More medals & Variants ...

Some variant rules and special medals for the preliminary rounds contributed to an exciting Empire Builder this year. Players began with a four-card start, discarding one card before beginning their builds. In addition, all preliminary and semi-final rounds were played with the open contracts variant. Participants were given the option of playing any of the variants in the early rounds. The newest variant, Lunar Rails, featuring a "wrap-around" lunar landscape, was designed by Robert Stribula, who attended and made it to the semi-finals. As a special treat this year, GM Chuck Foster provided medals for the highest score in each of the eight variants.

Twenty-five semi-finalists played Empire Builder on Saturday night; most of the games ran longer than normal and five sleep-deprived finalists gathered the next morning for a hard-fought, if bleary-eyed, final round. Veteran train gamer Donna Balkan, who won the "Best Eurorails" medal in the preliminary rounds, claimed her first Empire Builder title in a final game.

Lady Luck smiled on Donna throughout the final. She started the game with $51M worth of wood to Berlin and Luxemburg, which financed her line to Spain. Her luck continued as she drew loads from Eastern Europe to the Iberian Peninsula. Just before her victory, she delivered ham to both Sevilla and Lisboa, a trip worth $129M. Hoping to win the game in Lisboa, she discovered she was $1M short of the $250 needed for victory. Fortunately, she had taken a load of tourists with her from the Ruhr to protect her more lucrative loads from derailment. In the end, a visit to Paris to deliver the $10 tourist load was what put her over the top.

Despite Donna's card luck, both Rich Meyer (second - $249M) and former GM Rich Shipley (third - $235M) were hot on her heels for much of the game. Other finalists were Olin Hentz (fourth - $193M) and two-time defending champ Jim Yerkey (fifth - $141M) who saw his three-peat chances die when the Rhine flooded early. He had to dump his cards five times to get a payoff to rebuild his bridge. The final was played using a game timer with one hour allotted to each player. This reduced the final game to only three hours and 10 minutes. Incredibly, Donna only needed a little over nineteen minutes to secure her amazing victory.