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Andy Latto, Lynda Shea, Eic Freeman
and Tom McCorry ride camels. |
GM Jeff Mullet oversees his finalists. |
While the Cat's Away ...
Last year, we barely had enough games for everyone. Only after
a few people went back to their rooms to get their copies, were
we able to let everyone play. Thankfully, the lesson was apparently
learned and we actually had more games than were needed this
year. Your GM thanks you! That definitely cuts down on the stress
level. It also helped - in a bad way - that attendance was the
lowest ever for this event ... less players means less games
needed. How much of that is attributable to the "newness"
wearing off or the lack of a demo is anyone's guess. However,
the fact that we've failed to have a single multi-year laurelist
in three tournaments suggests that the game is not drawing back
the same players for repeat plays. Perhaps a game this short
really needs a demo session and cannot rely on experienced players
only to survive the WBC numbers game. To that end, we really
need more GMs to step forward and champion a game rather then
rely on the same few running multiple events if games like Yspahan
are to prosper at WBC.
There basically have been two strategies employed in this game.
About half the players concentrate on getting all of their buildings
early and placing as many cubes in the shops as they can to score
points. The other half have concentrated more on moving the Supervisor
and using the Caravanserai to hoard and use cards, while placing
as many of their cubes as possible in the caravan.
This year, the vast majority of winners used the Supervisor/Caravanserai
combo to achieve their victory.
We had nine winners return for the sem-finals, so we contested
three boards with Alfred Smith, Andy Latto and Christopher Yaure
moving on to the Final. Chris and Andy battled it out for Caravanserai
supremacy while Alfred had a bit of bad luck and slowly fell
behind. In the end, Andy topped Chris for the win. The scores
were Alfred, 70 points, Chris 89 and Andy 95. The 2009 champion,
Cally Perry, just happens to be Andy's girlfriend. Sadly, Cally
couldn't make it to WBC this year so Andy usurped her title.
Hopefully, next year they can both attend, so that we can find
out for sure which one is the best Yspahan player.
Next year Bob Wicks has volunteered to take over the GM duties
for Yspahan.
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