Welcome to La Republica de los Bananas, where the bullets fly and the fate of your regime can depend on the roll of a die. Put the most foreign aid money into your Swiss bank account to win.

Early Wednesday morning, thirteen competitors sat down to attempt to connive, threaten, deal, and assassinate their way to victory. We split into a six player and seven player game. In the six-player game, GM Kevin Youells coasted to a 15-point victory after shooting Paul Weintraub at the bank and depositing the 17 MP's that Paul was no longer using. In the seven-player game, defending champion David Weinstein picked up an 8-point win.

The system used to pick finalists favored closer games, so we had five players from the seven-player game and only two from the six-player game in the finals. Kevin Barry was elected to be the first El Presidente, and resigned from his post after one profitable turn. The next election went to Ken Samuel who quickly formed what we called the Corner Alliance with the former president. The two of them agreed on a very unequal distribution of the foreign aid money, and a revolution was started by David. Greg Kulp was the deciding factor in the coup, and threw in his lot with the revolution after receiving a promise of a hefty payoff.

In the aftermath of the coup, Kevin Youells was elected president and Ken was sent to the firing squad. The Ruling Coalition was formed and included everyone except for the Corner Alliance. Despite the members killing each other, the Coalition survived the rest of the game, withstood a coup attempt from the Corner Alliance, and Kevin kept his position as president for the last seven turns, which is an eternity in Junta.

In the end, it all came down to the payoff that Greg had received for joining the first coup, as he defeated David by one point. It was an amazingly close game, and first through fourth place were only three points apart. Congratulations to everyone on a very well played game. Alas, Junta was only a Trial event this year, and did not draw enough players to rejoin the Century.