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Phil Rennert on his quest in the Holy
Land. |
Michael Dauer and Adam Meldrom go
crusading. |
Blockheads to the Holy Land
This year's tournament used the same format of Single Elimination
with an optional Mulligan round. The Mulligan round
began on Friday night at with more experienced players matched
with the newcomers. It was a great turnout and we
had an upset or two of experienced players by new faces.
Saturday morning began the Single elimination portion of the
tournament in earnest. Newcomer Phil Rennert began
his run to the wood after dispensing with the Mulligan round. Phil
is a great gamer who picked up Crusader Rex very quickly. He
had to run a gauntlet consisting of three of the top six players
in last year's tournament who all gave him close games. Fred
Bauer almost beat him with a clever use of the assassin's card. Scott
Moll drew the semi-final out to the final die roll of the last
turn.
His opponent for the Final was Michael Dauer of Texas who
played the Franks. The Saracens took Antioch early
by focusing on the northern route.but took a lot of losses in
the process; three emirs were placed in the dead pile. On
the third turn, the French landed and the Saracens assaulted
Tripoli, taking heavy losses. But the Franks lost five of the
military orders and one pilgrim. Richard the Lionheart
and the rest of the English would arrive late in the fourth turn. It
was too late to prevent the fall of Tripoli.
The fifth turn proved crucial. The Germans arrived
and joined the English as they focused on Antioch. A
large battle ensued and the second round proved disastrous
as the Knights Charge caused eight self-inflicted hits. This
sealed the Saracen's victory as Phil regrouped his forces to
the north to deal with the northern threat.
The Saracens took the majority of games which is usually the
case when you have a many newcomers as the Franks have the higher
learning curve. There was one game that saw a sweep
of the board as all seven cities fell. The move to
later in the week proved a successful scheduling maneuver and
we look forward to more successful crusading in 2010.
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