Ruling Britannia XVII

It's funny, this time last month I was just getting excited about the start of the big tournament season. Right now I'm getting a bit pissed off because we have prematurely arrived at the end of it. There is no doubting that the big news at the moment is the cancellation of Deciphercon. Those who know me will know that this is a major disappointment to me because I am a huge fan of D-Con. I love the chance to meet you players across the lake, enjoy large American steaks and have some quiet beers in some American bars. He, I love all that stuff and this year it isn't gonna happen. I was driving home from work when DT texted me the news and I thought it was some kind of kop out to not have to pay the $50,000 prize money. Then I read Warren's little piece which pacified me a bit but I still think it's an over-reaction. Now before I get angry mails saying that being British I wouldn't understand how hard the September 11th tragedy hit America I would like to add that I understand the sentiment and my heart goes out to anyone affected by the hijackings, I just think that flying is no more dangerous than crossing the road and if we all stopped doing that we would spend out entire time walking round the block. And I certainly don't think proximity to Norfolk naval base will make the hotel a target. Can you imagine the CNN headline?

"...and in retaliation for these attacks, suicide bombers backed by Osama Bin Laden have taken out a hotel full of Sci-fi fans."

Anyway I'm not going to make an issue of this. The decision has been made, probably for the right reasons so I will respect that. However, next month I will print the best DecipherCon conspiracy theories people can send me. It's a while since I've had a mail-in contest so this one should get the creative juices flowing.

The other big news this month is that we are starting to give "The Trouble with Trekkies" a really big push. Those with good memories will remember that this is our embryonic CCG in the making. We have had the first set (160 cards) in spoiler form for a while and we now have about 50 in print. The game now also has its own website. Go to http://troublewithtrekkies.2itb.com for a full spoiler list, rules, pictures of all the cards printed so far and more. We are really enjoying making the game right now and we look forward to being able to give it away some time soon. It would be nice to say that we are doing this in the hope that Decipher will recognise our natural talents and offer us jobs. This is totally untrue though so I won't. In fact once you have seen the cards you will agree that we have as much chance of being offered jobs by Decipher as Washington have of winning the Superbowl this year. We update the website nearly every day and we are currently planning a "suggestions box" and a Bulletin Board for the site (with nobody posting in green accusing you of being off topic) so make sure you keep checking. Snap has nothing better to do at the moment as he has been off work for about a month. What started as a lost voice ended up as some weird form of laryngitis, which has meant while he can't work, he is allowed to play computer games and come down the pub every night. Sounds like a good illness to me!

So what exactly has been happening lately? Well if you remember, last month we finished with the end of GenCon giving fond farewells to all of those people who shared our floor over those wonderful 4 days. One guest however stayed around for a week, that being Mr Olav Rokne, top Canadian Trek player and Trouble with Trekkies playtester. On his last night in London we went for a trip down the local pub where we met this attractive Canadian (but only by coincidence) chick named Margot. Olav was in there. He was so in there, he even got as far as buying a pack of condoms, unfortunately the night of passion never materialised and everyone ended up going home. There the story could have (and some might say should have) ended. However, Tobes (who as you remember is now single) decided that in the absence of Olav, he would take up the challenge of pulling said Canadian chick. Now anyone who has experienced Tobes pulling technique will know that it is something straight out of a romantic novel. Well kind of anyway. Start with a romantic novel, only this novel is about 800 pages long. The 2 main characters, rather than having their first intimate encounter after about 3 chapters, stay "just friends" for the first 400 pages. They then spend the next 350 pages being "good friends" before in the last 50 pages the heroine either gets bored and leaves or gets drunk and shags the hero. Unfortunately, nobody knows what ending the book has until they get to the last 50 pages which is why watching Tobes on the pull is sometimes about as dull and tedious as reading Lord of the Rings with all the vowels missing. So I guess you're wondering what ending this particular saga had? Well it's starting to look more and more like a blowout. They haven't seen each other for a couple of weeks and she has stopped returning his calls. Looks like less romantic dinners and more spaghetti on toast for Tobes in the near future.

It was around this time though that we discovered the new Mecca for single men everywhere in the form of SchoolDisco.com, which originally started on the Internet, but now has a club right in the middle of London where you have to wear school uniform to get in. Obviously it's great to see so many women in school uniform although Ringo likes it more than most. Mind you, Ringo's love life has been a bit scary lately. Funnily enough, of all the gang I think Ringo's sex life is the only one I have never described in detail, so here you go. Every few months, he goes up north in order to see a girl who it would be unfair to call his girlfriend but more semi-regular shag. He once had a threesome with her and her bisexual housemate apparently. The housemate actually emailed me to tell me even though I have never met her. However, this arrangement is obviously not enough to satisfy Ringo's libido so he is often found pursuing other "easy targets". His latest conquest was a one-night stand with Rachael, Snap's inflatable sex doll. She now has a puncture.

I thing I did miss out on last month with all the big tournament breakdowns was the continuation of the New York/New Jersey saga. I received some more input on this recently the first from the father of the argument, John Corbett himself, who was last reported to be shit at the game by a number of sources.

'Anonymous? Where I come from we call this acting like a bitch. If you don't have the balls to talk shit and back it up then shut your punk ass up. You don't want to play with the cerebral assassin. Rob, you and me can finish this at DCon .I'm going to make you cry all over your OSU tee-shirt. You know you fear me and can't compete with THE GAME. As for you English, I don't know what they teach you but history is written by the victors, you all got booted right the fuck out of Virginia. And finally New York, 9/18 at Syracuse is all I have to say about that. As they found out once again and Rob Corbett will find out at DCon......I am THE GAME and you do not want to play me'

Funnily enough, according to MS Word, this email has the most grammar errors per line than possibly any piece of text I have ever seen, and I have received emails from Ringo when he is pissed. The next response from David Goldberg was slightly more subjective (although this isn't saying much).

I'll send this in as another impartial observer to the whole New York/New Jersey thing. My stance is that they both suck. Now I don't mean that there aren't good players there. Len Neidorf is certainly a quality player and has been close to the top of the world rankings for a little while now. What I mean is that in their drive to show each other up, they lose sight of the main goal of the tournament: winning. My example is the RamapoCon Open, which I happened to win. Now, I hadn't actually played a game of STCCG since last DecipherCon (about 8 months) and I put my deck together from the Voyager cards I received the Wednesday before the tournament. On the way to the tournament (a 2.5 hour drive for me, thus a much more exhausting distance than either the NY or NJ guys had to go), I got pulled over by a cop for speeding and got the requisite chewing out. This caused me to get there late, out of breath, and nervous.

And yet, amidst all the trash talking between the New York and New Jersey players, I managed to quietly go undefeated until the sixth and final game against John "THE GAME!!!!!" Corbett. Now, at this point I knew that I would be in the final confrontation no matter what and that if I lost to John, I'd probably be playing him. Seeing in the mission phase that he was playing dual-mission AJBOR/SSM, I thought "This deck should be a piece of cake to beat so I'll just take it easy." I did, and casually let my deck do its thing while he tried his darndest to beat me (including the first use of Alien Gambling Device that I had ever seen). So with him playing to win and me not caring, the game came down to him winning the turn before I would.

So I did what you typically do before a final confrontation and think about how to beat your opponent's deck. The game started and I pulled out all the stops to beat him while he didn't change his strategy one bit. I promptly won 100-0 proving that "The Game" could use some work on his.

Meanwhile, the whole NY/NJ rivalry thing was settled by the tournament being one by a guy from Philly.

Eat that NY and NJ! Philly RULEZ!!!!

I'm Joshua Carey (NY Resident, known online for the First Turn series), and my simple comment is that the state of New Jersey has Integrity of 1, Cunning of 2, and strength of enough to kill me in personnel battle. A local tournament showing 9 participants featured the New York and New Jersey State Champions, John Corbett, and other people (including myself), who aren't really important to the story here.

I get the fate of playing John in the first round, and losing pitifully. He did quite a bit of my deck revision the night before, I suspect some Treachery, some paying of the TD, and him borrowing my Kes, cost me the game, not his superior DQSS deck (I HATE DQSS). My 8th eventual eighth place finish matters not here, but the game described above just shows I saw John's deck, for future reference.

Fast forward to the final round. Jesse's already beaten everyone he's played into the ground, and thus brings on Len, who's at 5 win points at this point. He (like John) is playing DQSS (SURPRISE!), and as I had the bye, I had the fortune to sit at the end of the table and watch the madness unfold. Suffice it to say, Jesse would've pulled a full win had he remembered to bring his mission specialist along for the ride, or had 3 minutes more time (Len's an expert at stalling early in the game), meaning Jesse had to settle for 95 points with his tournament win. Where did Len, the NJ State Champion who was playing the deck that won Origins finish? 4th! 4 of 9, Not worthy of a 1941 Rating Drone. Jesse's non-DQSS deck? Something innovative he doesn't want shared, look for it at Day 2 of Worlds, when he'll kick Len's ass again.

New York Triumphs

So anyway, on to the London tournaments for the last couple of months. First came Tobes' annual silly tournament where people traditionally come along with really stupid decks and play in an unsanctioned tournament. The turnout was pretty poor proving that something different isn't always good. The added twist this year was that on the day, Tobes announced that in every round you would play with your opponents deck instead of your own. This would have been a fantastic tournament format except for the fact that James and Ringo knew about the twist in advance and deliberately built really shite decks to compensate. This came about because Tobes wants to have James' children one day so he tells him everything and Ringo happened to be in the vicinity while they were talking about it. As a result, all Ringo's deck could do consistently is lose about 200 points in the first turn while James deck could be crippled by a couple of side-boarded "Balancing Acts". Fortunately, we had all been to "School Disco" the night before and as a result I was too tired to build a deck in the morning. I therefore probably had the most fun of all the players by sitting in the pub and watching Liverpool beat Everton.

The following week we had one of the regular Littlehampton tournaments. Due to none of us actually checking the website, we nearly turned up a week early and given that Littlehampton is a piss-poor place to spend a week in September fortunately nobody actually went on the day we thought it was. Eventually the following week, it was only Snap and I who made the trip. It was our first chance to see Janice's new baby, Natasha who was only a few weeks old and to my knowledge the first baby to be born to 2 active Trek players in this country. Snap made the startling confession that he gets broody when he sees babies while I have an interesting time completing the entire seed phase by myself when playing Jason when he was holding the baby. Someone even got a picture of me holding the baby, which could possibly sell at Sotherby's as one of the rarest artefacts in the world. One of the real highlights of the day was, of course, going out at lunchtime for a cheap steak. We were terribly late back due to Jason having to stop at Tesco for some breast pads (I'm not joking) and might have all been disqualified if it wasn't for the fact I had the presence of mind to bring back some doughnuts. I don't know what it is about women and sugar but they are so easy to bribe. As far as the tournament goes, I won with a hastily (and badly) constructed Kurley Wurley deck, which couldn't solve missions and tended to default to winning 15-0 when up against a good player. The deck type definitely had potential though.

The following week we were back to London where I revamped the deck a little and tried to win a real tournament with it. It also marked the first visit to a London tournament for The Battling Belgian Joeri "Weeeeee're going to the Pub!" Hoste. I managed to play Snap in the first round. He was playing this deck that I had built for the third tournament running and to this point I had beaten it once and lost to it once. On this occasion I was 50-0 down but won 100-0 as Snap decided that declaring 8 "Dividian Doors" in a turn while having 24 cards in his hand was a good idea. Another vote for "Scorched Hand"! In the second round I played Joeri and after a bit of a chess match I won 15-0 as this deck often does. I couldn't blow up my Borg Ships because of Brunt so all I got was my Dilemmas from "Q's Planet". The following round I played Andy Dobson whose deck was a variant of Daniel Bell's DecipherCon 2000 deck except he used "Chula: The Way Home" to relocate the personnel instead of "Mysterious Orb". He got all his personnel out quickly but in a monumental act of stupidity left them all on his Nor which I blew up on the following turn. A nice comfortable 100-0 win. After that I was forced to play Howard with a Hirogen Armada that DT had built. After I played dumb in the Alpha Quadrant for a while, he spread his ships out and went to attempt some missions. In response, I "Wormholed" over and blew 3 of his ships up one-by-one with Distortions. After that it became a game of cat and mouse before eventually I managed to get a 75-30 win before the time ran out. In the final game I beat Gareth Cheeseman 100-30 to win the tournament. This tournament provided a fabulous opportunity to get a lot of photos for "The Trouble with Trekkies" including Stuart Marsh and Big Angry Mike.

This is all we've got time for this month apart from Song of the Month. This month's noise pollution comes from Howard following up on his previous success "I Will Survive".

Name: If You Haven't Played Me By Now
Based On: "If You Don't Know Me By Now" by Simply Red
Revised Lyrics By: Howard Kendrick


If you haven't played me by now,
You will never, never, ever play me, ooh...

Well, I've had my card play
And it's all gone bad
Even if I play Boheeka
Or maybe Gul Jasad

So I play a freighter
At least that's for free
Pretty Nor syndrome
Has got to me

No, don't get excited
Please don't be misled
I just realised
I really should be playing Fed

If you haven't played me by now
You will never, never ever, play me

So I got System Fives
So shiny and bright
But my opponents winning
Because my deck is shite

You see he must have built it
In about half an hour, I'd say
Some poxin' Vidiian solver
At the Caretaker's Array

If you haven't played me by now
You will never, never ever, play me

Before I go, I'll leave you with one thought. Why is it that you never dream about cards but whenever you talk in your sleep it's always about cards. Apparently when I fell asleep on the way back from France, I said in my sleep:

"I don't care if you are playing DQSS!"

- Ian Taylor, October 2001