war of the ring  

Updated 11/26/2008

Middle Earth Pre-Con
2008 WBC Report  

 2009 Status: pending 2008 GM commitment

Chris Trimmer, TX

2008 Champion

Offsite Links

 

Event History
2006    Phil Rennert     21
2007     Kevin Wojtaszczyk     26
2008     Chris Trimmer     28
 Laurels

Rank  Name              From  Last  Total
  1.  Chris Trimmer      TX    08     58
  2.  Kevin Wojtaszczyk  NY    08     44
  3.  Phil Rennert       MD    06     30
  4.  Jason Levine       NY    08     24
  5.  George Young       VT    07     24
  6.  Nick Anner         NY    07     17
  7.  Lyman Moquin       DC    08     16
  8.  Andy Latto         MA    07     16
  9.  Jacob Hebner       CO    08     12
 10.  Chris Yaure        PA    07     12
 11.  David Pack         CO    06     12
 12.  John Pack          CO    08      8
 13.  Dick Jarvinen      OR    06      6
 14.  Jim Doughan        PA    07      4
 15.  Mary Ellen Powers  VA    06      3

2008 Laurelists                                                Repeating Laurelists:

Jason Levine, NY
2nd

Lyman Moquin, DC
3rd

Jacob Hebner, CO
4th

John Pack, CO
5th

Kevin Wojtaszczyk, NY
6th


Past Winners

Phil Rennert, MD
2006

Kevin Wojtaszczyk, NY
2007

Chris Trimmer, TX
2008

Newsflash! That's Andy Latto - he of the four plaques - in an event in which he didn't even place. Three rounds and he got squat. Maybe there is hope for us mere mortals after all.

Chris Trimmer and Jason Levine vie for the shield as GM Kevin Wojtaszczyk observes. Riku Reikkinen - the Nest Slayer - watches after going four rounds with nary a laurel. His best days lie ahead.

Middle Earth Remains in the Ascension

The One Ring was at the cusp of Mount Doom, when the might of Chris Trimmer's Sauron armies dominated Middle Earth. Poor Sam and Frodo were captured which ended the Middle Earth Pre-Con with Sauron's forces once again victorious against the Free Peoples!

Congratulations to everyone who participated and made the Middle Earth Pre-Con another successful tournament with a lot of fun competitive play. The change in days/times to begin on Saturday afternoon boosted the WOR numbers to a record 28 players. Forty games were played. 11 used the basic game rules and 29 were played with the added expansion rules. The Dwarven Rings bidding seemed to balance the game with the majority of the bids giving the Free Peoples from 1-5 rings. (Four games had 1-2 rings given to the SP player.) For the basic game, there were six Sauron wins (four military/two corruption) and five Free Peoples wins (three dunks/two military). On the expansion side, there were 16 Sauron wins (11 military/five corruption) and 13 Free People's wins (nine dunks/ four military). A few new players joined the battle for Middle Earth along with a number of past participants. After learning the game last year, Jason Levine built on his experience and rode a Free People's strategy all the way to the Final. Chris Trimmer's multi-focused Sauron strategy was the only one to stop Jason's path to victory. In the Final Strider fell to a random casualty and the Balrog got a couple bonus hunt tile pulls as Jason was revealed at 3 and chose to still run the Moria gauntlet. On the FP bonus side, a bit later the Smeagol tile was drawn back to back in successful hunts and, in Mordor, Shelob came up a house spider '1'. In the end though, Frodo's 10 corruption upon entering Mordor made it a slow go. Jason did manage to avoid a corruption loss only to have Chris's Sauron forces dominate Middle Earth while Frodo cautiously navigated Mordor.

Some highlights: Christopher Yaure gets a nod for Musterings of a Long-planned War, being involved in two epic length games, 16 and 17 turns respectively, which each pushed the 4-hour session limits. Most games fell in the 9-14 turn range and finished in three hours or less. John Pack was a Ranger of the North, with his Northern army taking heavy losses on a Dol Guldur siege, but still managing to oust the Orcs for a Moria/Dol Guldur FP Military victory. Sean Vassey waged some Rohan guerilla warfare after losing Aragorn and Boromir in a Minas Tirth siege. Ahmet finally ousted the Rohan militants for an SP military victory. Eric Brosius raced to a hidden 5 move FSP start only to see the Hunt tiles turn and corrupt Frodo. Chris Trimmer needed an Isildur's Bane 3 tile pull plus a double Eye draw (one skipped with Mithil Coat) to seal the Fellowship's path to the dark side in Mordor in Round 3 to claim his spot in the final four over the GM. There were a number of action dice quirks noted in the game logs from too many FP musters which caused an Elvish lead military victory to rolling only Wills and Events and the always present too many/few Eyes/Character dice at the most inopportune times. Fortunately some of those poor action dice rolls were mitigated via Dwarven ring use!

I plan on continuing the Middle Earth pre-con in 2009 and hope to see everyone back again, along with new faces to challenge Mordor's might. I plan to require use of the expansion additions since I found the majority of players knew the expansion rules. I will also be reviewing the expansion rules in the demo to get everyone up to speed. Lastly, after talking to a number of players, I heard a mix of comments on the day/time of the Pre-con. Some want it moved to Mon/Tues while others liked the Sat/Sun so they could participate in some of the other Pre-Con events afterwards. If you have any ideas/concerns, feel free to email me before the end of the year so I can have all the info prior to my decisions for the 2009 event write-up.

Thanks again for participating!

 GM     Kevin Wojtaszczyk (1st Year)  135 Siebert Rd, Lancaster, NY 14086  
    kwojtasz@gmail.com   NA

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