Had a “brief” look at the possible finalists;
Berbatov and Brian Reynolds qualified.
then we get one of
Syzygy & ForzaA
Jeromeymartin & Gumers
Rho21 & Greatatlantic
Looking at POTENTIAL finalists;
Berbatov lost to Syzygy, defeated ForzaA, Rho21, Brian Reynolds
Brian Reynolds lost to Berbatov, defeated Gumers, Greatatlantic, Syzygy
Syzygy lost to Brian Reynolds, defeated Berbatov
ForzaA lost to Berbatov, defeated -
Jeromeymartin lost to rho21, defeated -
Gumers lost to Brian Reynolds, defeated -
Rho21 lost to Berbatov , defeated Jeromeymartin
Greatatlantic lost to Brian Reynolds, defeated -
Depending on outcome of matches, we may have
Berbatov on “+3” (Rho21 and ForzaA win their match) down to “0” (Syzygy & Greatatlantic win)
Brian Reynolds on “+2” (due wins of Syzygy, Gumers & Greatatlantic) down to “-1” ( ForzaA, Jeromeymartin, Rho21 win)
Assuming Syzygy wins ; he qualifies at “0”
Assuming ForzaA wins ; “-1”
Jeromeymartin “-1” (Rho21 wins) or “0”
Gumers “-1”
Rho21 “0” (Jeromeymartin wins) or “-1”
Greatatlantic “-1”
Brief look at the
“Extreme” rankings for the two already qualified:
Be +3 / BR -1, Fo -1, Je -1, Rh 0
BR +2 / Be 0, Sy 0, Gu -1, Gr -1
I do wonder how a “single elimination” with seeding is going to work with 5 contestants :)
@borges: perhaps you could play @Grunden, who also has a bye, as I recall.
My game as USA against greatatlantic just finished. Despite an early Purge, it felt as though the card luck was against me in the early game. Destalinization went to the USSR, and Decolonization too… twice by turn 4. It sorted itself out by the mid-game, but the game was solidly in greatatlantic’s favour until turn 6, when a Purge - Bear Trap combo turned the game on its head. I think I had placed somewhere around 25 unopposed influence by the time the trap was escaped in the middle of turn 7.
This was still only enough to leave me a little bit ahead. None of the really big US events showed up in the late war, so I wasn’t able to run away with it. Then it was all in jeopardy after a 7-point Middle East scoring (I tried to slip it through for 0 in the headline, but a fortunate Iran-Iraq war flipped it) at the start of turn 10.
In the end, as so often, it came down to the US placing last. I was able to use my final 2 ops to swing 4 points my way and when the dust settled, rho21 beat greatatlantic by 3 points in final scoring.
Phew, another close one. I feel rather bad for greatatlantic after that bear trap. So many failed rolls, so many wasted turns. Thanks for the game even so, it was tightly fought.
I had the same idea but didn’t bring it up because unfortunately it won’t be an “official” tournament result as challonge doesn’t support moving people around in brackets or marking drop outs. It’s all automated.
But if you guys want to play a fun game by all means!
I don’t think @tcgamer posted this, but he trounced me soundly. I had some really bad draws but I also suck at this game. I need to watch @Brian_Reynolds videos to learn how a master plays.
To add to this, yeah, the luck demons had it in for me on this game. I started the game with a weak hand under purge, and a similarly weak hand in turn 2. However, I was mostly able to stay ahead of the scoring cards, and Turn 3 was able to use De-Stalinization to get my foot in South America and France, scoring European Domination.
While I generally had good hands on turns 4 and 5, I didn’t draw any of the Big Neutral events: Junta, Brush War, ABM Treaty, Purge. A key event was probably Rho 21 drawing Junta early and establishing himself in South America before I could fill out the effects of De-Stalinization. South America was probably the most contested battleground of the game.
However, Turn 6 is when the Titantic played tackle football with an iceberg. I had a weak hand under normal conditions, two scoring cards, no 4 ops, a handful of US events I’d very much like to avoid. I use Missile Envy to swipe AMB Treatry from him, but not before he drops Purge turning my bad hand to worse. None the less, I try the ABM sponsored, possibly game changing coup in South America and roll a 1. So, holding SA scoring, I start throwing what remains of my ops into South America to maybe save it… when Bear Trap falls. At this point, I only have one card that I can discard to get out of it: Five Year Plan, which would have been my out of South America Scoring. So, I lost one of my favorite cards to hold, but didn’t make the roll and spent the rest of the round watching my Domination in Asia flip.
Turn 7 brought me no favors, as I failed the roll to get out of Bear trap 3 more times. 4 failed rolls in a row… plus the all the lost rounds due to Purge in Turn 6. The odds of that happening? 1 in a hundred? Considering how close the end game was, I have a hard time believing I would have lost had I got just a slightly more favorable set of circumstances.
The late war I think was a wash in terms of luck. I got hit with Grain Sales, which of all the cards it could have pulled from my hand it had to be Five Year Plan. I hit him with Terrorism, and of course see OPEC go bye bye. Major events for both sides never came up, including Ames, Glasgow, and Chernobyl. Honestly, my entire end game strategy was get to 6 or 7 VP and play Wargames for the tie or win. Or, force him into Defcon suicide. Alas, an early scoring of Asia put the Wargames plan on hold, though I kept managing to come up with VP to keep it about even. One might point towards my luck in using Iran-Iraq War to simultaneously get domination and remove his presence from the continent and the 8 VP swing it represents and say the win wasn’t that close as the end score. To that, I say BEAR TRAP. I get out of that quicker, and I can secure Africa and ME.
Anyways, luck was not so lopsided in the game that I lose without facing some skill, and rho21 rightfully wins.
Bear Trap and Quagmire can be so swingy. 4 failed rolls is 1 in 81. Though treat that number with care for survivor bias, as ever with this sort of thing.
Of course the wasted rounds in turn 6 were somewhat by design: I’d seen you using a bunch of 3-op cards already and was hoping you were running low. Still, I have to agree with you: even if you’d failed just the one roll (still enough to mess up turn 6), I’m sure you would have won given a similar set of draws later on. The second failed roll gave me the chance to score Asia without interference and the game would have been pretty close.
One interesting feature of the wasted rounds in turn 6 (from my perspective) is that your hand was filled up again by the time of the reshuffle so I knew every card you were holding on turn 7.
I failed 5 consecutive rounds in a FtF game this weekend, and the fact that probably won’t happen for another 243 bear traps or so was small comfort. What with my current personal record being THIRTEEN and all - literally one in a million, though the odds slightly janked by holding scoring cards.
But it reminded me that my problem with the rules for those cards isn’t that there’s randomness (there’s piles of it in Twilight Struggle and it’s fine), it’s that when the really long ones come up, albeit super rarely, it’s just NOT FUN. It’s absolutely boring and miserable as the victim. And it isn’t even very fun if you’re the beneficiary of a 4+ turn lockup - it just kind of puts a moral “asterisk” on your probable victory in the game. (Admittedly it made winning that thirteen-round bear trap game by terrorism-induced daniel ortega trap on turn 9 my most memorable wins of all time, but still).
So if I manage to worm my way into the beta for e.g. Imperial Struggle I’m going to suggest language more like “4-6 the first turn, 5-6 the second turn, 6 the third turn, and then definitely done”.
Getting hit with a purge/ bear trap combo can be game ending, right there. I’ve had it happen where it meant I literally had a single card to break the trap. Fail? and I lose an entire round basically, and have a handful of 1+2 ops enemy event cards on my next turn. Had I failed that roll, I probably would have conceded then and there (I was already in a bind, and did go on to lose to Wargames anyhow).
You are absolutely right about that being no fun, especially if one player draws both, and can space theirs. Failing an action due to a poor dice roll just feels qualitatively different than losing multiple actions due to the dice. One is rolling to try and win, the other is rolling not to lose. Just feels bad.
After a long and hard slogging match, @Syzygy (USSR) defeats @ForzaA (USA) in final scoring by 6 points.
Luck swung both ways, fierce contests raging all over the globe. Slightly different draw on round 10 and we’d be looking at a USA victory.
(say, a ‘harmless’ 1OP instead of South America scoring for the Soviets… Tear down this Wall would’ve been nice too ;) )
But, in the end, I do think Syzygy deserved the win more than I did. Well played, it was a true nail biter.
Lots of new insights for me, but if there’s one big takeaway - Don’t let the soviets get South America, and don’t underestimate the damage it can do.
Congrats again to Syzygy, and good luck to all the finalists.
I’m not sure I’d agree with this. Typically, Quagmire falls on one turn, and then a turn later US discards an event and gets out of it. Bear Trap same thing, different sides. However, on the long tail of randomness it can last for several turns and the super power is stuck doing nothing but discarding to get out of the Quagmire, or in my case just nothing.
Vietnam and Afghanistan were long and drawn out affairs, which Bear Trap and Quagmire rarely are. Then, they didn’t completely shut down the Super Powers. Nixon went to China in '72, during direct military involvement in Vietnam. The Soviets were in Afghanistan for a decade. It’s not like they didn’t continue to exert influence elsewhere in the globe.
Instead, these were events that pitted the governments desire to aggressively push the brand of communism/capitalism at the cost of popularity at home.
My alternative text for these events might be as follows: While Quagmire remains in affect, either lose a VP before taking your turn as normal, or in lieu of a turn discard a 3 op or higher card to cancel Quagmire. I think that captures the history of the events better, leaves less room for frustrating and unfun randomness, and also gives players some interesting decisions.
We are still waiting for @Brooski and @dstone112 to report their results (and I encourage you to do so for future tournament seedings when you can get around to the game). But in the interests of wrapping up this tournament, which started way back in January 18, I’ve gone ahead and seeded the finals.
If you have feedback on the format, now is the time to provide it before the next round is organized.
Speaking of which, are there any volunteers to take over the organization of the next round? I have a new job and am busier than I was in January, so I’m eager to pass the baton.
Yes, thank you for organising it.Had some excellent games. I’ll send an invitation to gumers this evening.
I wish it were possible to balance it with VP instead of influence. Mostly the 1 influence doesn’t make too much difference, but there is the potential of a vast swing if the US draws Middle East scoring in turn 1. We could try something like “US gets +2 influence but can’t use them to take control of a country (except in Europe)”.
It continues to be difficult to complete games across a big time zone difference with the 7-day time limit. I still don’t have a good fix for this though (especially given that the next time limit up is 21 days for some reason).
I’d be in favor of either (a) bidding for sides or (b) +2 US influence, in that order of preference. Bidding leaves the matter of what the proper US handicap is “to the market” and also makes Turn Zero variants less weird (there are some combos where I’d probably bid 1 to play the US!). Plus if I end up getting one side several times in a row and am tired of it, it leaves me some control of my future fate.
But if a number has to be assigned, I can argue for +2 instead of +1. I pulled up a bunch of win/loss records of people I play near my level who tend to bid +1, and they mostly had a 10%-20% higher win rate with Soviets than with US. The sample size was only 10-15, but it was surprisingly consistent (I did a little piece on this in the first video of my second youtube game - here’s a link directly to the timecode which shows the player records I was looking at). Which suggests that +1 bidders are undervaluing the Soviet advantage and underestimating the influence handicap they need when playing the US. I’m a 2-bidder myself and “anecdatally” out of 400 games I think my record is about 73% with Soviets and 70% with US though by bidding 2 I end up playing soviets in a higher percentage of games so I’m probably in better practice with them ;-)
But again, I’d prefer bidding in a competitive situation, as it leaves the players in control of this decision. Also it’s even the thing the designer suggests in the rules.
I do have one wild “thinking outside the box” idea on time control: with the number of players we have, we could theoretically set the time control to 45 days and play “simultaneous round robin” - everybody starts a game against everybody at the same time. So you’ve got a bunch of games going at once but the required “average move rate” in each is roughly a move a day. If that still results in too many games, we could overlay the “league” system (so imagine the top 8 players from this tournament in one league, and the next eight in the next league, or whatever). So each league has its own roundrobin tourney, and then at the end we promote the top 2-3 people from the lower league and demote the bottom 2-3 from the top league, etc.
It’s a different feel of a format, but it could work to make the overall tournament get done in a reasonable time (90-ish days) while alleviating the time zone / time crunch issues.
Just send me an invite when you’re ready to get started. I’m moving house over the next week so chaos will reign on time, but I’ll usually have an ipad around and I should have no problem getting moves in.
