Hearing Your Wonderous Stories
-------------------------------
The Secret to Winning.
I decided to play my sixth straight games of Axis And Allies on Thursday night at 7:00 PM. A&A is held as a swiss style tournament with the plaque going to the player with the most wins and points after six games. A&A was my team game and my record at that point was three wins and two loses. If I won the last I would have a slight chance of garnering a few points for our Team, GCOM Express. My final game was again the 2001 A&A champion, Patrick Mirk.
I played the Allies Patrick played the Axis. Unfortunately I am unable to recall specific moves in the game. Strategically both Patrick and myself played a close game with no mistaken moves being made by either player. Patrick was having a great night for die rolling. He was consistently rolling ones and twos, which are hits in A&A, on mostly every die roll. Patrick would easily get four hits out of six dice or six hits out of nine dice on a consistent basis. Even with Patrick’s defensive dice rolls, he would get three out of four hits or go seven for ten. I was rolling extremely consistent dice as well. They would have been wonderful dice rolls…if only I had been plying Risk or Titan. I was rolling fives and sixes on a regular basis, which are misses in A&A. If I needed to roll a two or less I would roll three, if I needed to roll three or less I would roll fours. It was simply incredible. I could not roll well to save myself.
As Patrick said during the game, “ Its like a gamers wet dream”.
I said, “I would be dangerous if I could roll well.”
And here’s the best part. It didn’t matter!! It was the most fun game I played at WBC this year.
Patrick and I were laughing up a storm. We both had a great time.
Did I lose the game? I conceded the game to Patrick.
But I came away with something much more important than any plaque or points could every give.
FUN, FRIENDSHIP and satisfaction
What other activity could give so much? Where else could losing mean winning?
Only one hobby and one place my friends. GAMES
Oh, I almost forgot the secret....Attitude is everything.
Keith Levy
---------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------
My week at WBC was kept busy GM-ing two of what turned out to be the event's most popular games -- Puerto Rico and Princes of Florence.

Puerto Rico had a total of 152 entrants which I think was
the highest this year (Carcassone I understand was at 150) and Princes improved from 65 to 94. It took me up until about 3:30 AM on Saturday night to check the results and fill out the forms to come up with the official count
(that and lack of sleep is why when Keith saw me on Sunday morning I was wearing last year's GM shirt instead of the new one from this year!).

One of the hard lessons I learned was not to select one of your GM-ed events as your team event; I had picked POF because of my strong second place at Prezcon, but there I didn't have the problem of running the event plus an even larger event the same day. So next year I'm probably not going to be doing both -- but would like to see if someone else in GCOM would be interested in taking over the one I
decide to drop, which if had to decide right now, would probably be POF.

I should also mention that in spite of all this activity on
the GM front I actually managed to play in some other events and even won a plaque -- my first since the convention changed from AH to WBC. It was in a game I had only played once before, Mexica, and I played it only
because I had an open two-hour slot and Harold Siegelman, the GM and a GCOM member, talked me into it. I won the first round game on Tuesday night. Harold said I was in the semis which started at 6 on Saturday. I told Harold I always play Adel at WBC on Saturday, but he insisted I
play as it was down to 4-6 people for the top prize. I'm
glad I listened to Harold; my opponents in both the semifinal and final games made major errors which basically handed me the game -- including creating a 77-space district in the final game which I was able to "horn
in" on with all my remaining buildings. Thanks to Harold
for running the event, talking me into playing, and I can't wait to see his write-up for the yearbook.

Even after all this, I also managed to get in a couple of
tournament games of Union Pacific and Taj Mahal, but I think the most fun I had was playing three games as the 55 Brooklyn Dodgers all at historic Ebbets Field in Superstar Baseball. Although I got knocked out at the three-game league stage, all three games were close, including a
14-inning marathon and I did beat the 27 Yankees of Ruth
and Gehrig with a home run in the bottom of the ninth by a little-known player named Frank Kellert.

One of the things I enjoy most about WBC is meeting people from other parts of the country who I usually see only once a year, people like James Pei, Jason Levine, Steve Scott, Randy Cox, Rachel McGinlay, Mike Hazel and Marty Hoff, just to name a few,and also my friend Jeff August
from an earlier gaming life who doesn't live that far away
but whom I haven't seen for almost two years. The one thing I missed most was McGartlin's Stock Car Racing game, which was dropped from the schedule not for lack of participation, but because noone stepped forward to GM
it.

Right now I am still in the process of assimilating statistics from games played in the POF and Puerto Rico tournaments and I hope, with Stan's cooperation, to have something posted at the "Stan's Game Box" web site which is linked to the GCOM site.

One final note: in both POF and Puerto Rico I wound up
handing out the wood to the same player, Arthur Field, so now I've GM-ed three WBC events and Arthur's won all three. Next year if I'm GM I would like to be able to hand out the wood to a GCOM member.


John Weber
----------------------------------------------------------