Ruling Britannia XI

I feel really out of the loop at the moment. What with one thing and another I have been doing very little deck building and playing lately due firstly to a weeks fishing holiday and then to my football teams annual training camp. I won't bore you with details of something that has nothing to do with the game whatsoever but I will relay to you a short story, the hero of which even Ringo would be proud of. On the Saturday night of camp we were let out of Colditz (in a manner of speaking) for the evening and were allowed to visit the local ale house. After non stop training for 2 days the lure of alcohol proved too much for most of the team. One of our Rookie tackles after drinking several pints of various beer found himself in the arms of one of the local girls on the dance floor. Clearly she had more on her mind than just dancing however as after a while she dragged him off down a nearby alleyway. Now in a million to one freak accident the girls mother happened to be walking past the alleyway about 5 minutes later. Now the girl he was with was of the large persuasion and it was obviously genetic as she dwarfed the hapless O-lineman (who is himself around the 250lb mark). Poor Ben was last seen running along the street outside the pub frantically trying to pull his trousers up. Funny really, million to one chances seem to crop up nine times out of ten.

Anyway while we are on the subject of embarrassing stories, you may remember that last month I offered the chance for everyone who has fell victim to this column to get revenge and have their embarrassing stories about me printed. I was expecting a torrent of revenge but the response was actually fairly disappointing. The only real attempt at humiliation was from Rik who came up with the following three misdemeanors. He must have a short memory though because all these events are from the last year and he has known me for nearly 5 including my rather excessive university days.

So, embarrassing stories about you for WNOHGB eh? Ok, where to begin?

Well, first off there's you sitting on the train home the night before flying out to D-Con in November, looking a bit quiet and then dribbling puke onto the seat next to you :-)

Yep true I'm afraid. On the other hand all I can say is that I got off lightly. Me, Rik and DT were the only ones on the train at the time whereas on his own respective way home that night Martin Allen did the same thing on a packed train back to South London. Rumour has it that he even acknowledged the crowd afterwards.

Did you mention the fat 40-year old groping your bollocks on that night out at GenCon? If not then there's another one.

I think I did mention that one. I'm not sure she was 40 but she was incredibly ugly. Oh, and her almost as ugly friend was after Rik.

If you want to get CCG about it there's the "hilarious" D-Con play test game we had where I Rev Doored your Temp Vortex on a Borg Ship, popping our ship. Bit dull that one though.

Yeah a bit dull but true. It was rather funny to see the deck that was eventually to finish second in the semi final of the world championship totally destroyed by 1 misplaced revolving door. Still, shit happens!

The only other offering came from Brad who posted the following.

Oh, I have a good one. At '97 words in Las Vegas I and some people were feeding Ian Beers even though he was under age - now he might not remember this as he had a bit to drink. We finally found this really, really seedy low down bar that wasn't carding people so that Ian could drink. So, me, Chris Swearingen and Ian all sit down and order a Guinness. The bartender puts them in front of us and as we watch the bubbles rise to the top to form a perfect head on top of the beers a fly land on top of each beer. Now, I am thoughrally grossed out and push the beer away. Chris is slightly daunted and fishes the fly out with his finger and then starts drinking his beer and then we both look over at Ian and he has picked up the fly by it's wings holding it above the beer and he starts to yell "SPIT IT OUT! DAMN YOU, SPIT IT OUT!"

HAHAHAHA! Of course it's not true but I have about a half a dozen of these stories I was planning on embarrassing Ian with at DecipherCon last year but he was well behaved so I kept them to myself. ;)

The only reason I am printing this is to let you know that when I was reading this, until the punch-line I didn't actually know that this story was made up. Just goes to show how much stuff you guys missed really.

Anyway onto last months competition. If you remember, the idea was to write a short paragraph on what you think would happen to the game in the next year. I received a fair number of responses, most of which revolved around the author becoming world champion and in one case president! For reasons of space and time, I will only print 3 of them the first is by Steve Boyles. I will declare this one the winner purely and simply because of the unrelenting cheap shots at Decipher to be found all the way through.

In the spring of 2002 (or "Late 1998" as originally promised), Decipher took an innovative move heralded as "sure to please players and collectors alike." Attempting to increase their share of the target audience -- males 18-25 of age -- research was conducted, revealing that food is a primary motivator for these people. Seizing this opportunity, Decipher released an expansion entitled "Hearts of Targ and Other Yummy Stuff" consisting solely of 250 Food cards (a new card type), integratable into STCCG or playable as a stand-alone game, the Food CCG. Two weeks following its release came "Enhanced Hearts of Targ and Other Yummy Stuff," which consisted of four packs of "Hearts of Targ" and an actual entree accompanied by a highly collectible foil version of the corresponding card, available in four die-cut packages: Chalupa, Zesty Burrito, Boiled and Salted Pork, and Surprise Casserole. Of course, none of these have appeared in any Star Trek canon, but the CGI wizards artfully created rather unhealthy-looking images of them, and the issue of canon was resolved by giving them an Alternate Universe icon and the following explanation: "In the episode 'Parallels,' we saw an alternate Enterprise where Riker was eating a chimichanga (watch carefully!), so we can assume that Mexican food has taken over the culinary selections in various universes." The fact that neither Boiled and Salted Pork nor Surprise Casserole is Mexican was never addressed. Regardless, this move failed miserably (the chalupa was "as vile as that Fajo thingy"), so Decipher proceeded to their next planned expansion, "Let's Unbalance the Feds A Little More."

Also I wonder just how hungry Steve was when he wrote this! The second one I will print because it would be simply cowardice not to and it comes from 2 players who identify themselves as 'Mike and Shane'.

The Massacusetts players meet you British fools at D-con and drink you all under the table in a night of debauchery and sin the likes of which has never been seen before.

Consider the gantlet thrown down.

Consider your challenge accepted although I really can't take seriously a challenge from any American who can't even spell his own state correctly! I'm looking forward to D-Con even more now. Final entry comes from Olav Rokne who while getting some good cheap shots in at both Decipher and Voyager just misses out of being the winner because he goes off on his own little tangent at the end.

April: Trying to cash in on the success of Diggi-mon, Monster Rancher and Poke-mon, Decipher prints "Po-Klingon" It fails to sell

June: Trying to cash in on the popularity of foreign magic cards, Decipher prints a Star Trek set entirely in Sanskrit, another in Ebonics, and a third in French-- and while the first two do not sell and never become a collectors item, the third is banned in Canada, when the separatist Quebec Government decides to make it the focus of a language law debate.

September: The long overdue Voyager expansion hits the shelves. The set features the popular characters from the show-- both of them (Lon Suder and Seven of Nine) are ultra rare. A Borg objective which assimilates outposts, which was originally printed as a preview in the Sanskrit edition, is badly translated as "All your base are belong to us." The joke would have been funny in March when it was new.

That wraps up the contest results for this month. Next months contest shouldn't be much effort for you all. 'Where should D-Con 2001 be held and why?' The only restriction is that you can't nominate anywhere within your own ST: CCG region. In other words no entries from the Brisbane crew explaining in detail why the middle of a desert is a great place to host the world championships.

Of course the topic that everyone is talking about at the moment is Voyager. As I write this there are about eight or nine of the cards on the website and everything is going on about organ harvesting and that kind of thing. What I have noticed most about the Vidiian affiliation is that they look very similar to the Dominion in terms of colour. In fact I suppose technically they are kind of a cross between the Dominion and the Romulans. Now add to this the fact that using 'The Vidiian Sodality' lets you have an automatic treaty with any affiliation, you get the potential for some very confusing decks. My tip for the world championship winning deck this year is a deck that contains Romulans, Dominion and Vidiians and relies on your opponents eyes getting glazed over with various gunky shades of brown and green and not actually realising that all your personnel can't work together. Trust me it will work! One more thing about Voyager, I wonder who the first geek will be who plays with Seven of Nine and keeps the other colour one next to the table and swaps it over every time she changes affiliation. Probably the same people who use foil Future Enterprises to chug around the space-line in and use a printed out First Officer Spock stuck onto the back of a common with the real one in a 6mm sleeve next to the table just to show they've got it.

So what has actually been happening in the last month anyway? Well first of all we swallowed our pride and decided to have a Mirror Mirror tournament. In fact I think this tournament theme should be renamed. I would call it the 'everyone try to use as many tricks as possible to ensure that they don't have to use the Mirror quadrant' tournament. I thought I was really original by playing in the alpha quadrant without 'Crossover' using STP drop and things like that to get all my Mirror Mirror personnel out. Oh yes, and I was using black hole to nuke the mirror quadrant. This seemed to work except that only one of my opponents (Geoffrey Thomas) was actually using the Mirror quadrant for what it was designed for and everyone else was just playing Fed Speed in the alpha. As a result I spent most of the day using strategic black holes in the alpha quadrant and trying to scrounge 100 points from what was left. It worked for the most part and I won the tournament albeit in the absence of the man nobody can beat at the moment, DT.

However, as so often seems to be the case it was after the tournament that things started to get interesting. The tournament was on March the 17th which as many of you will know is St. Patrick's day. With us after the tournament we had Mike Shanny and Colm which equals a grand total of 2 Irishmen and 2 full heads of hair (although the latter not being evenly distributed). In addition we also had Snap (Scottish) and James (can't really make up his mind, for now we'll settle for Essex slapper) all up for drinking themselves stupid in honour of some Irishman who nobody really knows anything about. After strategically saying goodbye to Colm after he nearly got us thrown out of one bar and then fell asleep at an arcade golf machine we descended on London Blitz American Football Teams 'gentleman's evening'. Having been drinking since 11 in the morning, what was from our point of view a cheap strip joint with no dress code seemed like an award winning idea. 2 hours later is still seemed like an award winning idea. These strippers were the no holds barred Eastern European types who dragged hapless victims up on stage and robbed them of their clothes, their inhibitions and then their dignity. This was all well and good until one of the strippers chose Mike. In Mikes well chosen words afterwards, 'she seemed like the quiet one'. Appearances can be quite deceptive however. After stripping him completely butt naked, she proceeded to cover him in shaving foam, burn holes in his underwear with a cigarette, whip him with his own belt and then in her grand finale piss over him. Even in our advanced state of intoxication we were pretty shocked and Mike was mentally scared for life. However Mike is now a legend at the Blitz and many legends were told at training camp of 'that mate of Ian's who got pissed on by the stripper'. It made standing just next to Wandsworth Scrubs prison trying to sing Star Trek CCG songs at the tops of our voices seem a bit of an anti climax on which to end the evening. BTW, if anyone wants a suitable time to bring up this story, we are trying to drag Mike along to D-Con.

As previously mentioned, I was pretty caught up in other things this month and so that was the only tournament I entered. There was another tournament in London though, our regular first Saturday of the month standard constructed. It saw Rik Thomas' return to London (for good this time) and also a guest appearance from the one and only Matt 'Shit, I've forgot my outpost' Slade. What a shame I couldn't be there. Anyway here is a brief tournament report from Ringo.

DT won with the deck he's been building for the Nationals.

Mark Radford (2nd) was playing a weird 10 space/Secret Salvage II deck that seeded 5 or 6 No Way Outs, killed his own personnel with RBM's to stick them at No Way Out and score extra points from Death Yells. Add in Data's Medals/Death Yell from Arbiter and some Kova Tholl for the points.

Playing against James he got Intermix'ed. Mark's black hole sucked in the entire quadrant but they had difficulty drawing out of cards before the time limit because James kept on waiting till he had 70+ cards in his hand (Paul Fosten-style deck) and then playing Scorched Hand.

That's about it. I had a coupla drinks with Rik and Noddy afterwards where I lost £10 when Rik bet on Terix in the Q-Continuum booster game. Then Rik felt guilty and bet the whole £10 again on Zalkonian Storage Capsule and lost.

Ah, good to see the Q-Continuum booster game is still going strong. If anyone wants hints of tips for playing this game please mail me. I am also currently working on the definitive rules for this game complete with a compendium of suggested odds. Anyone who is interested please mail me.

One last topic to touch on before I bring you to this months songs. As the more avid readers amongst you might be aware, the 'Bring back Marcus Certa society' was founded a few months ago and is growing in numbers (still single figures but growing nonetheless). Publicity Secretary Colm is currently working on the society website (URL next issue), I am minister in charge of propaganda and am doing my bit to persuade the world that the game was better when Marcus Certa was involved and Führer Mike Moore is ever watchful over proceedings with his all knowing spy network. Big news for the society recently is that Marcus Certa has been spotted stateside. British members of the society were hoping that the Messiah would come back to earth in England but we are happy that our stateside cousins are getting divine visits. The following is an extract from a top secret email by world championship finalist Chris Brennan.

Actually, Marcus Certa IS playing in tournaments again. He was at our last tournament in Worcester. was quite the local celebrity, even. (here in Betazed there's a lot of favored outcasts. Alidar Jarok, for example. and I can't wait to get Marcus and Skullduggery in the same room some day.) so once again, truth is stranger than fiction.

In fact if someone could tell me the full Alidar Jarok story (including Alidar himself), I would be happy to print it. What happened to the ex Decipher golden boy?

So anyway, on to song of the month, or rather in this case songs of the month. I am declaring joint winners this month. First an effort by James which wins by James' power of persuasive argument. When I said his song had a serious competitor, he replied:

'Is it about the new expansion though? Don't think so!'

Nothing more to say is there really.

The second entry loses out for not being about the new expansion but gains lots of marks for 3 important reasons.

On that note I will leave it for this month. Anything vaguely amusing you want to see in future issues, mail me on the address below. Especially wanted are Brittany songs, sightings of Marcus Certa, embarrassing stories about other players and views on where D-Con should be held.