After 2 years without a tournament the Lion in Winter was on the prowl again in 2022. 24 players showed up for 6 rounds. Although the field overall was smaller the chance to bump into other strong players made for a competitive race to the top. Randy Buehler won the title for the second time. Below is an account of his Journey to the victory.
Lion in Winter was a success for me long before I made the final table, much less won it. Just getting to catch up with old friends and play board games was a huge win after a couple of years without it. That said, I’m sure I’m not the only one who browses Derek’s website from time to time to look into the history of this awesome event, and so I am happy to add my perspective in the form of a “tournament report” from the 2022 installment.
With 11 games for bid each round and only 6 of them needed, this seemed like an event where getting into the right game was going to be a bit harder than normal. Who knows if the game you like is even going to fire! I looked at the game list in the week leading up to the event and took stock of what games I felt good about playing in each round. There were a couple where there were only 1-2 that I even knew reasonably well, but in round 1 I had played every single game on the list at least 20 times except for 1 (Patchwork) and that was one I knew I could practice for pretty easily via BoardGameArena.
So I decided round 1 was when I was going to bank enough points that I could overbid on everything I wanted in the other 5 rounds. I submitted my round 1 bid form and the next day got exactly the text from Derek that I was expecting: “Did you really bid 3 total points on round 1 or did something go wrong with the form?” Yep, I explained my plan to him, though rather than just bid all zeroes I figured it was worth bidding 2 and then 1 on my best games, just so I wouldn’t have to roll if they fired but had an open seat.
Well my top choice (Year of the Dragon) didn’t fire, and my 2nd choice (Castles of Mad King Ludwig) was so popular it was not only a carry-over game but also eligible to be played at the final table. So dice rolling it was! The two open games were Splendor and Vegas Showdown, and I wound up at a pretty tough Vegas table. Had I bid even a single point more this round it would have been to add Vegas to my list, so this was a very reasonable place for me to wind up, though having to play it against Robb Effinger, Steve LeWinter, and Adam Blum was definitely less than ideal.
4-player Vegas Showdown can be pretty tight on money, especially early. I got to make the $9 bid on slots, which is normally the right price but in 4-player I think the early ones are supposed to go for $12. Do I get a bargain or does everyone know what’s up? Unsurprisingly, they knew ... which led to me making the other bid that I only make in 4-player Vegas: $25 Sports Book. I was also able to get a cheap early High Roller’s Room so once I eventually found a Table Games my money was in great shape. I focused on population for a while and basically just snowballed my economy with brute force buys (two Buffets, etc.).
All these big buildings with big income and population made me feel great about my end game points, and I seemed to be mostly keeping in touch with the leaders on mid-game points so I was optimistic and just wanted the game to end. It lasted a bit longer than I wanted, with me eventually ending it myself by filling my board before any of the piles actually went out. Those last few turns let Robb get a Theater, though, and he had a bunch of diamonds on his board. When the dust settled from counting up victory points, Robb had even more diamonds than I realized and won pretty comfortably. I was second, but only by 1 point over Adam, while Steve’s tournament got off to a rough start with a last place finish.
It turns out this was the only game Steve lost. He rattled off 5 straight wins after this and managed to come all the way back to make the final table despite picking up only 1 point in round 1. Spoiler alert, Robb also made the final table (and with the best record going in). There can’t be many years where 3 people played round 1 together and then all finished in the top 4. Tough table!
From my perspective, this was very much mission accomplished. I spent zero points and survived the die roll with a second-place finish.
For round 2 I didn’t really want to fight the sharks at Agricola, especially since I haven’t played much of it during the pandemic. I also soured on Terraforming Mars a while ago (after being an early evangelist and adding it to this event the last time I won). There were really only two games I felt good about and while I have WBC wood from Castles of Mad King Ludwig it can be pretty random sometimes (depending on the seating order). I decided I wanted to try my luck at Castles of Burgundy. I’ve played a bunch of it async in recent years and done pretty well, plus I didn’t think any of the out-of-towners would bid on it. I knew it was popular locally (which is part of why I ran my round 1 gambit – I expect to need to bid 21+ just to get in!) and I was intrigued by finding out how my Castles game measured up with a crowd I hadn’t played much with before.
The bids that got in were 22, 22, 20, and 20 and it was popular enough to be a carry-over, though it missed being a final table game by just one third of one point. Apparently I was supposed to bid 23! I would be playing against Heather Dent, Tobiah Bingham, and Austin Rathbone.
I haven’t done bidding for turn order in this game before, but it definitely has a first player advantage in my opinion, so I was glad to see we were doing it. I got first for 4 victory points and felt like I got away with something. I guess you don’t always get dice that let you grab early mines, but you almost always get one and the starts where you get two are super powerful.
First player also got first pick of what mat to play on. The one broken board (#8, which has a 6-pasture) was banned, of course, but other than that one I’m under the impression that the other boards are all generally pretty fair. They’re certainly different (one has a bunch of small sections you need to close early, one has all 6 science together, one has all 6 boats together, etc.) but I really like to have a big pasture where I collect one type of animal so I chose to play on the base/beginner board. It’s got a central castle and a 5-pasture and has always felt reasonable to me when I’ve played on it. Maybe I’m wrong and one of the advanced boards is actually better but, if so, I don’t know which one it is.
The game opened with me rolling a 4 and a 5 and I wind-mill slammed both opening mines without even needing to spend a worker. Better lucky than good I suppose (though I did bid points for the right to get to maybe roll lucky dice). I hung around first in turn order long enough to get to buy the awesome yellow tile that gives 3 points per different good you sell at the beginning of age 2. Then was mostly second, though Austin jumped ahead of me for 2-3 rolls and thoroughly destroyed every short-term plan I had at that time. (I had made a judgment call to not place a boat at the end of the previous age too, so I could have played around it.) Toward the end of the game everything just kind of worked out great for me though. I made sheep a priority and never gave anyone the chance to deny them to me, so my mono-sheep 5-pasture paid off for all the points I was hoping. I also got to finish off a couple of colors right before other people and my dice generally cooperated with what I wanted to do. I wound up covering every hex on my board except for 5 of the 6 yellows. In the end it was a comfortable 15-ish point win for me while there was only one point separating 2nd from 4th (!).
I felt good going into round 3 as Great Western Trail is a game I am both good at and also enjoy. I didn’t bid enough points to get to play it in 2019, but this time around my round 1 gambit should make sure I bid enough ... except it didn’t fire! What the hell?! It was almost a carry-over game in 2019, but looking at Derek’s bid sheet for 2022 it wasn’t even particularly close to firing (and revisiting 2019 it looks like only 1 of the people who played it then was in attendance this year). Oh well. Tzolk’in was my second choice, but it didn’t fire either. I had success in that game at WBC 5+ years ago, but haven’t played it in a while and talking to the others who bid on it I’m probably happy it didn’t fire.
Third choice Amun Re (the only other game I had any interest in playing this round) it is, and it would be a second game in a row with both Heather and Tobiah. This time Chris McCurry rounded out the table. Age 1 I didn’t do anything exciting, and I never found any point cards, but what I did do was accumulate money. I got an early camel territory and stole from the offering all 3 rounds to keep it turned on and try to deny money to the farmers. My three territories were built up evenly, but the rest of the board was nicely chaotic: two territories had a double pyramid and two didn’t have one at all. This meant the people who hit most pyramids on a side were ahead of me going into age 2 (as was the guy with two temples), but I felt well-positioned to buy the juicy territories.
Unfortunately for me the double-pyramid territories came out together, and not until the final round. The order of territories also meant I could only complete one point card as well (point cards are just a lot harder in 4-player games where 3 territories aren’t used). As we went into round 6 bidding I was still sitting on my giant wad of cash and I had to try to both win one of the double-pyramid territories and then also buy enough pyramids to win most on both sides. I would clearly need to win the last offering (and take 3 bricks as my prizes) to pull this off so the trickiest bit was figuring out how much I could spend on pyramids and how much to save for the offering. I wound up spending $10 for 4 bricks (plus using a card for essentially 5 bricks) and then sacrificing $12. This was the wrong answer. It turns out I could have won the offering at $7 and I don’t count everyone else’s money but I still think I could/should have just intuited that $7 would be enough. If I had spent $15 then I could have had most pyramids locked up mathematically, but the way I played it gave Tobiah the ability to screw me if he wanted to. Basically, he got two presents from being 2nd in the offering and he could tie me with one brick (which means we would both get the massive 5 points for most pyramids on that side). Would he use his 2nd present to advance his own game in some way or would he use it to give me -5? He drew a card, huzzah! Meanwhile the card he drew helped him win money at the end and gave him second place, just behind me in first. We tried working out what would have happened if he had instead given me the -5 and it was complicated, because the money race was super close, but our best guess is that Heather would have won the game instead of either of us! (Because she would have won the money race.)
I bid 22 to play Agricola in Round 4, but the four seats went for 25, 25, 24, and 24. Looks like it had 2.5 times more points bid on it than any other game this round. (Another interesting bid note: Scythe was the carry-over game but no one bid on it. Two unique bids, the highest of which was a 3 for the second lowest weighted score of the entire weekend.) Clans of Caledonia was actually my first-choice game for the round, since I think I’ve played it a good bit more than anyone else in the room, but I didn’t actually expect it to fire and I was right. Concordia is my next best game this round, but I can never beat Robb Effinger in it so I thought I would zag and go play Seven Wonders Duel instead, which I’ve been enjoying on BoardGameArena.com. Welp, somehow ran into Robb *there* and apparently I can’t beat him at that game either. I denied him the military victory he was going for and I’m pretty sure I was ahead by a fair number of points going into Age 3, but his economy was better than mine and he set up the parity such that he got all the good cards down the stretch and beat me despite telling me the whole time that he thought I had it. Throw in a close loss on points to Ian (where he managed to acquire every single yellow card that appeared in Age 1 or Age 2) and I only managed 4 points this round. (I did at least win the tiebreaker to claim 2nd place in a 3-way tie at 1-2.)
Going into round 5 I needed to put up back-to-back wins to make the final table, but I wasn’t really thinking about that. I was just happy to be spending the day playing games. Egizia is my best round 5 game, but there were a bunch that I felt somewhere between competent and decent at so I only bid 17 of my remaining 41 points. I knew everyone would spend all their points on the final round and I wanted to be able to make bids in the 20’s. Everything worked out and Egizia fired comfortably with me as the second highest of the four who got to play it.
The board for the opening age was really interesting, with a lot of great cards available, and high on the river too. We bid victory points for initial turn order and I wound up successfully winning the first bid marker for I think it was 5 points (might have been 6). This was a board where I wanted to go early, but it didn’t necessarily have to be first, though first is obviously best. I wound up opening with the Sphinx and hoping I would then get to draft the +2 sphinx cards card that was 2-3 spots below it with my second action. This would normally be pretty risky as that’s the best card in the game, but the 2nd best card in the game (+1 crew strength per turn) was also available just beyond the sphinx, and there were also several quarries and two fields in the mix as well. So if one person skips the whole upper section, things are fine. Having skipped the sphinx they probably want the strength card anyway, and even if they take the sphinx card I still get a fine consolation prize. Brooke, drafting second, did skip beyond the sphinx, and then took the strength card like I thought / hoped she would. Austin and Tobiah chose slower routes, justifiably given how much good stuff there was. I managed to snag a small quarry in addition to the sphinx card and felt great about my first turn. I also managed to starve myself for -6 victory points (by growing my crew but not acquiring any food), which would ensure that I got to bid first in the second age as well. This was a bit more aggressive that I wanted (-4 would have been plenty), but these things happen.
Age 2 let me get some food (though I was never exactly comfortable and Austin managed to starve a couple of us and cost us some points one round). The end of Age 2 was pretty interesting in that I had to decide whether to build at a 3rd site (which gives nice bonus points) or decline in order to improve my draft position by one (2nd versus 3rd was at stake). I declined, but what I didn’t notice is that this let Brooke swoop in with her boat that was speculating, and build at her 3rd site for a giant bump of victory points that staked her to a sizable early lead. Being just barely in 1st is bad in this game (because it hurts your draft order), but being in first by a lot and just grabbing every point you can while others try to sandbag for position is a totally viable route to victory.
Things felt pretty close in the next few ages as I steadily acquired sphinx cards and did my best to complete them. My opening card was the 9-pointer for the pyramid getting completed so that was my focus when building, and I was getting enough help that it seemed likely to happen. In the final age I got my hands on the card that lets you build first everywhere you have a ship. Since it creates a 4th spot for you to build in, this is one of my favorite cards in the game because it lets you go slowly and accumulate lots of value while everyone else races to get into those precious build spots, and then it also lets you plan perfectly (since you build first). I watched as the last brown field went to someone who didn’t already have one, so my most brown fields sphinx card fired as well. Everything worked out about as well as it could, and I wound up around 105 points (after paying for my bid for first) and everyone else was in a scrum around 90.
I had been consistently in the Top 10 whenever Derek posted the standings, but never the top 4. Going into the final round I was in 5th with my 3 wins and 2 seconds. A win would probably be enough to make the final, though in theory if all 4 people ahead of me managed to also win I could still miss. I love that this event has a final table now. In previous years there hasn’t been much drama at the end. Maybe 1-2 people were rooting for 1 person to lose, but it was often all but locked up. This time around there were at least 7 people who were still live to win the event – more than a quarter of the field! And there was even more drama once the pairings came out as me, Rob Murray, and Sceadeau d’Tela all wound up at the same table of In The Year of the Dragon. They were tied for 3rd and 4th so this became a pseudo semifinal where the winner would make the final. If Rob or Sceadeau finished 2nd they would still be live to advance, but they would need some help from other games.
I was very happy with the game I’d be playing with these stakes. This is my favorite Stephen Feld game and I’ve gotten to play it a bunch lately because it has a good online implementation at BoardGameArena.com. The emphasis on advance planning and the fairly small but chunky strategic decisions (as opposed to a bunch of small tactical things that you have to line up perfectly) seems to suit me well. I wasn’t feeling any pressure, though. After a couple of years of barely getting to play any live board games at all I was genuinely just happy to be in this position and whether I made the final or not wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.
I find the easiest way to play ITYOTD is to just go first all the time. If you focus on initiative then you can basically always take the action you care about while everyone else scrambles to deal with all the events. The tension, of course, is that the low initiative units are better at what they do (especially generating victory points). If the table lets you, though, you can just build *a lot* and get your points from having a bunch of houses. You’ll need a bunch of rice to deal with the 2 famine events, but if you’re going first then you can just plan to draft it like 5 times (which has the added benefit of making everyone else pay for their access to the rice action). Anyway, that’s basically what I got to do this game. I was the 2nd person to take 11 points worth of starting units, which is the way you get to go first on turn 1. I alternated 1st and 2nd for a while but if one person is building while the other takes rice (and then vice versa) that can work out well, and it did here. After that initial dance I got to go first for quite a while, and no one pushed hard to fight me for it. There were a couple of turns where I drafted units for value rather than initiative, opening the door for someone to potentially steal start player from me, but no one ever did. I had one hiccup when I failed to realize all the monks were going to disappear, and thus I failed to recruit anyone at all with my last card, but when the dust settled most of my people were still alive and I wound up winning by 5-6 points. Both the plague events were close to the end of the year and Sceadeau was the one who never wound up with a double-doctor so his civilization pretty much imploded at the end. He had been my primary competition before that, though, and the memory of his previously awesome civilization was enough to secure 2nd place (although just barely). Less good for Sceadeau was that the size of my lead hurt his tiebreakers and he wound up losing 4th place and a seat at the final table to Keith Dent because of it.
So I made the final table!
In addition to really liking the existence of a final table, I also think the format for it is pretty cool. The most popular game from each round is eligible, and then players get to veto one game, with whoever was in first place going into the final table in charge of deciding which game is going to be used. Keith surprised me by vetoing Agricola, but I guess he’s just played so much of it lately that he wanted to play something different. There were two eligible games that I had only played a couple of times (and in both cases I also knew I was pretty bad at them). Luckily for me, Steve vetoed one of them so I got to veto the other. Bye-bye Goa and Race for the Galaxy. Robb took first place pretty much wire to wire, but he didn’t seem to like any of his options (Terraforming Mars, Castles of Mad King Ludwig, and Thurn & Taxis). He ultimately decided to leave things up to fate and rolled a die to choose. I caught a bit of a break here as Robb rolled Castles, definitely my best of the final table games. My impression is that Keith would have been the favorite if Mars had been rolled, but we also might still be there playing as the game goes notoriously long and Steve doesn’t even know how to play so it would have been a teaching game too. I’m not sure who would be favored at Thurn, though I think Robb plays it the least.
We randomized turn order and I wound up with Robb on my right, setting prices where I would have first crack at them. He gave me one bargain on the very first auction: giving me one of the “build around me” purples for cheap (specifically the one that gave 3 points for each adjacent outdoor room or activity room). However, once I had a board for him to parse, he was frustratingly good at not giving me much to buy. I didn’t get to do anything particularly clever with my build, and I closed surprisingly few rooms, but I had taken the goal card for purple rooms, which lined up with the public goal for purple rooms, and so there were a lot of auctions where things were secretly worth a lot more points to me than was obvious. I mostly just bought points (as opposed to buying room bonuses by closing things) and I managed to make more money as the master architect than I was spending so I never had cash flow problems (and wound up 2nd on the public goal for money as well). It was a close game and everyone played well, in my opinion, but when the dust settled I got to collect my 2nd 1st-place Lion in Winter plaque.
Huzzah!
Looking back on the whole thing I feel really good about my round 1 bidding gambit: spending zero points let me get into the game I wanted in basically every other round. I also feel like I played pretty well all weekend, and then I got a little lucky to get to play the final table on a game I know well. The first place plaque hangs pridefully in my basement near the table where we play board games and now I’m just looking forward to coming back next year and doing it all again!