sunblush

I attended 2 days of this year’s World Boardgam­ing Cham­pi­onships in Lan­caster, PA. It’s not as pres­ti­gious as it sounds – while there are many tour­na­ments held there, any­one can come and have fun. I was much more inter­ested in open gam­ing than in com­pet­ing, though I did par­tic­i­pate in one tour­na­ment heat.

The BPA site is clum­sily designed and not very newbie-friendly, and it unfor­tu­nately mir­rors some of the WBC con­ven­tion expe­ri­ence itself (you are ini­tially con­fused and dis­ori­ented, but grad­u­ally learn to nav­i­gate the land­scape in spite of the many quirks). I joked about attend­ing mainly to “watch the old guys play wargames,” but it’s unde­ni­able that grog­nards are the WBC’s pri­mary demo­graphic. One look at the BPA logo might give you a hint in that direc­tion, but any dyed-in-the-wool boardgamer would also rec­og­nize the name of the BPA’s pres­i­dent, Don Green­wood: Mr. Avalon Hill him­self, designer of seem­ingly a thou­sand titles, among which resides Advanced Squad Leader, one of the most renowned wargame fran­chises ever published.

So, “Wargamers’ Mecca” is the most apt 2-word descrip­tion I can muster for the WBC — those guys were every­where! Thank­fully, there were plenty of other options avail­able for the less-hardcore among us. As I men­tioned, I mainly con­cen­trated on (casual) open gam­ing, and there was ample time and space allot­ted for that.

Day 1

I drove out to Lan­caster with fralim on Fri­day morn­ing. Upon arriv­ing, I met my pal Severus, and we imme­di­ately launched into a game of Race for the Galaxy with the new Rebels vs. Imperium expan­sion. Severus is quite the gam­ing savant who rou­tinely beats the pants off of every­one, and he won effort­lessly. We both went for mil­i­tary, but he pulled it off much bet­ter than I.

Upon explor­ing the open gam­ing library for a short game, we were dis­mayed at how generic the selec­tion was. As Severus was off to see a game demo, fralim and I even­tu­ally decided to play a teach­ing game of Notre Dame since fralim hadn’t played it before. He seemed to enjoy it, despite being strapped for cash and nearly over­whelmed by the rats sev­eral times.

I went to check out the ven­dors’ area, where I imme­di­ately snapped up a copy of Con­flict of Heroes: Storm of Steel from the Acad­emy Games table. fralim showed me a few of the finer points of the rules and strat­egy. This looks like a really cool game, and I’m not sorry to own both it and Com­bat Com­man­der: Europe. Same genre, but wholly dif­fer­ent approaches to gameplay.

After putting SoS back in its box, fralim real­ized we had about an hour before the Chicago Express tour­na­ment. He’d heard that the new Nar­row Guage & Erie Rail­road Com­pany expan­sion would be given away to all heat win­ners, so that was on his list of things to do. Our friend Prince­Ham­let arrived, and we tried out Fire & Axe, a very attrac­tive light strat­egy game about Vikings that was sur­pris­ingly civil (and also had very lit­tle to do with either fire or axes).

The Chicago Express heat was kind of sur­real. I had never played a board game com­pet­i­tively before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. We were seated ran­domly, 4 to a table. My group­ing was pretty polite and well-mannered. The B&O com­pany launched out of the gates pretty early and was clearly going to beat the other lines to Chicago, so I sprung for a cou­ple shares of it. The next-highest line on the income track was Penn­syl­va­nia, which I also won a share in. That would have been enough to win me the game, but I wasted some pre­cious cash a share of Cen­tral, which resulted in a tie for first place between another player and myself. The tiebreaker to decide the win­ner? A die roll, which I won. Put an aster­isk next to my win if you must — the other guy def­i­nitely deserved it.

fralim, Prince­Ham­let, and I sat down to play our first-ever game of Star­craft: the Board Game with the Brood War expan­sion. Mer­ci­fully, one of the guys from Fortress Amer­i­trash swung by and helped us to grasp some of the rules. I played as the Arc­turus fac­tion of the Ter­ran race, fralim was Aldaris of the Pro­toss, and Prince­Ham­let chose to be the Zerg Over­mind. The game moved sur­pris­ingly fast despite its con­sid­er­able weight. Since attack­ers have a huge advan­tage over defend­ers, the game def­i­nitely pro­vides an incen­tive not to tur­tle. Despite this, Prince­Ham­let built up and built up, ready­ing his forces for the inevitable inva­sion as fralim and I rat­tled our sabres ner­vously. John had the spe­cial vic­tory con­di­tion that gave him vic­tory if he had 3 bases, but he only had 2, and his turtling Zer­glings were no match for the Bat­tle Cruiser and Wraiths I sent in to raze one of his bases. I ended up win­ning on vic­tory points, but mainly because we all played overly ten­ta­tively and defen­sively. We’ll get it right next time.

Severus and Prince­Ham­let went home for the night, and fralim and I were pretty fried, but we just had to play one more game: Thebes. He pretty much destroyed me.

Day 2

Sat­ur­day morn­ing began very ambi­tiously with fralim and I break­ing out Through the Ages. I began the game with Julius Cae­sar, while fralim took Homer as his leader. He took a siz­able lead in cul­ture dur­ing the first half of the game. After a while, though, my mil­i­tary started to push around his poets and artists, and ulti­mately just sat on them. I ended up draw­ing 3 War on Cul­ture cards when I had a strength advan­tage of 47 points. It def­i­nitely rein­forced the notion that you can’t afford to ignore mil­i­tary in this game.

fralim then taught me how to play Finca, a light set-collection game with an inge­nious lit­tle ron­del mechanic. I enjoy ron­del games, so that was a win. I may pick this one up at some point.

I had recently acquired a copy of Stephenson’s Rocket, and man­aged to get it to the table with Severus and fralim. Severus totally ran away with the game, owing mostly to the shrewd place­ment of his sta­tions. It’s def­i­nitely a game that I’ll have to play a few more times before I grok it. Only Knizia can make a set-collection game out of a train game. fralim called it “opaque,” not unlike Tigris & Euphrates, a game by the same designer which we later went to see demoed.

fralim had to leave, so Severus and I played his newly pur­chased spe­cial edi­tion of Cay­lus. The art­work and the metal coins are fan­tas­tic, but I have no prob­lem with the plain old reg­u­lar edi­tion. The bat­tle for con­trol of the provost is espe­cially tight in 2-player Cay­lus, and at one point, it was all the way back at the bridge! Amaz­ingly, I won the game by a sin­gle point, though I’m sure there’s a mar­gin of error con­sid­er­ing that it was Severus’ first play, and it had been a long time since my last Cay­lus game. We were unsure of whether a player’s sup­ply of houses is lim­ited, but lucky for me, it turns out that houses are unlim­ited. I built a pres­tige build­ing with my royal favor at game end.

I left to go home at that point, but Severus stayed to play in the semi-finals of the Race for the Galaxy tour­na­ment. He’d spent the whole week­end play­ing heats in order to qual­ify, and he ended up mak­ing it into the pool. Later that night he texted me to let me know he got 4th in the Final. Not too shabby!

Tags: boardgame