Ruling Britannia XXII

It actually got to the stage last month when I was wondering if I had played my last Trek tournament. The scene had all but died off in London leaving the popular games in the capital to be Magic, Lord of the Rings and the spawn of Satan, waste of cardboard known as Raw Deal. I would like to say that in the last month, everything has been turned around and everyone is playing Trek again but sadly this is not true. Attendance to the tournament last week was 2. However, a sealed deck tournament down in Littlehampton and an email discussion with Robert Corbett about his deck for the Pro Tour and I was back thinking in Trek mode again. Also, last months piece about Trek related web sites got me starting to visit these sites a bit more, talk with other Trek players and get me back in the groove again. I still think my constructed playing days are numbered but I do still like sealed deck and potentially other formats such as Highlander and No Such Thing as Luck. I may even get round to coming to DecipherCon 2002 unless some bugger cancels it.

Apart from it's distinct lack of tournaments, this month has been decidedly eventful in a bits and pieces kind of way. It started with what was supposed to be a very sentimental night out drinking with Ringo and Colm. We planned to go to all the old London tournament venues on a Friday night and have a pint in each. Well in typical style, what eventually happened was that I was a bit late; Colm despite being completely confident of his own sense of direction went to the wrong pub. I arrived at the right pub to find that they were not there, so I phoned Ringo and Colm to tell them where the correct pub was which they still couldn't find. I went back out into the Strand to find them eventually doing so and taking them back to the pub while listening to Ringo bitch at Colm because he 'knew it wasn't the right pub all along'. This sound complicated? Well it's about normal for any event where you trust Ringo or Bowdy with any feat of navigation. The pub in question of course was the Cheshire Cheese. This pub holds loads of sentimental value for me. It was where Marcus Sheppard used to run tournaments before he went over to the dark side and was employed by Decipher. It's where I won my first tournament. It's where I met people who introduced me to Pages Bar. It's where I won a tournament the day before my first ever regional victory in 1997. You get the idea. It held a few memories for Ringo as well although these were a bit more surreal ranging from the spot where he traded for his first 'Assimilate Homeworld' to the fruit machine in the corner. Well you can probably guess what happened. We were so caught up in nostalgia and phoning people and saying 'guess what, we're in the Cheshire Cheese!' that we never actually got round to going to any of the other pubs.

Me and Colm did go on to the Purple Turtle afterwards (see most RB's from the last year) without Ringo who lost his phone and so wasn't really in the mood. We had a good night drowning jugs of orange shit and messing around trying to pull the usual mix of Goths, rock chicks and tourists with various permutations of little and no success. By the time we left, we were pretty wasted. We got the night bus home where Colm in his usual drunk Irishman state decided to talk to Howard on my phone. Now when Colm gets drunk he talks a hell of a lot of shit. On this particular night he decided that his topic of discussion would be Irish republican views. He spent 5 minutes shouting anti-English garbage at the top of his voice before noticing that most of the other people on the bus were laughing. Thinking he had a captive audience, he spent another 5 minutes doing the same. After letting him finish, I pointed out the real reason that the whole bus was by now in hysterics. My phone, which he had been using all this time was made up in the colours and design of the English flag!

The following weekend, we took our first trip in a long, long time down to Littlehampton. Nobody from London had graced its shores since about October last year when Janice had just had her baby and we still had a house etc. So it came to pass that the same trio of myself, Ringo and Bowdy went down for a sealed deck. Our first task was persuading Jason to run a booster draft even though he didn't have too much idea how to do it. Eventually the idea hit home and we were on our way. I managed to draft my usual Fed/Rom mix in a strange draft that contained 3 Supernovas (but no Tox) and an alarming number of 'Raise the Stakes'. I was the first one to get lumbered with one. I gave it to baby Natasha who is now about 6 months old and in the habit of smiling at anything that moves and attempting to eat everything that doesn't. She really is dead cute. As well as the RTS, I also have her a Tarus to chew on in the hope of educating her in the ways of the Romulans at a young age. Not sure it had any effect but it was worth a try.

So anyway, we got the tournament started. I drew Colm in the first round where I was outplayed and made a few bad decisions and lost my first game ever in a booster draft tournament (a statistic that only hit home a bit later on). I only lost 100-70 but it made it a bit of an uphill struggle for the rest of the tournament. In the next round I had Jason who still plays by a different rulebook to the rest of the world. After he seeded a 3-way treaty, I stole one of his missions after a few turns at which point he said 'I thought we weren't doing each others missions'. After failing to give me any time at all between actions to play my 'Loss of Orbital Stability', he eventually moved away from his outpost and managed to do a space mission. I really couldn't be bothered to argue as I knew I was going to win the following turn so I let him have his 25 points. This left me 2 (+55) after 2 rounds. After a nice steak at lunchtime I played John, one of the Littlehampton regulars. He made the classic error of clearing out a load of mis-seeds under my mission and then trying to steal it, which facilitated my 100-0 win in quite a big way. In the last round I played Ringo who was 3-0. He managed to work out that he needed to score 20 points to be sure of winning the tournament. This seemed like quite an easy task especially given the number of Rogue Borg and Palor Toff's he had managed to draft. He nearly cocked it up though and left it right to his last turn before sneaking a 20-point planet mission to secure the tournament with a 100-20 loss. He finished 6 (+240) and I finished 6(+235). That 25 points I couldn't be bothered to take back off Jason had come back to haunt me!

The last attempt to play a tournament this month was when I visited Elephant and Castle (crap name of a roundabout in London) to play a Lord of the Rings tournament one Tuesday night. It was the day that Mines of Moria starters became available so we decided to have a bit of a sealed deck. Apparently they have these tournaments every Tuesday. Howard normally runs them and DT is a regular trying to become top of the world in yet another game. Now I have severe issues with this tournament set-up. Cost of the tournament was £18 for one of each starter. Now given that the starters are being bought at cost (or close to), there is no prize support and the venue costs only works out to about £1 per head, there has got to be someone making a profit out of this. Now this person is certainly not Howard. In fact, he is being dictated to what he has to charge and what he can give out as prizes. Eyes of suspicion at the moment point firmly at Jason the guy who organises the games club. After playing 1 round, I decided to give up and head home after having a quick pint and a chat with Howard. The whole scenario put me off enough to make me decide that I wouldn't be visiting the club again in a hurry even though Marcus is keen on making it a big thing (apparently). I'll just have to start my own games club with hookers and blackjack.

So what else has been happening this month? Quite a lot if you're James! His wedding seems to be edging ever closer. Now we make a lot of jokes about James being under the thumb but get this. He has agreed to have his wedding on the weekend of GenCon UK! This must be the ultimate sacrifice that a British player could possibly make for his fiancée. Why didn't he just arrange it for the day of the World Cup final and be done with it! As a result of this, James will miss a lot of GenCon rushing around arranging things and we will also be on a bit of a tight schedule. We're not invited to the wedding (possibly a shrewd move) but there will obviously be a few festivities in the evening. The Stag Week (I think you Americans call them Bachelor parties) has been arranged for July 19th-24th by Sam De Smith of song and legend (see Song of the Month in Ruling Britannia XVIII). I'm sure if anyone happens to be in the Glasgow area at that time they would be quite welcome to join us. Read about it in RB the following month or actually be there, the choice is yours. Just to add a bit of further pressure onto the already stressed out James, he has just lost his job. If you see someone walking the streets of London in August begging pennies so he can save up to hire a suit, please give generously.

Oh yes, one thing further to add before I move onto this months generous reader contributions. The Trouble With Trekkies is back! This was the card game that we spent so much time creating back when we lived in Arkley Road. Snap has got bored after shagging his mates ex-girlfriend for a while and has taken up making cards again. The website is still at http://www.troublewithtrekkies.2itb.com if you fancy a browse round. If you have never seen this before, it is well worth looking at. Also my own website is starting to take shape as well. Go to http://www.PieHQ.com for all the back issues of Ruling Britannia and also an encyclopaedia of drinking games that I am slowly putting together. Recently up are the rules for the game 'Pairs' which nearly destroyed me, Neil and Noddy the last time I was at Warwick.

At this point, I was going to write a short response to the article 'Ruling America'. If you have never seen the article, I went up on WNOHGB on about 20th February but mysteriously disappeared a while later. It was basically retaliation to nearly two years of RB basically saying how Americans could drink the British under the table yadda yadda yadda. I must admit I only got the chance to read it once but I hope the series carries on, as I would like to hear the author substantiate such a claim. From personal experience, I've never met an American who could drink even the average Brit under the table. In fact, most of them couldn't even out-drink the table. Maybe I'll get other offshoot articles. In the coming months, look out for Ruling Germany, Ruling Sweden, Ruling Argentina and the deeply controversial Ruling the Gaza Strip.

On to readers mail of which I have had a generous amount this month. First up was John McCann from the sunny North of England. John still has about 8 of my tournament foils from trying to sell them on his website but I won't hold that against him as he gave me this snippet about Ben Janes (see 'What Didn't Happen Next' from 2 months ago).

Oh yes and John also owned up to being 'Sleepy' (see last month). Following this, the responses to 'Star Trek CCG and Communism II' started flying in. I won't bore you with any of them and a lot of it has been thrashed out on the BBS but everyone seemed to just have fun picking apart my view of communism. In fact everyone was very defensive of it. Is there something about Star Trek CCG that appeals to shandy drinking left-wingers? Next I had a lengthy conversation with Michael Walk. By his own admission

He managed to come up with a good way of spending a Saturday by finding as many card shops as you can and alternating them with going in pubs after buying a booster in each. Obviously I would have been failing in my duty if I hadn't pointed out that this provides a great was of adding a random element to your drinking. Just use the rare to somehow determine what your drink is in the next pub. If you have managed to do this bar-crawl by now Michael, then let me know and I will print the report. He also sent me quite a lengthy RB style report of a bar crawl he and his mates did. After much deliberation it's a bit too long to include here but I have advised him to post it as a separate article. I would love to see some more regular articles appear. On the subject of which, does anyone know what happened to 'Too Far North for Snow'? I enjoyed the first 2 instalments of that and then it disappeared. Oh well.

Lastly, as always, I bring you Song of the Month. This is one that has been attempted by a few people in the last few months but I sort of padded it out and made it flow (ish).

Oh yes, on the subject of getting drunk, my birthday is on the weekend of 23rd and 24th of March. Anyone who is in the London area and wants to join me will be most welcome. Current idea is doing a repeat of the Victoria Line Challenge.