This year’s Concordia tournament started off with 27 players. We had additional sign ups, but problems with the website this year caused a few folks to drop out before we even got started. After we got through that, things went more smoothly.
In the preliminary games, Allan Jiang ended up with what I believe is the highest score I have ever seen (159) made up mostly of five Saturn cards (different provinces) and four Mercury cards (different goods) all of which scored 10 points apiece. Three of the twenty-seven games were what I consider “low scoring” (everyone below 100 points) and those were all remarkably close (scores between 80 and 99 for everyone).
Nobody won all four games, but we had three triple winners (Eric Freeman, Andrew Emerick, and Ray Wolff). The GM even managed to make the cutoff of this round, barely.
In the second round the field was narrowed to 14 players. The GM’s glory was short-lived as he came in dead last. Allan Jiang and Dennis Mishler this time had three wins, and they were joined in the last round by Michael Swinson, Rob Kircher, Andrew Emerick (last year’s champion) Eric Freeman, and Ray Wolff.
Interestingly, the second round had five more “low scoring” games, which is indicative of the cards being rushed more quickly than cities. Last year’s tournament has only three such games in the entire tournament.
In game 1 of the finals, the starting city was surrounded by Food and Tool cities. Anyone looking to Architect two cities would have had to settle for Brick/Food or Brick/Tool. There was only one Cloth two spots away, as well. The first two players played Tribunes to get another Colonist. Michael, in third place, went for a Brick/Tool. Michael went on to place the most cities (11) and had a 7-point win over Eric.
In game 2, Michael pulled out another win, this time leaning more heavily into cards, purchasing eight over the course of the game. Rob came in second by 10 points.
In game 3, Eric won the game by 5 points over Allan, with eight cards including the Tool and Cloth cards.
In game 4, Allan had a large win, passing the nearest opponent by 32 points. He had 11 cities down with a fistful of Saturn and Jupiter cards.
In game 5, Michael won in a squeaker (2 points) over Andrew, with eleven cities on the board, a number of Saturn and Jupiter cards, and propped up by two 10-point Mercury cards.
In game 6, a close game had Dennis the winner by just 1 point, with Andrew winning the tiebreaker over Rob for second place.
In game 7, Dennis beat Michael by just 3 points, with all the players within 13 points of one another.
In the end, Michael Swinson, who had come in second in the past two tournaments, finally managed to top the field with his three wins and one second place finish. Congratulations on the win.
Final top 6:
- Michael Swinson
- Dennis Mishler
- Allan Jiang
- Eric Freeman
- Rob Kircher
- Andrew Emerick
Due to the issues, we had with the website, which do not seem close to being resolved, I will not be running this tournament for the coming year. I will be on the lookout, though, if Concordia pops up on another platform, or if the website gets fixed.
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