Sunday has been my big gaming day for the past few months, since I agreed to run A Game of Thrones CCG events at Critical Hit. I generally arrive about 12:30, and stay until 10:00 or so. Yesterday was a decent example, although the store was a little slow.

Contents of this post: AGOT tourney report, Standard format, and Puerto Rico game session.

AGOT CCG TOURNEY
When I got there, the store had around 8 people in it. Unfortunately, only 4 of us were there for the ccg tourney. Since we started having weekly events, the numbers for our total community have gone up, but attendance at tournaments is down. Are people just expecting that they can miss because there's always another next week? Is the noob factor turning people off? Did people have too many NPE's from losing consistently too often? I don't know. I just know we've done a lot of work to build the community, and it's not paying off in the organized play department. That, I suppose, is fine, especially from the perspective of the store and FFG, as they still sell cards. Anyway, the format was standard constructed, and I played Lannister Trait Manipulation, since it's the only deck I still have together after my other four decks got butchered to make my peasant deck for the last tournament... I played Chad's Lannister deck in the first round. Chad is a new player, with a small collection, and this round suffered from the imbalance in CCG constructed formats created by collection limitations. In other words, my big collection beat Chad's tiny collection. Chad was a great sport, though, and made the good comment that coming and getting beat still taught him about what deck types were viable, what cards were good, and how to appropriately play. I have no doubt that in a couple months, he will be pretty competitive. Second round was Jerod (Clu/store owner) playing Baratheon Threat From the East. Jerod is the guy who got me into the game, and is a very competitive player, with a big collection, who comes up with interesting combinations of cards. This was no exception, and we had a long and complex game with a lot of hard decisions. He was able to consistently bring back cards with the Tourney Knight, and his recycling was a real pain. Fortunately, I kept the tourney knight off the table much of the game, and ended up winning with Gregor's Retainer, as he was very attachment-lite and couldn't defend. Third round was Chris with Stark. Chris has been playing for a while, but hasn't collected all the rares he wants for this deck. It was basic military, with some search effects. Unfortunately, he only drew 3 characters the whole game, so there wasn't really much of a game here, more of Chris bemusedly dropping locations and attachments on my guys, and discarding events to my intrigue challenges until I got to 15. I wouldn't have made any changes to my deck afterwards, although I did learn valuable information about Threat decks. Not much of a day, and I hope that more people start showing up. We'll keep working on it.

PUERTO RICO
While we were finishing up AGOT, Dan and Peter were teaching Peter's girlfriend Rachel to play PR. PR has been a big favorite aorund our group the last couple months, and Dan is always ready to play. After the tourney ended, Jerod and I took our seets at the table, and went into PR mode.

Peter was in seat one, followed by Rachel, Dan, Jerod, and then myself. I really don't like being last in this game. Too many important choices are made in front of you, and you start with corn sitting to your right. When we started playing, I liked the first corn seat best, as you have the chance to dominate a shipping strategy. However, in recent games we've seen the corn get really spread out, and the corn player not being rewarded. Now, I think I'm leaning toward the first seat, settling for a quarry. We may be undervaluing some of the starting buildings, though, and the option of having first crack at them.

I came into this game with back-to-back victories in our last two plays, each being 4 experienced players and a new player, like this one. I wasn't optimistic about my chances here, as I was in poor position, and I figured Dan would convince everyone to gang up on me. Fortunately, Dan was the early leader, and the hounds decided to chase him and ignore me... In fact, I was never perceived as a threat until I bought my big building in the penultimate round...

In my first few games, I felt that poor play on my part, and failing to grasp the tempo of the game, were to blame for me not winning. In the last few games I've won, I think that it was other peoples' mistakes, rather than my own excellent maneuvers, that were responsible for my victories. Dan gets really frustrated with people making what he considers to be poor plays, as he feels it corrupts the game. I like my games to have a little luck, though, and I guess that's the luck factor here. The luck of other peoples' choices. Some of the odd choices in this game, to me, including Jerod building construction hut and using it once, passing on a small market when he was in the first corn seat. He also passed on a quarry in his first settling phase with active CH, going for Corn instead. This signalled confusion to me, as one generally goes shipping with that seat, and he was signalling building with construction hut, then going the other way with the corn plantation. Nobody punished him for the construcion hut move, and he bought the small market later. Diversifying may have cost him later, though, as everyone got into corn. A second odd choice on his part was chosing to build a harbor in the second to last turn, when he could have saved his money for a big building on the last turn, and he probably wasn't going to be able to use the harbor (he did not get to). I know I made a noteworthy mistake, but I failed to take note of it... One thing I remember is that I passed an obvious choice of Trading which would have limited the benefits to the player to my left, Peter. Peter bypassed the cheap goods, and went right into tobacco. He was slow getting into the game, but then he hit several good Traders, with a large market, and snagged a lot of money, which made him a force in the late game. He ended up in second, by nine points. Rachel had a good early game, pumping up sugar, but got hurt by two craftsman phases in th mid-game, when I got sugar before her, and took most or all of the supply. Dan had a quick start, and then got hurt by people trying to slow him down. I think there were some times when he should have traded, also, to make money on his coffee. His late game suffered from low funding and an inability to buy big in the later building stages.

I won with 56 points, the most I've accumulated to date. I'm still learning a lot about this game, and enjoying the experience. In this session, I tried to build effectively in conjuntion with my plantations in the early game, and I went for small market, hospice, and a couple quarries. In the mid game, I pumped up my sugar production and went for a wharf. The late game timed out well for me, picking up the fortress, which ended up being worth 6 extra points. This is the first time I bought the University. I did it because I though that the last two turns would come out with someone mayoring, and then someone else building for points, and I wanted to be able to build big and have it manned. It didn't work out that way, though, as I ended up building and then mayoring, as other people chose to craftsman/captain/etc.. Oddly, the University still got me points, as I did get a colonist in the building phase which gave me an extra fortress point. Only one time that I've played has the game ended by someone filling their city. Every other time, we've run out of colonists. I wonder if this is a factor unique to our group? This time, we were close to the other conditions, with someone only two buildings away, and with only around 8-9 vp left. It was a good, long game, and I appreciated not being able to calculate who the victor would be until the end of the game. I wouldn say that everyone was a viable contender going into the last round, which was great.

We rounded out the night with the excellent Peking Buffet next door, which I can happily recommend to any visiting gamers. A little pricy at $10.50, but a good meal. I tried to entice people into Tigris & Euphrated or St. Petersburg, but, unfortunately, they'll have to wait for another day...