// Editor's note: this article may be unsuitable for children; all flames, stories, and other comments should be sent to Ian! ;-) //

Hello once again to the article that seems to get more obscure every month.  I apologise for last month when the Steve Tobin porn star scoop may have been a bit too tasteless for some of you but to not tell the story would have been even more of a travesty.  To give you an update on this story, Steve still hasn’t got his money back from Danielle and he is currently playing in tournaments with other people’s decks.  Another breaking story that has just missed the cut for this issue is that Ringo is currently in America backpacking.  More on this next issue but lets just say I have received some interesting stories.  Also earlier in the month, Martin Allen the ex Warwick legend has lost a kidney.  In his own words, ‘I went to the hospital with stomach pains and came out with only one kidney’.  On behalf of players in Britain and the world over, I want to take this opportunity to wish Martin a speedy recovery and hope he is back to building large complicated inefficient decks as soon as possible.  I now feel quite bad for the extensive piss taking directed at him last month.

In fact after July which was pretty quiet, this month has been tremendously busy.  The month kicked off with Steve Tobin’s silly tournament whereby all the good players accepted deck ‘challenges’ to see if they could get them to work.  I had to build a deck in which the only personnel were Targs and Ty Kajada.  It was going to be Targs only until I realised that Animals could not attempt missions on their own.  It was a great equaliser as nobody was quite sure if their idea would come off.  The tournament was won by DT who decided that playing a sphere encounter deck meant building a good Borg deck and changing 1 of his seed cards for a Sphere encounter.  He was none too popular as you can imagine especially when he was quoted on one of the discussion lists as saying after the tournament that British players had moral objections against people winning.  Maybe it’s our fault. Maybe we didn’t explain the concept of a joke deck tournament quite clearly enough.  Anyway, Steevie G came second with a ‘Super Wesley’ deck and James Farmer came third with a Klingon Wrestling deck (no hand weapons).  I think I rolled in 4th or 5th in the end.  I might have got up to 3rd if I hadn’t abandoned point scoring in my last game to start a big fight with Ringo’s ‘Barbering of Borg’ deck.  We’ll definitely have to do this again some time.

The following week Stuart ‘Tax Dodger’ Marsh ran a 10 player multiplayer event (dominated by Snap’s award winning Manheim’s Dimensional Door deck).  Meanwhile Ringo and Colm played in the Euro Gencon doing rather well for themselves (Ringo finished third) and James, Tobes and I went to do a demo in Cambridge.  In the words of James’ demo report, ‘Bugger all happened’ although we did get to see an animal rights demonstration and a Star Trek chess set that seemed to include Beverley Crusher wearing a wonderbra.  And while we’re on the subject of James’ demos, an interesting incident occurred a few weeks ago.  It appears James’ better half Angela dragged him into Clare’s Accessories (I don’t know if you have them in America, it’s a women’s chain store that nobody can quite work out what it sells).  Anyway, James was wearing his Decipher Ambassadors t-shirt and in case you can’t quite worked out what happened next, this particular shop happened to sell the lesser known Decipher game Boy Crazy (see www.iguanas-cbc.com/boycrazypack.html For details).  Recognising James’ t-shirt they asked him if he would mind showing them how to play the game.  Realising an embarrassing situation emerging (and not wanting to let on that he didn’t have a clue how to play the game) James mumbled something about setting up a demo and left them his card hoping they would forget about it.  Not a chance!  Several phone calls later and it appears that James is not going to get away with it and he will soon be running a demo of boy crazy in Clare’s accessories and he has even taken the trouble of learning how to play.  I might sell tickets for local players to see James in his hour of glory or maybe pay a couple of mates to turn up and pretend to be gay.  Anyway, more on that next month.

The following weekend we had 2 tournaments in 2 days (although this is not unusual in London).  On the Saturday I tried to do something I have never managed to do to date and win a tournament with Borg.  I only lost one game (to DT) but rolled in third.  I would have come second except for my match against Colm where I had 125 points with Q’s Planet on the table and then when trying to probe for Assimilate planet, probed 5 Green drones on the trot and timed out.  I hate Borg!  DT won the tournament with a Romulan ‘do stuff’ deck and Colm’s other Romulan ‘do stuff’ deck came second.  Definitely the day for the little green men.  On the following day 6 of us travelled to Littlehampton for another tournament.  This was unique in so far as it was the first tournament in England to be run by a female TD.  We were hoping for some kind of Star Trek playing Sarah Michelle Gellar look alike (although in private most of us assumed she would be a younger version of Kathy McKracken).  As it turned out, she was a pleasant, fairly good looking girl although her unusual interpretation of the no interference rule led to the following strange conversation:

TD:  You can’t do that
Me:  Yes I can
Opponent: Yes he can
TD:  You can’t
Me:  Ok, you go and check it in the rules, we’ll carry on playing

It was an enjoyable tournament despite the efforts of one player who seemed to have a superiority complex over everyone else.  He commented to one of the London players that his deck was invincible and the only time he spoke to me was after two rounds when he came up to me (while I was packing my deck up by the way which is bad etiquette) to comment that he had won every game so far.  To my utter delight, he finished 5th and the London players came 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th.  I think we would have taken the top 5 had Colm, who finished 6th, not arrived a round late.  If this blond haired southern bombshell is reading this, no hard feelings mate but could you justify your reasons for thinking that you could wipe the floor with a 3 time British champion, a one time British champion, an ambassador and 2 other TD’s (apart from the vicious rumour going round that you were shagging the girl running the tournament).

So, Veni, Vidi, Vici, the London team had struck again.  Unfortunately the opportunity to take on the rest of the country at GenCon UK was not taken up by many.  However, it was well represented by Decipher employees and ambassadors including European Marketing co-ordinator (or something like that) Marcus Sheppard, Midlands ambassador Rik Thomas and Belgian ambassador Joeri Hoste.  Ah yes Joeri who was last seen pleading with me on the last day of Gencon not to write anything about him in ‘Where No One Has Gone Before’.  My only previous encounter with Joeri had been at Gencon 1998 where he played the (at the time original) Ooby Dooby, Dividian Door deck.  He seemed just like your average geeky player.  However for the new millennium he had developed a taste for beer (if not the tolerance) and a catchy new slogan ‘Weeeeee’re going to the pub’.  Looked like we were going to get on just fine.  A booster draft on Thursday won me a Fajo collection and I have still never lost a game in a booster draft tournament.  During the evening in an effort to find a bar that was open after midnight we descended on a room where live action roleplaying was taking place.  This would have been annoying had Glasgow legend Sam de Smith not been performing on stage blissfully unaware that 12 of his mates were sitting there with pints of lager grinning at him.  Unfortunately after the novelty of laughing at Sam wore off, it turned into a bit of a shop talking night, with Rik thinking that because of a loophole in the rules he had discovered the new ultimate deck (he hadn’t).  Eventually we wandered home about 2 in the morning and I built a deck for the following day before spending the night on Rik’s floor.

5 rounds later the following day my all conquering Blood Oath, STA, Live Long and Prosper, Lore throwing people out of airlocks (yes a bit Martin Allen I know) deck secured first place in the Galactic supremacy tournament and won me a box of tribbles.  The fact that I pulled a McCoy out of the third pack did nothing to harm my evening apart from having Rik constantly nagging me to trade it with him.  We then descended on the bars of Manchester.  After a lovely meal in an Italian restaurant courtesy of Marcus’ expense account we went to a vodka bar.  I’m not normally a fan of these places but after drinking several mysterious drinks involving umbrellas and cherries, we would have been happy to stay had the beast that is last orders not descended on us.  Not to be deterred we found a sci-fi bar, sort of like the Manchester equivalent of Pages bar.  The greatest thing about this bar is that unlike Pages it was filled with extremely attractive women.  Unfortunately, the curse of the sci-fi fans was on us.  It’s a strange fact that while sci-fi fans individually can pull women, as a group they are hopeless.  Take this night for example.  A local attractive girl was taking more than a passing interest in Joeri and even bought him a drink.  However despite Rik’s best efforts, Joeri did not get past the ‘friendly chatter’ stage.  Similar incidents were occurring throughout the group and no we were not wearing Star Trek t-shirts before anyone asks.  However as soon as we left the bar and separated, Rik and I were propositioned by two passing women.  Okay, they were about 30 and pretty damn ugly but it was nice to be asked (and in case Rik’s fiancée is reading this, we declined).  Meanwhile, a couple of the other lads were invited to a club by two other women.  What is it with this curse and has anyone else had any experiences with it?

Anyway, it was at that point that a few conversations on mobile phones decided we would have a post-drinking chill out session at Marcus’ room.  It was here that I realised just how drunk everyone was.  Marcus had us walking through what seemed like miles of corridor before he eventually found his room and Joeri knocking at every door on the way didn’t help.  Once there, a drunken discussion about parsley and Joeri throwing up in Marcus’ on-suite bathroom were the only highlights.

The following morning we all had souvenirs from the previous night.  Marcus and Rik both had glaring hangovers.  Joeri had a bad hangover and a bit of pepper up his nose from where he threw up the night before and I had Rik’s stories about me talking in my sleep.  Apparently while he was talking to his friend on the phone after I had gone to bed about 4 in the morning I had shouted out something about a piece of metal and then more worryingly, something about Ringo and Colm.  Not sure I’ll live that down.  Anyway my performance must have suffered because I could only manage second to Marshey while playing a Hero of the Empire deck.  More disturbingly nobody could face the prospect of another night out.  I think Marcus, Rik and Joeri are all getting too old.  Instead, those three had an early night while some of us stayed behind to have another booster draft, which amazingly I managed to win again.  I am just the booster draft king!  Sadly though this signalled the end of GenCon for me as I was running the tournament the following day.  Shame really as players’ choice sealed deck seems like a really good format.  Oh well, there’s always next year.

So this brings up neatly up to where we are now.  Next month will be fairly hectic as it is the month leading up to DecipherCon where Rik, DT and I will be trying to conquer the world at Star Trek (or Young Jedi in the case of Rik who prefers games where you don’t have to think).  We will also have our usual array of tournaments in the London area and Tobes’ birthday this weekend, which is guaranteed to be entertaining.  So until next month I leave you with the following challenges.  Please e-mail me at the address below if you succeed at any of them or even if you fail.

1) Go out with a group of 6 or more single players.  At least two of you must score with women.
2) Build a Hero of the Empire deck using only cards from the DS9 expansion and beyond and the sealed deck promotion cards.
3) Find a young single female TD who knows all the rules and report her to me so we can move there.
 

Until next month

Ian
iptaylor@dialstart.net