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hwangoIt's been an odd weekend so far. Friday I got a call from Tom, my best friend from High School, who apparently has moved back from Colorado into the house down the street, and will be attending grad school. It was a bit strange to learn that he's been home for a week and this was the first I'd heard from him, but he's been rather busy. We arranged half-formed plans for him to come with me when I went to WPI Saturday night for my session of board game playtesting at Gaming Weekend. After I got off the phone with him, I headed off to another friend's house for some L5R, in order to prepare for the tournament on Saturday morning. I wanted to play something other than Mantis, even though I kind of felt it was the best of my decks. I was just getting tired of it, having played it at the last 2 or 3 tournaments. So I tried out some other stuff, played against my Crab deck a bit, and decided to run Crab for the tournament. We also finally tried the Spacefarers of Catan 2-person card game, which was pretty nifty.
The L5R tournament
The same friend who was helping me practice and decide on a deck also attended the tournament, using my Mantis deck. Naturally, we were paired for the first round. *grumble* This was actually the second piece of bad news: the new set was going to be legal for this tournament after all. I thought it wouldn't be, so I hadn't put any of the new stuff into any of my decks. *grumble*
Against my own Mantis deck, I managed to pull almost every personality in my deck that the Mantis couldn't shoot with ranged attacks, and won. In round 2, I faced a bizarre Bloodspeaker deck running out of Kyuden Agasha. I never got to find out what sort of doom his deck might contain, since he had early gold problems, made very strange choices about how to deal with them, and even weirder choices about how to organize his defenses against my early attacks. He put out a bunch of spells on his last turn, but it was far too late by that point, and I still had tricks to play in my hand even after everyone on his side of the table was bowed or dead. Then came round 3, which was against another Kyuden Agasha deck, but this one was actually full of real Phoenix personalities and was trying for straightforward military victory. Alas, I got off on the wrong foot with that player. I attacked him with a single personality, and he played Strength in Numbers, bowing all three of his defenders to destroy my personality. However, my personality was Hiruma Tatsuzo, so I just had to bow one of Tatsuzo's followers to negate the action, which would leave him free to kill all three of his defenders. My opponent got very upset, said he hadn't realized that I could do that, and that he'd like me to tell him about things like that. Now, if he had just been disappointed and calm about it, I probably would have offered to let him take it back, because I know what it's like to make that kind of mistake. However, this guy really seemed to have the attitude that I should spell out everything for him, point out useful things that I could do, and generally do all of his work for him. Add to that the fact that this was a personality sitting in the middle of the table that he could clearly see and read before opposing it in battle. If it had been a holding or something else off on the sidelines, that would be another mitigating factor. Anyway, between his attitude and the circumstances, I wasn't inclined to offer to let him take it back. He seemed to get over it after a while, which made the rest of the game a lot more pleasant, and I made my own mistake later on the in the game, forgetting an ability on one of his people. My mistake wasn't nearly so disastrous, though. That game was also noteworthy for the fact that I managed to defeat his Kaneka that was wielding the Celestial Sword of the Phoenix. Admittedly, he only had three people at that point, so he had only 8 force, but I managed to cancel the bowing Tactical action with Tatsuzo's ability, kill the other defending personality with Kani Hitokage's force duel, negate the send home Tactical action with Right Hand of the Emperor, overcome other send-home effects that he had by using Tireless Assault to return people to the battle, and finally force him to use the regular Tactical action just to keep me from taking a province as well as destroy both Kaneka and his clan sword. Mmm...it felt good to play effectively and not lose due to my own incompetence.
Undefeated, and surprised to be so, I sailed into round 4 against a brutal, incredibly mobile House of Tao deck, which took a few provinces early on and kept thwarting most of my attempts to even things off. In fact, he accidentally honored out due to the honor gains he received from defeating my attempts to recover. Blah. I knew I'd come crashing down sooner or later.
Then I faced off against Kyuden Bayushi, and a politics-crazy card drawing engine of wackiness. Things looked very, very grim at the start, but as I started to get out more and more people, I began to overwhelm his defenses. There was one scary point in which I nearly tied a battle, which would have provided him with enough honor to win. I managed to scrape up 1 point more force than his army, though, and left with him even fewer defenses for the final attack. It eventually got to the point that, for my final assault, even after bowing 4 people due to 3 Shosuro Maru and a 4th Pan Ku copy, and having one of my large units kept home by the Emperor's Underhand, I could still send 6 or 7 people at him, for a total of over 30 force. Victory for Zim! ...er, I mean, Victory for the Crab!
Round 6 was very short, as my deck stumbled against a perfectly functioning Crane dueling honor deck that left me with 1 living personality when he honored out on turn 6 or 7. Nevertheless, my previous games had carried me into the top 4, so I actually got a nifty metal box and some extra promo cards. Perhaps even better was the satisfaction of having done reasonably well at one of these things for a change - final 4 out of 19 is good enough for me. It even made me feel better about my loss to the Dragon deck that it turned out to be the ultimate winner of the tournament, so there was clearly no shame in losing to it.
As happy as I was to have done well, Murphy's Law was still poking its influence at me - those extra rounds that I played meant I got home a couple hours later than I planned, and was running incredibly late to head out to WPI. Tom did indeed decide to tag along, and even offered to drive, which was very welcome after two earlier trips to Worcester this week and driving back and forth between home and Nashua for the L5R tournament. We played a round of my board game while people occasionally stopped by and looked at it, but no one expressed any real interest. Once we finished, we decided to try one of the many unfamiliar games lying around. We selected Carcassonne, because it claimed to be playable by 2-5 people and take about 45 minutes to play. During that game, I actually had 3 people come by interested in trying out my game. Carcassonne went on hold, and I got to have some new people try out the 3-way version of the game.
Their game was a bit odd, in that no one really did much of anything with Air. There wasn't even a lot of damage flung around. Most of the attacks were small, and I think only 3 Territories were actually destroyed. Still, they seemed to have some fun with it, and had no serious complaints. Many of the changes they suggested were actually geared towards making the game longer which is not something I'm interested in. Besides, with some experience I think they could have longer games.
Afterwards, Tom and I returned to Carcassonne, which was kind of nifty, and is probably a very interesting game with 3-5 players. I can see many possibilities for people to score points for themselves and one or more other players simultaneously, leading to all kinds of interesting interactions between players. Also, with the tiles spread across more players, each player will have fewer turns, and will have to make their choices about what to do much more carefully.
Finally it got to be about 2:30, and we decided it was time to head home, no matter how desperately we wanted to live out our childhood fantasies of being 16th Century Italian merchants by playing Traders of Genoa. ...actually, this was just our running joke for the night: that we could think of few gaming premises less likely to be sought out by the average gamer. It's quite possible that the game is wonderfully fun and interesting, but the concept and game presentation did not win us over.
The L5R tournament
The same friend who was helping me practice and decide on a deck also attended the tournament, using my Mantis deck. Naturally, we were paired for the first round. *grumble* This was actually the second piece of bad news: the new set was going to be legal for this tournament after all. I thought it wouldn't be, so I hadn't put any of the new stuff into any of my decks. *grumble*
Against my own Mantis deck, I managed to pull almost every personality in my deck that the Mantis couldn't shoot with ranged attacks, and won. In round 2, I faced a bizarre Bloodspeaker deck running out of Kyuden Agasha. I never got to find out what sort of doom his deck might contain, since he had early gold problems, made very strange choices about how to deal with them, and even weirder choices about how to organize his defenses against my early attacks. He put out a bunch of spells on his last turn, but it was far too late by that point, and I still had tricks to play in my hand even after everyone on his side of the table was bowed or dead. Then came round 3, which was against another Kyuden Agasha deck, but this one was actually full of real Phoenix personalities and was trying for straightforward military victory. Alas, I got off on the wrong foot with that player. I attacked him with a single personality, and he played Strength in Numbers, bowing all three of his defenders to destroy my personality. However, my personality was Hiruma Tatsuzo, so I just had to bow one of Tatsuzo's followers to negate the action, which would leave him free to kill all three of his defenders. My opponent got very upset, said he hadn't realized that I could do that, and that he'd like me to tell him about things like that. Now, if he had just been disappointed and calm about it, I probably would have offered to let him take it back, because I know what it's like to make that kind of mistake. However, this guy really seemed to have the attitude that I should spell out everything for him, point out useful things that I could do, and generally do all of his work for him. Add to that the fact that this was a personality sitting in the middle of the table that he could clearly see and read before opposing it in battle. If it had been a holding or something else off on the sidelines, that would be another mitigating factor. Anyway, between his attitude and the circumstances, I wasn't inclined to offer to let him take it back. He seemed to get over it after a while, which made the rest of the game a lot more pleasant, and I made my own mistake later on the in the game, forgetting an ability on one of his people. My mistake wasn't nearly so disastrous, though. That game was also noteworthy for the fact that I managed to defeat his Kaneka that was wielding the Celestial Sword of the Phoenix. Admittedly, he only had three people at that point, so he had only 8 force, but I managed to cancel the bowing Tactical action with Tatsuzo's ability, kill the other defending personality with Kani Hitokage's force duel, negate the send home Tactical action with Right Hand of the Emperor, overcome other send-home effects that he had by using Tireless Assault to return people to the battle, and finally force him to use the regular Tactical action just to keep me from taking a province as well as destroy both Kaneka and his clan sword. Mmm...it felt good to play effectively and not lose due to my own incompetence.
Undefeated, and surprised to be so, I sailed into round 4 against a brutal, incredibly mobile House of Tao deck, which took a few provinces early on and kept thwarting most of my attempts to even things off. In fact, he accidentally honored out due to the honor gains he received from defeating my attempts to recover. Blah. I knew I'd come crashing down sooner or later.
Then I faced off against Kyuden Bayushi, and a politics-crazy card drawing engine of wackiness. Things looked very, very grim at the start, but as I started to get out more and more people, I began to overwhelm his defenses. There was one scary point in which I nearly tied a battle, which would have provided him with enough honor to win. I managed to scrape up 1 point more force than his army, though, and left with him even fewer defenses for the final attack. It eventually got to the point that, for my final assault, even after bowing 4 people due to 3 Shosuro Maru and a 4th Pan Ku copy, and having one of my large units kept home by the Emperor's Underhand, I could still send 6 or 7 people at him, for a total of over 30 force. Victory for Zim! ...er, I mean, Victory for the Crab!
Round 6 was very short, as my deck stumbled against a perfectly functioning Crane dueling honor deck that left me with 1 living personality when he honored out on turn 6 or 7. Nevertheless, my previous games had carried me into the top 4, so I actually got a nifty metal box and some extra promo cards. Perhaps even better was the satisfaction of having done reasonably well at one of these things for a change - final 4 out of 19 is good enough for me. It even made me feel better about my loss to the Dragon deck that it turned out to be the ultimate winner of the tournament, so there was clearly no shame in losing to it.
As happy as I was to have done well, Murphy's Law was still poking its influence at me - those extra rounds that I played meant I got home a couple hours later than I planned, and was running incredibly late to head out to WPI. Tom did indeed decide to tag along, and even offered to drive, which was very welcome after two earlier trips to Worcester this week and driving back and forth between home and Nashua for the L5R tournament. We played a round of my board game while people occasionally stopped by and looked at it, but no one expressed any real interest. Once we finished, we decided to try one of the many unfamiliar games lying around. We selected Carcassonne, because it claimed to be playable by 2-5 people and take about 45 minutes to play. During that game, I actually had 3 people come by interested in trying out my game. Carcassonne went on hold, and I got to have some new people try out the 3-way version of the game.
Their game was a bit odd, in that no one really did much of anything with Air. There wasn't even a lot of damage flung around. Most of the attacks were small, and I think only 3 Territories were actually destroyed. Still, they seemed to have some fun with it, and had no serious complaints. Many of the changes they suggested were actually geared towards making the game longer which is not something I'm interested in. Besides, with some experience I think they could have longer games.
Afterwards, Tom and I returned to Carcassonne, which was kind of nifty, and is probably a very interesting game with 3-5 players. I can see many possibilities for people to score points for themselves and one or more other players simultaneously, leading to all kinds of interesting interactions between players. Also, with the tiles spread across more players, each player will have fewer turns, and will have to make their choices about what to do much more carefully.
Finally it got to be about 2:30, and we decided it was time to head home, no matter how desperately we wanted to live out our childhood fantasies of being 16th Century Italian merchants by playing Traders of Genoa. ...actually, this was just our running joke for the night: that we could think of few gaming premises less likely to be sought out by the average gamer. It's quite possible that the game is wonderfully fun and interesting, but the concept and game presentation did not win us over.
