Welcome to the second in this series of reports on ST: CCG in South Africa. The month of January has been particularly boring here - I've only played six games, three of them in an unsanctioned tournament. We've yet to hold our second sanctioned tournament. Things are not going well in our quest to reach 2000 points before anyone else.

Turnout for both our scheduled tournaments was low - five on the 14th of January, six on the 28th. We decided to go ahead with the tourney on the 28th, so here's my report:

I spent the previous night (a Saturday with nothing but deck building to do, would you believe it) building a deck based on one I read about in a tournament report. The basic idea was to use two high point planet missions and six universal Space, and then remove all but three of my opponents dilemmas at each mission with Ajur and Boratus.

// Editor's note: I assume he means 8 vSpace, since he says lower down he has no other missions, and 2 + 6/2 = 5 ;-)

With only five people appearing for the scheduled 10:30AM start, we waited until 11:00 and then went ahead with play - I was the unlucky one who had to sit out the first round. I spent the time building a second demo deck so that I could sit down and teach anyone who expressed any interest. The round was pretty uneventful, with two timed wins. Half way through the round Terry Nicole, our sixth player, arrived, and since we were unsanctioned we decided that we should each receive a 1 (+0) score just to make things even.

Round 2: vs. Jared Cramer
I had only played Jared twice before, and won both, so I was pretty confident of the win. Unfortunately, this was one of those games that are lost in the seed phase. Thinking that I was planning on stealing his missions, he put only one dilemma at Cultural Observation and three at Hunt for DNA, and the rest at his missions.

As it turned out, he was playing his usual Klingon battle deck, but he couldn't reach my end of the spaceline, what with all the high-span Space missions between him and myself. Not even needing to get Ajur\Boratus out I sped to a 135-0 win.

Score: 2 (+100)
Cumulative: 3 (+100)

Round 3: vs. Warren Cramer
After a lunch break which was supposed to last 30 minutes but actually lasted 45, we returned to our tables. My opponent for this round was Warren Cramer, who has beaten me in two out of our last three confrontations. I was fairly confident that he wouldn't know what I was aiming at with my deck, but that didn't stop him from beating my Defend Homeworld deck when we last played. Warren usually plays quite carefully and knows his deck backwards.

I solved Hunt for DNA for 80 points. At this point I realized that I didn't have Ajur in the deck (slight error), so I would have to face all eight of his dilemmas seeded under Cultural Observation. I got my megacrew out and attempted, hitting Edo Probe. I made the decision to continue, knowing that if I waited for him to solve a mission (which was my only option, since I didn't have any other unsolved missions) he would probably have everybody he needed to win in one turn. I was stopped by Crisis (happens every time, ******) and lost the ten points. A turn later, and with five minutes to go, Warren had solved two missions and was 85-70 up on me. The minutes crawled by as I made the decisions I needed to on which personnel to grab from Q's Tent etc. and continued. A Borg Ship which was heading my way and would destroy my ship a turn later complicated things. I eventually (and with about 30 seconds to spare) made my way through the last dilemma for the win.

Score: 2 (+15)
Cumulative: 5 (+115)

Round 4: vs. Rethea Deetlefs
At this point I was extremely fidgety because of the nerve-wracking previous round. I settled down, sorted my cards out and we began to play.

I think Rethea must not have encountered the universal space missions much (I think I'm the first person ever to play with them here), because she wasted dilemmas on them. Hopefully she didn't seed any planet\space dilemmas which could have been put to better use under my planet missions. She appeared totally confused by the spaceline configuration, and ended up seeding only four dilemmas under Hunt for DNA and five under Cultural Observation.

I cleared one dilemma at Hunt for DNA with Boratus on the first turn and solved for 75 points. While I was assembling my megacrew to solve Cultural Observation, Rethea solve two missions for 70 (would have been more if she'd remembered to use her mission specialists to meet the requirements) and had a Horga'hn in play, which worried me severely since I wasn't using the Writ. Fortunately, I managed to clear out all the dilemmas under Cultural Observation and won before she could take too much advantage of the Horga'hn.

Score: 2 (+30)
Cumulative: 7 (+145)

Final standings:
1. Fritz Meissner 7 (+145)
2. Warren Cramer 4 (+116)
3. Rethea Deetlefs 3 (+145)
4. John van Rensburg 2 (-120)
5. Jared Cramer 2 (-63)
6. Terry Nicole 1 (-202)

To me, these standings are not very indicative of the playing performances of these guys. The main reason is the large number of timed wins - five in the day. The playing speed needs to be upped, although hopefully that will come with practice. At least we are still playing even if there aren't enough players for sanctioning. It is also good to see a bit of competition developing between Warren, Rethea and John (all of whom are quite capable of beating me). It was also a pity not to see Shawn Kennedy here, as he is my usual source of worry.

Apart from this, we didn't do much. We've had some news from the Johannesburg players (1200 miles or so away from us, but still the same country), where Owen Swart has signed up to be a tournament director, and John van Rensburg will be following suit, since Allan Campbell, our current director is having problems. John will also be signing up as an ambassador once he gets enough sanctioned tournaments under his belt.

I've also found a number of potential new players - the main problem is getting them to stick to any commitments they make about meeting me. It is so annoying knowing that we have the numbers of players, but being unable to get them all together at once, due both to school (our summer vacation has just ended) and work demands.

I was noticing that the magic guys, 60 of whom were battling it out at a Planeshift pre-release tournament, also on the 28th, had managed to find a rather nice looking A0 size poster to stick up. I'm trying to find some way of having something similar done for us, especially for whatever national or regional qualifier we get (if we do).

I think that's it for this month - There's a tournament being run by John on the 18th of March, so I'll include a report of that and everything else with next month's article.

- Fritz