This article (I'm hoping it'll turn into a monthly column) concerns ST:CCG in South Africa. Mostly in Cape Town, because that's where I live, but if I hear anything from anywhere else, I'll write about it too.

First of all, let me educate you about South Africa. Population - 36 million, of which five million are European, one million Asian and the rest African. I happen to be one of five million Europeans, even though my family has been living here for five generations. In fact, all our ST:CCG players are, somewhere along the line, European in origin. There are two cities that anyone cares about, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Cape Town is far more important, as we have a cool mountain (that Table Mountain place you might have heard of), as well as being the place that I've lived all my life, but Johannesburg is the country's biggest city, so I have to give it a mention. Most importantly, there are NO wild animals anywhere near my back yard. The closest to being near a lion, leopard, elephant or anything else that I've been is in a zoo. Also, I use a computer, listen to the radio, watch TV (I don't even need a satellite receiver to watch, we have actual broadcasts of our own) and take regular showers. I hope that this paragraph has destroyed any notions that you might have had concerning us playing ST in our huts.

A little about the history of ST:CCG in SA. Over the past few years the ST:CCG playing population of Cape Town has grown from 2 to somewhere between eight and seventeen. I make that approximation because I know of quite a few people who have been collecting for a while but have yet to play.

One of the major difficulties we face are prices. You're paying *half* what we pay for our cards. The local supplier has just put the price up on their new stock. The price is now (as of the 20th December) R36,00 per booster. Assuming that the conversion rate is R8,00 per USD (and it's actually closer to R7,50) that's $4.50. Let me give you some other prices:

OTSD                            R200,00 $25.00
Second Anthology          R350,00 $43.75
Enhanced Premier           R160,00 $20.00
Enhanced First Contact   R150,00 $18.75
DS9 booster                   R 30,00 $ 3.75
AU booster                     R 33,00 $ 4.13

Sigh... maybe he has major overheads. All I know is that if prices were cheaper, I would still be spending the same amount of money. Possibly more. That probably doesn't make sense, but hey - it doesn't need to. It won't change anything.

Those are the only ST:CCG products on sale here. At least, that's what they tell me. Then again, over the past three years, I've been begging them to find more Q-C boosters. Six months ago, they reappeared, and an assistant said, "oh no, they've been at the back of the store, because no one wanted to buy them." A week later, they were sold out.

Never mind about that. Here are the results for our first sanctioned tournament. I emailed Bruce Umene and asked about prize support. His response was that there is "no prize support policy for the neutral zone region."

1. Shaun Kennedy	8 (+279)
2. Fritz Meissner	6 (+85)
3. Fritz Meissner snr.	5 (+161)
4. Warren Cramer	4 (+88)
5. Rethea Deetlefs	4 (-78)
6. Ben Rouhani	2 (-75)
7. John van Rensburg	2 (-195)
8. Jarred Cramer	0 (-400)

You'll find me more than a little cranky that I lost 100-0 to Shaun's PNZ deck in the third round. I feel incredibly stupid, because two weeks earlier, he had told me that he had this PNZ deck put together, and I had said, "So use it!" to him. Needless to say, I didn't have any method of getting past his first turn revolving door on my alpha quadrant TNG (I was playing Borg). And I didn't have Wake of the Borg to take out his only outpost. Anyway, at least we've got rankings now.

From January 14th we'll be running fortnightly tournaments. I'll include reports in future articles.

I'll write a bit about the metagame at this point. At the moment, the choice of deck builders is rather limited, because there aren't enough people buying enough cards for there to be spares floating around for trade. Many people stick to one affiliation and trade off everything else.  It's easy for me to keep track of the metagame here, because I know who'll be playing what. I know that there'll always be Klingons, at least two Federation decks, possibly one or two Romulans, some Cardassians, the occasional Bajoran and (extremely rarely) a Dominion deck will show up. The Borg and Ferengi I don't have to worry about, because I'm the only person with the cards to play them. Also, the metagame here is way behind the rest of the world. Red Alert is probably the one card that everybody (except me) uses. Not that I'm complaining, because I'll always have IOAG fodder.

I have to decide what to play on the 14th. The deck I like best at the moment is Defend Homeworld. I have a version which works without DS9, which I feel is vastly superior, since Mike Harrington forgot his sites and still managed to finish fourth on day 3 at DCon. I'll just have to hope that no one remembers me talking about the deck and how to beat it.

Now for some thoughts on Mirror Mirror. First of all, I love this set! There isn't anything in it that I have to have (that's a good thing, considering that I'm still spending money on TwT). There're a few new, decent personnel, but if I'm not planning on playing with the Mirror personnel, the only cards I need are Commander Charvanek (the PNZ bullet) and Weyoun of Borg. 35th Rule, Blood Screening, the new Kirk, Construct Starship, Tantalus Field and the Mirror personnel etc. are cool, but not absolutely essential. The new dilemmas are nice, but I forsee a major swing away from planet missions, and consequently players might start leaving out the planet only dilemmas entirely. Maybe I can persuade someone else to buy a few boxes online and trade what I need off them.

I've taken up the "First to 2000" challenge (mentioned by Ian Taylor, in his "Ruling Brittania" column) on behalf of South African ST:CCG players. There're five of us with rankings above 1500 (as well as a few players who've yet to play in sanctioned games). Assuming that one person wins every single game they play, I figure that someone could make 2000 points in four months. We'll just have to find a way of stopping everyone sitting on 1950 from winning any games in the near future. Maybe I should move to London before someone here starts beating me consistently.

That's my two cents worth for this month. If you have any comments, let me know. If anyone feels like sending me cards (anything but Barber Poles) I'll make sure they go to a good cause. If you send me money, I'll spend it. To do this you'll need my snail mail address, so email me at meissn@mweb.co.za. Oh yes - if you're planning on an African holiday, come visit us, and you can play ST:CCG. We'll even take you to the zoo, if you want.