10 Years After Last Final Appearance, MossMan is Victorious

Overall turnout was down this year. The most notable absences included the crew from Jay's Basement, few who were able to make the trek to Seven Springs this year. They are uniformly strong and consistent players of El Grande. I'll have to better adjust for numbers next year; with the number of no-shows, a number of the semi-final games changed over to four players. Interestingly, all the heat games were full five-player tables.

In the first semifinal, Eric Freeman topped the board in a high-scoring game with the rest of the players in a tight group about 10 points behind. In the next semifinal, Jeff Meyer held off former champions Robb Effinger and Greg Thatcher. In the third semifinal, Micah McCormick had a comfortable win while GM Rob Flowers came in last place. In the fourth game, Tim Mossman defeated Rebecca Roppolo. In the closest semifinal, previous champion Curt Collins held off Nick Henning by 7 points.

The final commenced and among the first action cards was the 2-stack card that clears everyone's courts. Despite grumbling from the players, the GM declined a reshuffle and the players did their best to navigate this tricky opening. Both Curt and Micah went early, but declined to make use of the card, instead positioning themselves with the King and a score card for an early lead. Tim, as third player for the turn, executed the Court card. Eric, in response, placed the 4/0/0 scoreboard on Tim's home region of New Castile.

The next turn, Tim used his action to move the scoreboard off his home region to Seville, where nobody was located. Eric managed to get on the board with a Score the 5's card, while Jeff struggled to get pieces on the board. Ahead of the first scoring round, Jeff had a pile of cabs in the Castillo, and a locked down home region of Catalonia, but little else. Everyone else was a bit more evenly positioned. Jeff scored the most in the first scoring round but still trailed the pack, having missed out on earlier scoring opportunities. Curt led by one point over Tim.

The big swing of the game occurred during Turn 5 when a score the firsts card came up. Jeff secured first place with a power card of 12 with Tim was next in player order. Jeff desperately needed to pull back into the race even though it meant cooperating with Tim, who had a decent board position. The play happened with Jeff netting 18 points, nearly doubling his score, while Tim got 20 points. This pulled Jeff into second place but now Tim had a 13 point lead.

Then the game became a question of how much Tim could be pulled back. In the next couple of rounds the group did a decent job of it. During the second scoring round, Tim's board position had deteriorated enough that he scored no first place's and only got half the score of the other players, who were all about even. During the Castillo drop, three of the five players went to Tim's home region resulting in a pileup of 24 pieces from four different players, with Tim tied for third place there. This still left Tim with a ten-point lead over Jeff and Curt.

During Turn 7, both Tim and Jeff snagged some small scores with action cards, while others positioned themselves. No other massive scores changed the balance. Several times Curt had to burn scoring cards that were disadvantageous to his position. With Tim still in a lead, the focus was shifting over to a fight for second place. Jeff was still in second place with Curt a bit further back followed by Eric and Micah at the back. Eric had been fighting hard to get pieces on the board while Micah, Jeff, and Curt had substantial forces in the Castillo. During the final scoring round Tim again had the lowest score but managed to maintain his lead for a win by seven points. Eric managed the best score with twenty-five points to sneak past Jeff by a single point and Curt one behind Jeff.

Tim has been a regular entrant in the El Grande tournament but had only made it to the final table once before back in 2008. Congratulations on making it all the way to the top!