I drove up to the WBC this year on wednesday and stayed until Sunday. Susan had booked a room at the hotel, so we would not have to drive the 40 minute trip each day. This year I was not going to compete. I decided to leave the team and to sample a little of everything with no intention of trying to win anything. I would play what I felt like playing at that moment, and if something fell into my lap, well, ok, MAYBE I'd follow through. And that's exactly what I did.

I was running two events. I had abandoned Princes of Florence, which I GM'd last year, and I told Don Greenwood that I would jump in if he needed someone. He needed a GM for Hector & Achilles, a new card game by Phalanx, so I volunteered. Then he needed someone for Goa, which Jay Tummelson had entered as a very late addition, so I volunteered for that one too. I got a free copy of Goa for doing it, so what the hey? Yes, I was volunteering to run two games sight unseen, but how bad could it be?

It did get me into a little trouble with Goa, and I've caught a little flak for it on consimworld. I had no idea how long a game lasted, and I had to schedule ASAP. The only thing I saw was 60 minutes at the Geek, so I asked for 90, but somehow it got 60. We bumped it to two hours at the last minute, and even then I was pretty sure the slowpokes and newbies would need more, so I announced I would adjudicate games. I ended up shutting down three games in the first heat, and I could have done a couple more later but didn't, so it wasn't too bad. Thankfully David Fair backed me up so I could play in one heat myself, and boy, I needed the help. We were constantly
hopping tables answering questions. Otherwise it went pretty smoothly, and Perrianne Lurie won it.

I was supposed to help John Weber run Puerto Rico, but I was galavanting all over the place, so I sort of missed some of the heats. I did show up for the last one -- to play and not help. It's been a while since I've played PR, and I was a bit rusty. When I'm not screwing around, I play a serious game of trying to build like crazy and end the game before the shippers (usually the corn folk) hit their stride. The guy to my left was a shipper, and he got off to a fast start. I usually do pretty well in a setup like this, unless there are loose cannons in the game, and the cannon to my right was loose as a goose. In one stunning, heartbreaking moment, the cannon chose the captain because it had a coin on it eventhough there were prospectors available and eventhough she had nothing to ship! The shipper to my left had goodies for each boat and the harbor, so he was agog. His eyes bulged out so far that they bounced around the tabletop like pingpong balls. I lost eventhough I had built three big buildings.

I got into a heat of Tigris and Euphrates, which I had missed in the previous years. Tom McCorry was sitting to my right. He started a kingdom near a board edge, and I decided to put some of my kings there because it seemed like a nice, cozy spot. Oddly, Tom left our kingdom quickly after that, and there I was with all my kings in a kingdom that I had to myself. I started eyeing up a fat, juicy kingdom near where the water monument always shows up, and I was almost hopping up and down in my seat, anxious to attack it. But just before my turn, Tom attacked ME from a completely different direction! He chopped my cozy kingdom into tiny little bits, and most of my kings ended up behind my screen. So I raved. I pounded the table telling him what I was going to do to him, but he just sat there with this satisfied Mona Lisa smile because there was nothing I could do but rant. The only
recourse I had was to have an Ally McBeal fantasy where I smack him in the head with a backhand, and he tumbles over backwards in his chair.

It felt real good.

I entered the Memoir '44 tournament and had a wonderful time. I won two of the three battles as the Allies, but I got creamed at Gold Beach. I realized after I was setting up