Robert St. Pierre and Canadian Sara VanderWal	Canadians on WBC holiday: Anna Kiefte and Romain Jacques
Peter Staab takes a break from Stone Age with Robert Davidson.	GM Jason Levine and his three finalists.

Concordia made a nice debut as a WBC tournament. It was one of Rio Grande's five new game entries, having been released at Essen in 2013. 47 players combined their curiosity with a competitive streak to give it a try. Mac Gerdts design is one of his best and it showed with impressive attendance for a new trial event.

13 of those 47 made their way to the semifinal round. Your happy GM was pleased to be one of those so blessed. But there our happy story ends as he was narrowly defeated by Rob Kircher. So although your happy GM didn't make the Finals, he did acquire a few laurels for his 6th place finish.

Hank Griffin and Duncan McGregor joined Rob as the other finalists. Duncan entered the event with more than just passing curiosity as he had picked Concordia as his team game, indicating some prior experience - and with that he became the favorite in this first ever CNC Final. Each finalist used different strategies. Rob acquired the following cards: smith, architects, prefect, diplomat and colonists. He went heavy with tools and colonists as his predominant gameplay. By endgame he had only two colonists left.

Hank concentrated on building more cities while also generating colonists. This strategy left him betwixt and between the others who focused more on one aspect of scoring.

Duncan used a quick city building strategy. His cards were: mason and farmer minervas (which he took with his first senator), consul, weaver, colonist, architect, He ended the game with three colonists remaining. More importantly though, Duncan was able to build all 15 of his cities using the Minerva cards he bought and was able to end the game on city buildings to get that 7-point bonus. After pulling the minervas on his first purchase, he was able to build both brick and food cities really quickly as they only take more brick and food to build them. By the end of the game he had seven brick cities, five food cities, two wine and one cloth city. By collecting so much brick and food it led to him being able to build lots of cities and get them out quickly on the board. This was by far a runaway strategy and led to his high score even though all three players had 13 cards for scoring. Duncan showed that putting a little bit of thought into developing a new strategy will pay off when a game hasn't been mastered by all the players yet. Now that he has shown what a very good strategy will do, it will be interesting to see if someone can beat it next year or if Duncan can repeat as champion in 2015.

That bonus wouldn't make a difference in the long run as Duncan scored 132 to Rob's 118 and Hank's 106 to become the first champion of Concordia . He also led his Canadian team to a 6th place finish in their first Team Tournament despite being a 223-1 underdog.