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The tale of my week at WBC--continued.


Wednesday

There are two more heats of Empire Builder, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. I do better this time--if you are generous enough to define "better" as "losing less ignominiously." The second game is once more Empire Builder, with a less archaic map that includes Mexican cities, but the third game is a new variant, Martian Rails, which is set on a geographically correct Mars with fictional (read: Edgar Rice Burroughs) product loads. It happened that the designer, Bob Stribula, was one of the players, and it was gratifying to see that he did not win despite (obviously!) knowing the board much better than any of the rest of us. I finish this time with $130 M and all my necessary city connections, which was fine with me, particularly since I had never seen the board before sitting down to play the game.

Having missed the first heat of Vegas Showdown, I had no planned events until 9 p.m., when I intended to play Agricola, a game I like but have no great talent for. esrblog and I ended up having an early-ish dinner at a Midwestern (yes, Midwestern, despite the name and theme) chain restaurant called the Texas Roadhouse, where we were joined by esrblog's friend Ken Burnside and his friend Ken.

Agricola went pretty much as I expected--with me deeply in the basement. They played with four at a table using the "K" cards only, but one of the players was *very* experienced. The final scores: 56-36-33-15 (that last was me). esrblog and I went to bed early, because the Commands and Colors--Ancients tourament heats were scheduled to begin 9 a.m. Thursday morning.

Thursday

After an early breakfast at our hotel (which, amazingly, served hot breakfasts as part of the room cost every morning!), I saw esrblog off for a morning of Commands and Colors--Ancients. I promised to bring him some lunch after my morning event, which was Ticket to Ride. Ticket to Ride, a much simpler rail game than Empire Builder, also went better for me. I came in third of four, in a game so close it made my teeth hurt (Final score: 122-121-120-106).

After running out to a nearby Fuddrucker's for burgers for Eric and me, I basically had the afternoon free because my next event, Puerto Rico, was not scheduled until 7:00 p.m. As Craig pointed out in a comment on my last entry, this was the afternoon he taught me Dominion. (Tuesday PM was when esrblog and I made our first trip to the Texas Roadhouse).

The Puerto Rico heat turned out to be a lot of fun. As they had done last year, players were seated four to a table. Again, it was a very close game, but this time I came in second (55-51-50-33).

After the Puerto Rico heat, I'd originally wanted to play in the second Agricola heat, but was too hungry and decided to blow it off in favor of dinner. Craig, Carrie, esrblog and I went to a nearby Perkins with a young man who turned out to be a computer science student at Carnegie Mellon and one of esrblog's fans. To avoid getting his e-mail address spammed, I will refer to him hereafter as Fanboy, though he had much better taste than to act obviously fanboyish. We had a pleasant meal, with good conversation, before heading back to the tournament for a few friendly games of Race for the Galaxy (all but one of which I lost) before bed.

...to be continued