Goddard Captures Thurn & Taxis Title!

Scores in the Heats ranged from a high of 33, scored by Cary Morris in the third Heat, to a single negative score of -2 scored in the first Heat. Cary's score of 33 was also the biggest winning margin, with second place 15 points behind with 18. In contrast, the closest game occurred in the first Heat. Andrew Martin and Chris Houle both scored 19 with Andrew taking the win on tie-breakers. But while ties are not uncommon in this game, there were three other ties in the Heats. What set this game apart was that Alex Bove and John Towne both scored 18, so that only a single point separated first and fourth places!

In the Elimination rounds, players expressed a strong preference for bidding for seat order after seeing the initial six cards, but players also seemed to feel that the initial seat order makes very little difference. In the 5 Quarterfinal games, there was one bid of half a point and 19 zero bids! The Semifinal saw only slightly more bidding, with two bids of 1, both for first seat, 2 bids of 0.5, one for fourth and one for second, and 14 zero bids. In the Final, Alexander Goddard bid 1.5 to go first and the other seats were all taken by 0 bids.

The results this year were pretty balanced as to which seat did best, with a slight bias towards 4th seat. 25.5% of games were won by first seat, 21.6% by second seat, 19.6% by third seat, and exactly a third of the games were won by fourth seat.

Semifinal

In one of the Semifinal games. all three players started their first route in Hohenzoller. With everyone competing for the same cards, there weren't enough to go around. Kyle Smith voluntarily abandoned his route to seek a less crowded portion of the map, but it didn't help; Robert St. Pierre edged out Andrew Menard for the win.

In another Semifinal, the cards on the board were to no-one's liking, with all four players drawing from the top of the deck in Turn 1. This game saw even more competition for Pilsen and Lodz than is usual, with no-one in Lodz two-thirds of the way through the game. After the game concluded, the reason for the struggle to find Pilsen came to light, the deck was missing a card, and there were only 2 Pilsens cards instead of three in the deck! Players, please make sure your deck has 66 cards before starting the game!

In another Semifinal, Antony Saccenti administrated early, didn't find an adjacent card, and crashed his first route. He later voluntarily abandoned another route. This left him 2 points behind the winner Itamar Hochboim in a remarkably close game, with only 2 points separating first and fourth.

Final

The Final saw 4 players who had never been in the Final before, In fact none of the 6 laurelists this year had earned laurels in Thurn and Taxis before, something which has never happened since the event's inception in 2006.

The initial deal in the Final saw both Innsbruck and Sigmarinen available at the start. Alexander Goddard thought this was worth a bid of 1.5 points to go first. Knowing that these cards would not remain on the board for long, no-one else thought it worth bidding any points for position, with Robert St. Pierre choosing fourth seat, Thomas Lind sitting third, and Itamar Hochboim sitting second, all for bids of 0.

Alexander took the risk of taking both Innsbruck and Sigmarinen on turn 1, which paid off when Zurich was available on his second turn. He went on from there to play a near-perfect game. He only used the administrator twice in the entire game, and the only time in the early game succeeded in securing Lodz. This let him score the world traveler bonus first. He lagged slightly behind Itamar in the race for carriages, but when Itamar played a full 6-length route for the 6 carriage, Alexander cartwright for his 6 to catch up in the race. When Alexander placed 4 houses in his final turn to gain the Bavaria chit, a 7 carriage, and the point for triggering the endgame, the result was clear. Even after deducting his 1.5 point bid, Alexander was an impressive 6.5 points ahead of Thomas.