your money. COUNT YOUR MONEY.
No, seriously. Count your money.
What can I say, I made a huge mistake here. I showed up to this game hoping that I could win and give myself a good chance to make the semis.
I was doing reasonably well through the first round, and had picked up Potjomkin's Village, since I was still interested in seeing what I could do with building upgrades. So, when a good one came out, I bought it right away.
That was the mistake. I didn't count my money--and I didn't realize I wouldn't have enough money for a worker in the next round. On some level I am amused that pursuing a strategy I still think is better made me forget the basics--that's how it works sometimes for me. But I am also annoyed that I did something so stupid.
In any case, the player diagonal from me was certainly outplaying us all by the middle of the game, and this is when I learned one more thing: Luck is not always a mitigating factor. Here he was, beating us with his skill, and then he also started getting excellent cards. Curses!
But at least I was racking up lots of points with a nice collection of buildings by this time. Was it really possible that the game was long enough for me to catch up?
It might have been. The buildings were running low and the question was whether to buy workers to keep them from the leader or leave them out in the hopes that the game would go another round (or at least make him pay for ending it). I left it. But the player to my left thought ending it would give him a chance to win and he took care of it. I wish I'd paid more attention to what he was doing, because he managed to rack up many points without many aristocrats and it was quite impressive.
In any case, it didn't give him the win--the leader won, but he took second, and I came in third. But certainly another round would have at the very least helped me out a little.
So, I was out of the St. Pete semis again, and once again resolved to get in the following year.
-
-
-
It's either trains or employees, but not both.
I was excited to attend the Shipyard semis, but there weren't any--we had so few people that we skipped straight to the finals. I say again, where were you, Shipyard fans?
I'm going to need to find a way to drum up more support for this game if I want to find opponents.
In any case, we had a very nice game of Shipyard. I drew the contract that awards points just for building ships-- nobody said they had to be good ships-- and I decided to go for that one. For my other contract, the choices were points for propellers, or points for having one of everything in my fleet. I opted for the latter, thinking that this, together with the other contract, would allow me to just pick up whatever happened to be readily available.
It also occurred to me pretty early on that this is essentially the perfect situation in which to pursue trains. They can be had cheaply and exchanged for whatever is expedient--exactly the strategy I was pursuing.
I was the most experienced player at the table, but my opponents also played well. However, in the end I maxed out both my contracts and that was enough to put me ahead. Unfortunately, one of my opponents had misunderstood a contract and had worked toward this misunderstanding, which I think makes my win a little less meaningful--but aside from that, an excellent session of the game and I'm just really glad I got to play.
So now I have a shiny plaque. Yay! But I'd trade it in for more opponents*. I'd like to see this tournament again next year so I can play again.
*Offer not redeemable.
-
-
 -
Bet.
A bunch of people from one of my gaming groups decided to attend the Wits & Wagers game show as a group. It's not my favorite game, but it is one instance where I prefer team play to solo, and everyone was in a good mood, so I was sure I'd have a good time.
We bet correctly on the first two "real" question, at which point we realized that we would have made much more money if we'd bet with our chips.. and so, we proceeded to do so. We had to hold one member of our group in check, though; he wanted to go a little farther than the rest of us with this concept and bet everything we had on several questions.
We bet like perfectly reasonable people and ended up doing decently well, although we didn't win.
-
-
-
There exist situations in which failing a small ticket is not the end of the world.
Sunday morning. I was pretty sure that I had missed the St. Pete semis, so I thought I'd show up for Ticket to Ride. From here on out, we played the Mega game. For those who aren't familiar with it, this is one variation on the 1910 expansion. It adds many tickets to the game, as well as a "Globe Trotter" bonus of 15 points for the player who completes the most tickets. The Longest Route bonus is still in effect. So, tickets are even better than in the base game.
I was the first player and my tickets seemed to emphasize the southeast; I knew I would need Houston to New Orleans and I took it immediately, on the first turn. Instantly, the player to my right groaned and announced (slightly humorously?) that he had lost the game.
Personally, I wasn't convinced of that. In his situation, I would probably have at least strongly considered taking more tickets (at that point, why not?). But what he did was begin to play pretty aggressively (still working toward tickets, as we discovered at the end). This created a few conflicts for me, but it really hurt the player on my left, who ended up with several unconnected routes around the map. Meanwhile, I played a few key routes and took more tickets.
I was a little worried about that, and indeed, I ended up failing one (a 9-point route). But other players had some trouble as well; the player to my left had failed several and the player across from me hadn't taken any ticket besides his initial two. The player to my right had worked really hard to get his connections and did better than his comments would suggest, but I ended up with both the Longest Route and the Globe Trotter for the win.
So, I found myself in the semis.
-
-
-
The three-player game is not as brutal as I'd feared.
Twelve of us qualified for the semis, so we had three-player games. I'd avoided playing with three before, because I thought that eliminating the second space of the double routes would distort the board--I may have played with three before this, but I can't remember. So, I felt some trepidation at this format, besides the general jitters of having actually advanced in such a large tournament.
I was grouped with two players I suspected of being pretty good at games in general, though I'd never played TTR with them before. I actually think I was pretty lucky in this game--I ended up focusing on a different part of the country than my two opponents.
I ended up playing routes that formed essentially a zig-zag at the beginning. This was mostly because the cities I wanted were in this relationship to each other, but as one of my opponents pointed out after the game, it was also a very effective way of concealing my intentions.
As I mention above, the three player game wasn't as bad as I'd feared. It's true that some particular routes are more difficult to get than they would be with four, but there's also much more space to go around, and I think it balances rather neatly. However, since I was in a less competitive part of the map, it's possible I'd feel differently in a different game.
I didn't get the Longest Route this time, but Globe Trotter was mine once again. And I'd won. I'd never imagined that I would make the TTR Final, but here I was.
-
-
-
Anyone can win.
After having lunch and making some effort to decrease my heart rate, I sat down to the final table. My opponents were Lori from my gaming group at home (!), Jay Fox, who'd won the larger tournament the year before and had a beautiful set of silver trains to show for it, and Grant LaDue, who, um, I don't know anything about.
It was a pretty tense game. I think all four of us happened to draw Western routes and that part of the map got ugly fast. Jay started it by playing a long route in the West--Helena to Seattle, I believe. Lori, who was sitting to his left, grabbed one half of Portland to Seattle, and I grabbed the other. Seattle to Vancouver ended up being split between Jay and me. I made it from there down to Houston, hitting Santa Fe and Phoenix on the way.
At this point, I only needed to go out to Chicago. I guessed we were probably about three quarters of the way through the game. It was a little later than I wanted it to be for what I was about to do, but I had needed to secure my cities out west first. So--I took tickets.
I drew a couple that looked a little risky, but only needed a few connections. I got them, but at the price of Chicago, which I never made. But this was eminently worthwhile, for a couple reasons. First of all, each of the new tickets was worth more than the Chicago ticket. Second, they were two tickets instead of one. This gave me what I needed to tie Lori for the Globe Trotter (and in the case of a tie, it is awarded to both players). I didn't get the longest route this time--but I was able to pull off a victory. Second was Jay, third was Grant and fourth was Lori.
So there you are, anyone can win.
Including me 
Anyway, this game, and all the game I played in the TTR tournament, were really great games, tense and pleasant at the same time, against opponents who played well and were nice people to hang out with.
See you next year!
-
-
|
|
Brisbane
California
Pennsylvania
Again, we are in the Warminster area and love lots of the same games! Hit me up, we are always looking to expand our group.