titan  

Updated 11/26/2008

 2008 WBC Report  

 2009 Status: pending 2009 GM commitment

Jason Ley, WA

2008 Champion

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Laurels Laurels Laurels

Event History
1991    Steve Rareshide      43
1992    Kevin Quirk      48
1993    Brian Sutton      58
1994    Chuck Kaplan      67
1995    Steve Koleszar      65
1996    Ben Foy      66
1997    Dave Finberg      72
1998    Jung Yueh      78
1999    Dave des Jardins     51
2000    Rich Atwater     60
2001    Steve Koleszar     55
2002    Ed Rothenheber     51
2003    David Finberg     60
2004    Aaron Fuegi     39
2005    David des Jardins     51
2006     Kevin Hillock     38
2007     Aaron Fuegi     45
2008    Jason Ley     37
 Laurels

Rank  Name             From  Last  Total
  1.  Aaron Fuegi       MA    07    193
  2.  Dave Finberg      MA    08    169
  3.  David des Jardins CA    08    140
  4.  Jason Ley         GA    08    111
  5.  Rich Atwater      WA    05     98
  6.  Brian Sutton      MD    07     97
  7.  Steve Koleszar    VA    08     84
  8.  Kevin Hillock     VA    06     80
  9.  Dan Strock        PA    07     72
 10.  Ed Rothenheber    MD    04     70
 11.  Joe Harrison      KY    08     48
 12.  Michael Pustilnik NY    07     47
 13.  Robert Masso      NY    08     36
 14.  David Gubbay      TX    05     36
 15.  Chuck Nail        GA    01     36
 16.  Tom Johnston      IL    06     30
 17.  Andrew Gross      WA    03     30
 18.  Arthur Wines      NJ    05     24
 19.  Kevin Quirk       FL    00     20
 20.  Russ Cleaveland   WA    04     15
 21.  Kyle Moore        WA    04     10
 22.  Justin Childs     FL    99     10

2008 Laurelists                                            Repeating Laurelists:

Robert Masso, NY
2nd

David Finberg, MA
3rd

Joe Harrison, KY
4th

David des Jardins, CA
5th

Steve Koleszar, VA
6th


1991: Steve Rareshide, VA
1992: Kevin Quirk, PA

Brian Sutton, MD
1993

Chuck Kaplan, IL
1994

Steve Koleszar, VA
1995, 2001

Ben Foy, VA
1996

Dave Finberg, MA
1997, 2003

Jung Yeah, MA
1998

David des Jardins, CA
1999, 2005

Rich Atwater, WA
2000

Ed Rothenheber, MD
2002

Aaron Fuegi, MA
2004, 2007

 

Kevin Hillock, VA
2006

 

Jason Ley, WA
2008
   

 Akihisa Tabei, Aaron Fuegi and Robert Masso roll buckets of dice.

David des Jardins (center) watches the finalists battling for wood.

A Titanic Struggle of Champions

This year there were a total 32 games played. 25 of these (including the semis and Final) were 4-player games and the other seven were 3-player games. This works out to 121 game seats, compared to 156 last year and 138 the year before. This is not a big enough drop that I want to change the format. The current system seems to be working pretty well and I am anticipating the pending release of the Valley Games edition to boost interest next year.

Steve Koleszar has a reputation in the Titan community of being Mister nice guy. This year he let me know that he wanted to try more seriously to do well and there wasn't going to be any more Mister nice guy. Later while fighting a final titan on titan battle in a preliminary match against Bruce Rae, Bruce forgot to enter his titan onto the board and Steve neglected to remind him of that until it was time to eliminate units that didn't enter. Both Steve and Bruce went on to make the semi-finals and Steve had some good chances in his, but didn't make the Final.

Bruce was not alone in making that faux pax. Mark Smith followed suit in another preliminary game. While you might do this intentionally to reduce the points your opponent will receive when you are hopeless, these two cases were inadvertent. Players seem especially prone to accidentally leaving titans out of battles. My supposition is they put the titan aside while setting up everything else, planning to come back to placing the titan safely later and then forgetting this last step. Other units don't typically get that kind of consideration. My suggestion is that when doing this, leave the titan counter on the battleboard map rather than off to the side, as it will be more noticeable there. Hopefully this topic won't occur next year.

Two of the semi-final games had upset final titan on titan battles. In the first, Akihisa Tabei had attacked Bob Masso with a significant edge. But Bob took a chance with a giant hoping that Akihisa wouldn't kill it with16 50/50 dice so that he would get two strikes with it against Akihisa's 12-die titan and then be able to throw his second giant giving him almost an average kill. This was a long shot, but things went his way and Bob advanced.

In the second, David desJardins had a significant edge over Joe Harrison. David kept his titan back while most of the rest of the material in the battle was eliminated. Then he closed his fresh titan on Joe's heavily wounded titan. Both were 12-die titans and Joe's had nine hits on it already. Fortunately for Joe, David didn't roll three hits on his first strike and Joe was able to get a total of 12 after getting two strikes with his titan. This made the result a mutual. David rolled low on the roll off and Joe advanced.

The last two players standing in the Final were Bob Masso and Jason Ley. Jason had done well in the preliminary rounds and had finished with the top seed. However Bob was doing well with a colossus in his titan stack. But before he could get a second colossus, which probably would have sealed the victory for him, Jason was able to catch him with a very unusual stack. Jason attacked with an archangel and three angels and summoned a fourth angel during the battle. Bob had a 7-die titan, colossus, two dragons, unicorn and warlock. While Bob had more meat in his stack, his titan was vulnerable and he needed to play to preserve pieces or Jason would be able to finish him off before he could recover from the battle. Jason did end up engaging the titan and killing it to win this battle and the tournament.

I received a comment regarding active players giving advice during a battle in which they were not directly involved. The comment was that since the other active players are not fighting the battle they should not be giving advice to the participants. My response is that since other players can be significantly affected by the outcome of the battle, they have a legitimate interest in it and should be able to protect that interest by giving advice. The only exception is if the person being given the advice asks the giver to stop. I can certainly see gaming groups agreeing not to do this for various reasons, but not all groups see things that way. At the WBC I prefer to not impose restrictions on the multi-player aspects of Titan that are not included in the rules (except for very extreme things, such as pre-planned collusion). Especially since players that don't like the multi-player aspects of Titan have the chance to play in the two-player event where they don't come in to play.

David Platnick was kind enough to leave a copy of the Valley Games edition of Titan out at the Titan base camp throughout the tournament. He obtained the copy at Origins for doing well at a Titan tournament sponsored by Valley Games. Hopefully by next summer the game will be released, and that should spur more interest in the game. The unit counts are the same, so using the old or new sets next year will be fine. While I haven't seen the final version of the rules for the new edition, the intent seems to be to leave them alone and only make changes for clarity. So I am not expecting any rules changes next year.

 GM     Bruno Wolff III  (14th year)   NA 
    bruno@wolff.to   NA

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