I have been talking to Rob Corbett for a while now about an Ohio tournament, which we would come down and get some state-to-state action going. Since we couldn’t get a date setup via other TD’s, Rob decided to host his own event. April 6 was set as the date and we were prepping to play.  I had been working on my fed mostly OS deck that utilized Vic and Barzan dropping for speed reporting; Olav’s Holy Hexany was added for additional speed. 2 mission win and a fail-safe horga’hn were perks in the deck also.
 
Bright and early we awoke Saturday morning to get up and ready to travel down to the depths of Ohio.  I managed to accumulate 6 other players to come down with me on this glorious trip to the heartland of Ohio; Columbus here we come. In the car that I was riding in there was James Alexander, Evan Steiner, and Jeff Jarvis, in the other car there was Kevin Markman, Matt King, and Scott Roszkowski, we dubbed our car the “cool car” because we could.  Just as we were gassing up in Detroit before we embarked, James picked up the coolest water bottle out there; it looks like it was made from NASA. I swear you have you to do like 3 different things to get the water out of it and you can hang it off of your belt of backpack with its cool top.

People would imagine a 3+ hour car ride boring as hell, but not in our car. We spent about 98% of the time slagging Ohio on the way down. Lines like “Why is Ohio so flat? Is there anything here?” and “We should just pave all of Ohio and make it a free-for-all for faster driving” were frequently stated, as the truth was unveiled before our eyes.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

We arrived in downtown Columbus right about 1 O’clock, the starting time of the tourney, and we parked in the parking garage of the OSU Union building.  Once we got inside we had no clue where it was in the building as it wasn’t a small building. We called Rob after about 5-10 minutes of wandering around, found out he was only about 30 feet away when we called. Rob showed us the way to the area where we were to play.

Arriving in the basement of the OSU Union, there was already 6 other players sitting there, I only recognized one person, Jared Hoffman, as Brian Sykes was nowhere to be found, yet.  Rob called Brian on his cell phone and he said he was going to be there in about 10 minutes, 20 minutes later Brian showed and was the last person to show up, yet he lives practically the closest. Well around 1:30 we started and here are the games.

Game 1 vs Jared Hoffman

 Well, well, well, I get to attempt to get revenge my timed loss from last November. Turns out he is playing his Bajoran RBM deck again, same as last time, but revamped. I go ahead and get my self-seed at Earth and start my downloads and hexany going. A turn or two later I get Earth solved and snaggle my Horga’hn seeded there. 45 points and an artifact for me, drawing RBM for him. I load up my crew and move a few goons towards Pegasus Search. Jared drops a couple RBM aboard one ship with Vic, I let them battle. I move another ship with some goonies aboard and he does the same thing, I let them battle again. I load a fair amount of people up aboard a 3rd ship and move over, I attempt and go through a couple dilemmas, then get stopped. I end turn. He goes and does a bunch of drawing stuff and gets more RBM, he tries to drop a large number on my ship with everyone aboard it, but I drop my reactor overload on it to wipe em clean off.  My next turn with Jared out of RBM I work my way through the mission for the win. 100-0

2 (+100)

Game 2 vs Evan Steiner

 Evan and I always have interesting games.  This one is no different; we started off by duping 4 missions, 3 in the AQ and 1 in the MQ.  My blunder of the tournament happens right here, I forget to seed some dilemmas under one of the duped missions and Evan seeds 2 cards there, a cryosatellite and a horga’hn.  Off the bat he horkes his horga’hn and 20 points. I go first and start up the hexany and my chain download via Vic express. I start doing Earth and immediately figure out what’s there: The Clown: My Festival -Chula: The Chandra – Friendly Fire. I have to wait a turn or two so I can get the right people to solve it.  Two turns later I get the right people so I Barzan drop them into play and Evan RBM pings them. Next turn I start to move them to Earth but he wormholes them to the MQ and by that time I had used both of my Q the Refs already on other stuff. So I just decide to trigger off the Friendly Fire at Earth anyway. Evan goes ahead and decides to do his smaller point missions knowing they will be easier than going for the larger point, double dilemma’d ones.  He solves Agricultural Assessment with Ogawa for +5, now he’s up 55-0. My turn the FF counted off and Now I solve Earth for 45 points and get my horga’hn, and right away he Devils it! Gah! The game times out pretty much after that, right when Evan was going towards Pegasus Search for the win. I lose 45-55

2 (+90)

The next 2 games are short and sweet. My opponents get a combined 3 total turns and I win both 100-0. Nothing of consequence happened in those games, so they really aren’t worth that much of mentioning.

Final Score 6 (+290) good enough for 2nd place.

Found out after the tournament us MI guys took places 1 & 2, Jared got 3rd, and then 4th – 7th.  Brian finished 8th with Rob’s deck as he forgot his seed deck back in his room.  Seems like Brian has been forgetting a lot of things to tourneys lately.  After the tournament is over Brian wants to play me using his supa-Brog deck so I agree but everyone wants to go get some food first.  Brian suggests Champps, but Brian had to get his fiancé first. We stop off and pick up Angela and soon we were at Champps waiting in line for a good 45 minutes.  Now Angela is allergic to smoke and she is having a tough time standing and waiting for our table when the worst happens.  Some goon ball lights up in the waiting area before he gets outside.  Brian yells at the guy and he just snubs them off. Angela starts going into an asthma attack. It continuously gets worse and Brian quickly drives home to get the nebulizer to help her.  Well while he is gone it doesn’t get better but only worse. 911 is called and an ambulance is on the way. Minutes later it arrives and takes care of her. Brian arrives shortly after and everything is ok. Brian and Angela go home so no game after dinner that Brian and I were hoping for.

 The drive home was similar to the drive down, lots of Ohio slagging.  I dozed off for a while while the others talked briefly about quantum physics and whatnot. Too many cops in Ohio, way too many. Fun was had by all. I hope to see everyone again, soon.