I got soundly beat by @Benkyo . I made it to turn 9 as USA, but by that time I needed to be dealt both Aldrich Ames and Asia Scoring to have a chance of making it to the end.
Despite a very significant 10 points for Africa scoring in turn 7 going my way (he knew my whole hand except that card, so it wouldn’t have seemed at all likely), I was unable to even get into a plus score ever. I felt like I had great cards in the first couple of turns, but still arrived in the Mid war at -4 or so. I had one nasty bit of bad luck with my nuclear subs not firing, which was costly at the start of the Mid War, but I think overall it evened out, as it tends to.
I tried to do justice to Ben’s skill by keeping track of the cards and analysing the options carefully. I think I didn’t play too badly, but it was a bit too stressful for me, and I ended up being rather relieved to finish. Against anyone with a rating below about 1700 I’ll switch back to my normal practice of winging it.
Cheers! Was a very tense, madcap game. Despite the score going my way, the board was yours, and it looked bad for me for at least the first half of the game.
I think the highlight for me was looking at a bad board state on Turn 5, requiring 3 OPs to Space, and being dealt a hand including Voice of America, Colonial Rear guards, Nixon Plays the China Card, OAS Founded, Puppet Governments, and S America Scoring, and the cherry on top was seeing your Missile Envy headline.
Speaking of which, I think I only got 1 VP from MilOps all game! In Turn 8!
C America USSR control in the face of Nuclear Subs was mad, and lategame Africa US control even after T3 Decolonization was mad too.
I only realised afterwards just how risky it is to headline Missile Envy after Yuri Gagarin is first into orbit. So that was a bit of luck. I got the China Card out of that turn, which was very nice, but in the end no points sadly. I now realise that part of the reason your turn 7 hand was so terrible was that you’d been hoarding OAS and Puppet Governments for ages. My sad moment was headlining CIA in turn 8 to see a hand with something like 24 ops in it plus the China Card and no benefits to the US (including The Iron Lady, which is sort of galling). At that point I kind of knew there was nothing much I could do. I had a good hand in turn 9 but couldn’t use it.
Not even that, because I did a coup on the last round using Portuguese Empire Crumbles, specifically to prevent that 1 point. But you got 2 in turn 3 I reckon.
Can you link the tournament page in the first post? Also, is there some reason it seems to briefly show matchups, then switch to standings with no way to see matchups that I can find?
I can’t update the original post, but it should be visible under the arrow next to the persons who commented the most, just beneath the reply-button to my original post. Clicking on that gives you a overview of ‘popular links’ of which it should be the top one.
Regarding the matchups. It sometimes is a bit buggy where it only shows the matchups of round 4&5 and you can’t scroll up, but I can see it fine when I refresh the page. Doesn’t that work either?
Otherwise, I can just screenshot and post them here.
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