Bring on the accountants ...
History of the World with Bidding took a participant
hit this year after growing in attendance the past few years.
Maybe the early Tuesday start for heat #1 or all the other options
available on Tuesday night this year is to blame, but for next
year a later start is envisioned. Overall, we managed two full
tables of six players each night. On Tuesday, Robert Destro and
John Koski managed to win their heats. The notable guffaws were
Rich Irving's 61 bid for the Romans in which he lost 12 Roman
armies while throwing three sets of snake-eyes, andMark Smith's
terrible streak of bad luck in whiffing with
his Barbarians, losing his Elite Troops before they won a battle
and overall coming up short on way to many die rolls. In the
second night, Chris Byrd and Stephen Mayer won their tables.
In those games the high Roman bid was Tony Cadden's 50. Needless
to say, he fared as well as Rich the previous night.
The Friday morning final had three of the heat winners show
up and the top three seconds based on the pre-tournament tie-breaker
of percentage of VP points verse bid points. The final had Robert
Destro, Stephen Mayer, Chris Boyd, Kevin Wojtaszczyk, Michael
Mullins and Nick Henning going for the Wood.
The bidding was very close early on and everyone was having
difficulty winning any offensive die rolls. Combining the Persians
and Celts vaulted Stephen into an early lead and good board presence
at the start of Epoch III. The Romans went for 41 to Robert but
they held the same fate as the Romans in the previous heats.
To start with, the Fanatical Romans lost four boats trying to
navigate the Western Med, and continued to show non-Roman quality
fighting by dropping an additional eight armies along the way.
Epoch IV saw Chris's Arab Jihad cut short in their first two
attacks by the Jewish fort in Palestine. The worst luck, however,
was experienced by Nick's empires. Starting in Epoch III, his
Macedonians with their imitation Weaponry rolled snake-eyes four
times and lost six armies. In Epoch IV, Nick's Byzantines lost
five armies and then, to make matters worse, Nick's Seljuk Turks
lost another five in Epoch V. Even with all the unlucky offensive
die rolling going on, by the end of Epoch V everyone was still
neck and neck with only seven points between 2nd and 6th with
Kevin as the target a dozen points in front of Chris's second
place 52 heading into the critical Epoch VI bids. Michael had
the biggest board presence at the time and was poised for a big
early score after running the Mongols in Epoch V. Michael however
bid too high on Portugal, grabbing them for 20. This allowed
Kevin to mop up all his China presence with the Ming, before
Michael could score them with Portugal. Kevin's early empire
however, launched him to 91 points and had everyone looking to
take a piece out of his green empire. Nick decided against the
luck of the dice for Epoch VI and chose the Incas/Aztecs and
scored an impressive 29 points to jump into third place with
70 points by the end of the Epoch. The high bids for the Turks
(21), Portugal (20) and Spain (26) didn't help Stephen, Michael
or Chris's VP totals for the Epoch but did establish them some
good board presence heading into the Epoch VII bids. The biggest
winner of the round was Robert's Mughals which raked in a whopping
40 points. This moved Robert into second place at 78 points before
the final round of bidding. Needless to say a premium was going
to be paid to go early in the last round. Robert won the bidding
war and edged out Kevin for Russia 20 to 19, while Chris edged
out Kevin for the Manchu Dynasty 18 to 17, only to have Kevin
fall into the Netherlands for 9. Michael grabbed France for 25
and Stephen got Britain for 32. Lastly, Nick defaulted to Germany
for 10. Going first in Epoch VII after scoring 40 in Epoch VI
was a big coupe for Robert's purple and they managed to crank
out 62 more points. This vaulted Robert to a leading 120 points
and thoughts of HWB Wood. Chris followed up with the Manchu's
and jumped into a possible 2nd place by rolling up 49 points
and getting to 87 overall. Next up, however, were Kevin's Netherlands,
with at least 38 points to make up to catch Robert. Luckily his
first attack into the North Sea was successful to get to his
previous Atlantic fleet. From there, he gained dominance of Northern
Europe, some monuments and with his final army he sacked Spain's
capital and monument to gain presence in Southern Europe for
a 4 point play. 38 was the total, which put Kevin at 120 with
Robert, both awaiting France, Britain and Germany to go. Michael
managed to grab 47 points with France and pulled just behind
Chris to 84 overall. Next Stephen revealed his Japan minor nation
to go with his British empire. However, Japan failed to expand
to China or to grab the Manchu capital and the Brits had to populate
their navy before attacking so Stephen got up to 66 points and
just edged past Michael to 85 overall. Lastly Nick tried his
hand with the dice one last time, and as before, they failed
him. Half of his Germans were lost, but he did manage to grab
33 points. This put him at 93 overall and secured a 3rd place
finish. Double checking the addition had Robert and Kevin truly
tied at 120 which forced the tie-breaker decision of percentage
of VPs verse amount of bid points. Robert had Shang (5), Vedic
(7), Romans (41), Goths (10), Chola (9), Mughals (13) and Russia
(20) for a total bid of 105, or a percentage of 1.14 VP per bid
point. Kevin had Sumeria (5), Assyria (8), Sassanids (11), T'ang
(11), Vikings (12), Ming (12), Netherlands (9) for a total bid
of 68, or a percentage of 1.76 VP per bid point. So in the closest
HWB final to date, Kevin edged out Robert for the Wood. Hopefully
with more participants next year we could have another close
battle for theWood!
See http://members.aol.com/wafflehq/howbid.html
for current information on this event. Knowledge of standard
HWD rules is required.
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