Because of the differing age of consent laws in various countries I have been forced to amend this warning in the following way.  Please don’t read this article if any of the following apply to you:

1) You are English and under 18
2) You are American and under 21
3) You are Dutch and under 12
4) You are Greek and under 30
5) You are French

Ruling Britannia XIII
 

Oh well, another month gone.  Quite tragic really but I worked out that at my age (23), I only have about another 700 months to live.  If they all go as quick as the last one I’ll be dead before I finish writing this paragraph.  It also means we have one less month to D-Con, and one less month to GenCon UK, both of which I am looking forward to immensely.  GenCon UK is in London for the first time this year, which will make a change from the student digs of Loughborough and the ugly gray buildings of Manchester.  The Trek open is sure to be a good event with around 30 people already registered to play 2 months in advance.  Since last month I have actually started playing tournaments again.  I have played in 2 constructed and 1 sealed since the last outing with a fair amount of success.  As a result, I am now once again at or close to the world number 1 spot (although as the ratings haven’t been updated in a while so it’s difficult to say how close).  Although DT probably hasn’t moved much in this time, it should make Britain favorites for the race to 2000 once more.

The first tournament I played this month was at our regular ‘road trip’ at Littlehampton.  Unfortunately numbers are dropping here a bit of late and we only just about managed to get the tournament sanctioned with Janice (now about 7 months pregnant) playing as well as being TD.  This wasn’t helped by the fact that only 2 London players (Snap and myself) made the trip on this occasion.  Eventually the tournament was a fairly low-key affair, which I won fairly comfortably with a Romulan Mission solver/battle/STA deck.  I always try to play a pure Romulan deck (none of this Fed/Rom treaty crap) in the last tournament before each new expansion as a tribute to my all time favourite affiliation.  I did however get a game against soon to be father Jason Guzikowski.  Many a time I have gone down to Littlehampton with a deck that will really piss him off in the hope that I will get to play him (my cargo run Parallax Arguers deck is probably my favourite).  When I actually played him (albeit with a fairly ordinary deck) he actually gave me a fairly good game.  He did however come up with his usual array of interesting rules interpretations which led to several McRulings (none of which went in his favour).  The best were probably the following.

- You can only use the attack or defense bonus on a tactic card, not both
- You can play Magic Carpet Ride on an away team even if there is no ship present.
- Personnel brought back to life with Genetronic Replicators are stopped.

Anyway, as always it was a good day out thoroughly enjoyed by all (well both) of us.  I might not be able to make the June and July Littlehampton tournaments due to American Football commitments so it might be a long time before I visit those shores again as the baby is due in August.  Although if it takes after its dad it will probably not be born until October because it’s questioning the ruling that the pregnancy period is nine months.

The following week it was back to London for our weird tournament slot.  This is generally the 3rd Saturday of every month and we do a tournament for a format other than constructed.  This month we pushed it back a week so we could have a Voyager GayTrek tournament.  The only time I have previously played GayTrek is at D-Con where (just after the release of EPP) about 25 of the worlds best players (who had already qualified for the second day of the worlds and were therefore bored) had a go at the new fast exciting format.  I think Eric Johnfauno won it in the end although I doubt it was the highlight of his weekend seeing as 2 days later he won the World Championships.  So anyway we had this Voyager Warp Speed tournament.  I pulled absolute crap!  My rares were 2 of the same rare non-aligned bloke (can’t remember his name, has Cunning 10), Kes (crap in sealed), a Vidiian Warship (useful but hardly game breaking) and a Federation Vulcan bloke who never even made my deck.  On the plus side I got ‘The Next Emanation’, ‘The Vidiian Sodality’ (plus outpost) and ‘Villagers with Torches’.  I put together a serviceable mainly Vidiian deck using TVS for a lot of free card plays although I lacked the AMS, bridge crew and good missions that defined a lot of the good decks.

Eventually it turned out to be battle that was my biggest friend especially when combined with ‘The Next Emanation’.  I could knock together weapons of 25 with all of my ships, which was enough to take out most ships and put their best people on TNE.  By the end of the tournament Neelix, Kes, Tom Paris and (most satisfying of all) Janeway had all ‘got religion’ at some point in the tournament and in 7 rounds I managed to win 6 with true tie 1.  The true tie was against DT in a bit of a see-saw game that saw us eventually tie 35 all with all his good people dead and mine not able to overcome his Land Eel that he managed to pull.  DT won the tournament on differential having won all his games except against me while I had to settle for second.

The following weekend we had our usual first weekend of the month constructed tournament.  This was bound to be good as it was the first since the release of Voyager.  Problem was I had no Voyager cards except for the ones I had got in the sealed deck the week before.  What followed was a piece of divine metagaming even if I do say so myself.  Thinking everyone would be playing in the delta quadrant, I decided to play a PNZ deck.  I won every game even my game against DT who probably would have beaten me but he was scared to come into the neutral zone as he thought I was playing a Decius drop deck.  When he eventually did come into the NZ it was with only a few people who, put it this way, didn’t have Youth.  I won the tournament with a 10 (+470) record and moved within reaching distance of 2000.  DT in an increasingly rare slip only managed second.

So what does everyone think of Voyager then.  At the moment from what I’ve read from other regions and what I’ve seen, the Delta Quadrant seems to be dominating at the moment especially the Vidiian + Fed combo and DQSS decks.  It does seem to have taken some of the speed out of the game though which is nice.  I was fed up with sneezing and missing my opponent scoring 100 points with his OS Feds.  On the other hand I have yet to see one Containment Field played.  Hmmmmm.  It’s a shame that my requests to make Janeway an Officer/Science mission specialist were ignored as I felt that not only would that reflect her role in the show but would also make her a lot more useful than she is now.  On the other hand we do have the first even vaguely sexual image on a card in the form of Jeri Ryan’s nipple on the Seven of Nine card.  Go on, take a look, it’s there!  Next week we are playing a ‘no rares’ tournament which should be fantastic.  Will be just like the good old days (96ish) when we didn’t have any cards, remember them?

‘I play Takket, I draw a card, your turn’
‘I play a Kivas, your turn’
‘I play The Traveller, your turn’
‘I play Red Alert’
‘Kevin it’
‘Okay, your turn’

And so on for 25 turns.

As well as Voyager being released this month, I have also had the perils of moving house to contend with.  I am now sharing a house with Tobes, Snap and Shanny, which should provide a never-ending stream of stories for this column.  Good news for me and you, bad news for…er… Tobes, Snap and Shanny.  Snap's girlfriend, the lovely pink haired Aziza, is set to complete the household any time soon which is good news as I have no idea how to use simple household appliances such as the iron and the cooker at present.  She has already given me a crash course in how to use a washing machine.  Not surprisingly in a household of 4 young blokes, none of us can actually cook.  Tobes claims he can but so far we have seen him make nothing more complicated than a ready made microwave meal.  So far I have managed to flood the kitchen, Tobes has managed to disengage the hot water somehow and Mike has managed to come in from work late one night and pass out on the couch until the morning.  We have only been living there for a couple of weeks so I’ll bring you all the gossip as it happens.

And to go with our new house we also have a new post tournament regular drinking establishment.  If you remember we became disillusioned by Pages Bar after the bulletin board was abolished, the clientele became snootier and less populous and we were banned from singing.  Since then, our post tournament drinking activities have included Chinese Restaurants, quiet pubs, arcade games, bowling and in one case dirty Polish strippers.  The Purple Turtle in Mornington Crescent seems promising though.  On the downside, the people in there are mainly Goths, the music is shite and some of the non-Goths in there are twats.  On the other hand they serve very cheap alcohol, they have a fit barmaid and nobody tells us to stop singing.  Oh yes and a lot of the women don’t wear many clothes.  I was however stopped from doing a ‘Hawaii 5-0’ dance on the table.  The signature drink in this bar is what has become universally known as ‘orange shit’.  We don’t know what is in it but is costs £8 for a jug and once you’ve drunk a couple of jugs you have a tendency to slur, giggle, make confessions you will regret in the morning and….er….  try to do Hawaii 5-0 dances on tables.

Last weekend was probably the best night we have had there so far after the Voyager constructed.  After meeting up with Richard Cowton from Scarborough, we headed over to the Turtle with about 2 hours of happy hour remaining.  After drinking in the region of 60 shots of Vodka between 7 of us we moved onto the serious business of singing trek songs, playing the slots and getting really jealous when Richard told us that he was going to have a threesome the next day.  Top comedy of the night would have to be Mike’s attempt to pull the barmaid.  After 10 minutes standing at the bar he hadn’t even managed to order a drink let alone get chatting.  When he did eventually get to talk to her the conversation (in its entirety) went:

‘What are you doing when your shift finishes?’
‘Going round to my boyfriends house’

Mike’s luck with women is becoming legendary ever since the story got out about when he went all the way to America to meet his ‘fiancée’ who he had never actually met in the flesh but got engaged to over the internet.  When he finally made the 4000-mile trip he was told to fuck off.  Never mind Mike.

Because I have had some great reader mail this month I will devote the rest of the issue to this.  First of all, in answer to my question has anyone got a perfect record in a sealed deck tournament, Olav Rokne replied that in his first ever OTSD tournament he managed a 8 (+400) record in 4 rounds.  Mind you, one of his premier packs contained 15 rares.  If this wasn’t bad enough, he managed to get 3 Q’s which would be amazing even in booster draft let alone standard OTSD and managed to record the first (and almost certainly only) instance of a Q-bypass deck in OTSD sealed.  Lucky buggar!

My second question in the last issue was an open-ended question about big tournaments and amusing stories about them.  The following story from Len Neidorf is brilliant.
 

I saw you mentioned something about big tournaments and preventing players from playing in them in your last paragraph of this month's RB.  Well, I've got a pretty good little tale for ya. This one comes from Ithaca, New York, 5/5, Major Rakal's "Not Your Everyday Tournament." This tourney was a huge one with all the best players in the Romulus Region coming to it. Stuff like Fajo Collection, URs, URFs, Seven of Nine foil, EP, EFC, USS Jupiter and a lot of other stuff for prize support. NY players and NJ players have been feuding for a little while, and this was the main confrontation. NJ (where I am from) took the top 2 positions. I won, with John Corbett (another NJer) taking second.

Well, as you may know, Major Rakal runs her tournaments in a chemistry laboratory. Outside of the lab was a blackboard with all these chemistry drawings and information and some other rather important stuff. John was feeling a little cocky after our performance and did a little mischief. He erased some lines and replaced them with "SCHOOLED BY NEW JERSEY" and "I AM THE GAME AND YOU DON'T WANT TO PLAY ME" and "YOU ALL FEAR NEW JERSEY'S GAME!". We then scrammed from the college in Ithaca where the tourney was held. John receives an e-mail from the Major later that night. She said something along the lines of "As a result of your childish actions of writing on the blackboard, you are banned from all tournaments that I run".  I just cracked up at this.
 

// Editor's Note: hmm, I'd have to support the major there… rewriting formulas is annoying :-p and
// losing the use of the lab for tournaments would really suck :-p

Yeah so did I.  I followed this up by asking David if he would be willing to risk getting banned from the BBS in order to share this story in public.  He replied that he couldn’t because he was already banned.  Ladies and Gentlemen, this is my kind of player.  For next month I would love to hear about anyone else that has been banned from any tournaments for stupid (or maybe not so stupid) reasons.  Best ones will be printed next month.

The other truly fantastic story received last month was again sent by Olav.  For reasons of space I will not included the entire story here but it revolved around Olav and some of his fellow Canadians trying to get into America from Canada.  It was a story of drugs, customs officials and innocent Star Trek players being led astray by peer pressure.  Although this may well beat Ringo’s Las Vegas story as the seediest story ever about a Trek player, it’s a long story and this issue is already over the 3000 word mark so I will leave it until next month.  But believe me, it is well worth waiting for.

And now I will entertain you with what may (but in all fairness probably won’t) become a regular section in Ruling Britannia.  It is to salute the work of a regular player who has just discovered his true calling and will one day be famous.  While reading this, you may shed the odd tear as you comprehend the inner meaning or (as Andy Dobson did) feel the need to write us an essay on what the piece reveals about the mental state of the author.  Ladies and Gentlemen, for the first time in print I bring to you…. Ringo’s poetry corner.
 
 

‘Satchel’ by Ringo Greenwich
 

(Burp)
A Persian body kit
Slided on the Nile
Between Nurse Ketchup's thighs
She can't deny
Xmas crackers starts stuffing that stocking
Bolivian barbecue buttercups
Live a threatened life
by Galaxy Minstrel menstrual cycles

A ridicule from Ravishing Rick
Was the underlying principle exposition?
Of Jimmy Snuka's colon –
I want to knob an owl
When a man loves a melon
Everything gets cheaper
Whores, hitmen and horses' heads
Camel wrestling let the Topless Games begin
Sort your skin out to join the Mafia

Gronduluc long scowling brood
Repetition Ravishing Rick Rude
Semi-colon; reality at work
Syphilis and wart correction
Hyper-extended erection
Connemara belies little - wojpa
 
 

We are currently pressing Ringo to release to the public some of his unpublished works, which are said to be just as deep and meaningful as this.

As always we will finish with Song of the Month.  On top of his poetry efforts, Ringo has also managed to take his first ever SOTM crown with this fantastic effort on the Bon Jovi classic.  Like all of Ringo’s creative writing, it combines fantastic one-liners as well as apparently random sentences strung together.
 

Name:  Living on a Prayer
Based On:  ‘Living on a Prayer’ by Bon Jovi
Revised Lyrics By:  Ringo Greenwich
 

(Once upon a time, not so long ago.)

We used to play with Saltah'na Clocks,
But games are so more psych, we're into a ruck....
We suck, we suck.

Badger decks no longer okay,
Playing for a laugh, what more can we play
But speed? Fed speed.

I say: We’ve got to go back to playing dodgy decks,
Cause we’re building awesome combos when we should be having sex,
We’ve got a pint glass and that’s enough for now - get that beer down your neck!

Woah-oh – our Rommies are far,
Woah-oh – from the Lonka Pulsar,
Come on now – let’s all bang Tasha Yar
(ASP Tie Kajada).

Still trying to reach two thousand
Now we’re trying so hard we screw each other up – so tough, it’s tough
Then Shanny got pissed on all day
He cries in the night and whispers: I was brave, she didn’t shave.

We’ve got to go back to playing dodgy decks
‘Cause it doesn’t make a difference,
If we drink Carling or Becks,
We’ve got a pub-crawl and that’s a lot for now - we’ll give it a shot.

Woah-oh – our Rommies are far,
Woah-oh – from the Lonka Pulsar,
Come on now – let’s all bang Tasha Yar
(ASP Tj Kajada).

We’ve got to play games, retro or not,
We’re gonna hit 2K by playing with Spot.

Woah-oh – our Rommies are far,
Woah-oh – from the Lonka Pulsar,
Come on now – let’s all bang Tasha Yar
(ASP Ty Kajada).
 

And finally this month’s topic for debate comes from Olav.  What is the strangest place anyone has ever played Star Trek?  Could be somewhere really remote, somewhere really public (games conventions do not count), anything you can come up with.  Personally I have never done anything stranger than play Young Jedi at the airport but I’m sure you can all do better than that.

Until next month

Ian
iptaylor@dialstart.net