World Boardgaming Championships, Baltimore
Greetings one and all from the world boardgaming championships in Baltimore, Maryland. As some of you are aware, I have a tradition of coming down here every year, with a roommate of mine from McGill, Nick Benedict.
Another tradition of ours regarding WBC is the food: We aim to prepare all the food we eat each year in our room. In addition, this food has to fit the theme that we’ve decided on for the year. Further, the food is ideally prepared with complicated, ideally single purpose appliances. For example, three years ago we chose a theme of “sushi,” so most of the food we ate was sushi prepared in our room, using the rice steamer, bamboo mat etc. that we’d brought with us. Other appliances have included an electric sandwich maker, a hotplate and frying pan (for omlettes), and a waffle iron.
This year’s theme is grilled foods. Since both of us were flying into Baltimore (Nick used to live nearish, and I drove down from New Jersey last year) we couldn’t bring much with us. Thus we had to go and pick up a charcoal grill at the Wal Mart near our hotel. I was astonished to discover that it cost less than $10US.
We also needed to go and buy food. To get a weeks worth of food back to our room, we requested that we be allowed to borrow a shopping cart. To our great consternation, we were “pulled over” by a Maryland State Trooper as we were pulling (or rather pushing) into the hotel driveway. Thankfully he believed that we had permission to borrow the cart and let us continue on our way after some stern words about being sure to return it.
I suppose technically we aren’t following our in-room-cooking rule quite perfectly, since we’re cooking on the little patio just outside our room, but our room prepared food includes:
Grilled fish and veggie burgers.
Corn on the cob (soaked in water, then cooked on the grill.)
Grilled vegetables.
Perogies
And so on… Doing all this (and disposing of the remains) makes a bit of a mess of the room, so we always need to keep the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, and spend a few hours on the last day tidying up the room so that it’s fit to be tidied by the actual cleaning staff.
As for the actual gaming, it hasn’t been going spectacularly well. After two games of Kremlin, and one of Britannia (I finished first and fifth in these events respectively last year) I’ve yet to get a win. The other games I’ve tried have been similarly disappointing.
A few days later…
Things have improved a little since my last report. In terms of actually winning things, it’s only been a marginal improvement. I managed to win a Kremlin heat, and, if I do say so myself, it was a brilliant victory. (for those of you unfamiliar with/uninterested in Kremlin, skip to the next paragraph.) It was a 6 player game, where I was playing a long-game strategy, and it seemed no one was going to get 3 waves. Through trickery, clever use of cards, and smart work in the add influence phase, I managed to end up with a 10+ Party Chief, a 10+ KGB head, a 7 Foreign minister and an 8 Defence minister. Though the party chief was too old to get out of bed and wave reliably, he was young enough to sit in the Sanitorium for the last three turns and wait for the game to end. In fact, with the use of the “treatment by a specialist” card, the party chief took over the post at 81 with 2 crosses on him, and ended the game in perfect health at 84.
I haven’t managed to win a game of Britannia, but have had a lot of fun playing in the tournament. In addition, this year the developer of the game came to WBC. Earlier today, I had the good fortune to playtest Britannia 2.0, a revision of the game he’s working on to improve its balance, historical accuracy and playability with 2 players. (I actually managed to win that one too!)
Cooking continues to be a lot of fun, but we still haven’t had the shrimp skewers (!) or salmon steaks (!!) They’ve been stored in our bathtub on ice in the meantime.
Anyhow, this’ll probably be the last I get to write from WBC, so I’ll conclude by saying it’s been great fun coming here, playing games, using the hotel room in ways that the management would probably not expect and getting to hang around with Nick again.
Talk to you from Vancouver!
Here’s a few photos of WBC, just to give you a general flavour:
The Hotel Room (before)
The Hotel Room (with shopping cart)
The Hotel Bathroom (after)
The Barbecue with grilled vegetables
One of the two big gaming halls at WEBC
Playing Britannia (clockwise from Left, Richard Jones, Lewis Pulsipher (the inventor of Britannia, who’s just watching,) David Yoon, Ewan McNay. (David and Ewan were two of this year’s Britannia finalists)
Tags: North America
Llew
August 10th, 2004 at 1:22 pm
Since the main theme of this entry was food, do you think you couldsend me your okra soup recipe when you have the time? I had a craving for it the other day. I hope you are still having fun Mr. Former world Champion
August 11th, 2004 at 2:18 pm
Ouch! Well, I didn’t win anything this year either. Advance agreement to kill Nick next year?
I love the bathroom pic. I do wonder how you managed for personal hygiene… 😉
August 12th, 2004 at 9:43 am
Hmmmmm, food and fun…have you tried doing ribs on this little makeshift kitchen you have? Let me know, Llew, if it’s successfull…I’ve been trying to find a way to cook ribs while on the road…
Cheers,
Kdog