Still Drawing Players!

The tournament drew 28 players, which is the third time in the last four years it got that many. Considering this was the first WBC after two years of cancellations, I consider that pretty good.

With 28 players, seven pods of four players were created, with everybody playing each other within the pod once. The seven winners of the pods would advance, plus one second place finisher from all the pods, based on the tiebreaker of most flags won in their three games. We used the battle of Po River as was done last time. That seems to work well as I didn’t see any bids of a flag for one side or the other and the won-loss was pretty even. The winners of their pods were Jon Manley, Jr., Bill Herbst, Geoff Heintzelman, Sean Druelinger, John Shiba Jr., Michael Sosa and Joe Harrison. The wild card was taken by Alex Slate.

Those eight advanced to the single elimination quarterfinal in which you play the same person in the battle of Caralis, switching sides after the first game. The winners in this round were Joe Harrison, Bill Herbst, Geoff Heintzelman and John Shiba. They advanced to the semifinal for the battle of Raphia.

In the semifinals Geoff met John. This battle goes to eight flags, and in the first game it was close at 5-5. Then Geoff as the Seleucids and sensing he was in trouble sent out a weakened medium cavalry unit, which proceeded to kill off a heavy cavalry unit, then made the 1 in 6 die roll to kill the leader, then advanced to attack a medium infantry and finished that unit off also. And suddenly the game was over. John as the Seleucids won the second game but Goeff kept it close enough to advance to the final. In the other semifinal, Joe won two close games over Bill to move on.

In the final, the first game was Geoff as Rome and Joe as Carthage in the battle of Zama. I’ve played Zama quite a lot over the years and I consider it to be about 55-45 in the Romans favor. One important thing the Carthage player needs to decide is whether to immediately charge with the elephants, or get them out of range of the annoying enemy light troops with sharp pointy spears. Joe did the expected by screening his elephants, but Geoff was able to lead a big push in the middle which met with a lot of success. Joe tried to salvage the middle, but when the dust settled Geoff had an 8-3 victory in the first game. That’s a tough score to beat in a second game with two experienced opponents and Joe did his best but Geoff was able to keep it close for the tournament victory.

I’ll make the after-tournament usual request: Please bring a copy of the game! This year there was just enough, in part because I was able to bring a couple of extra copies from various sources. Hope to see you next year!