tikal [Updated October 2004]  

 2004 WBC Report  

 2005 Status: pending 2005 GM commitment

Harald Henning, CT

2004 Champion

2nd: Arthur Field, CT

3rd: Davyd Field, SC

4th: Jack Jaeger, VA

5th: Jonathan Fox, IL

6th: Timothy Kelley, SC

Event History
2000    Jason O'Donnell     95
2001    Kevin Garber     80
2002    Brian Jones     72
2003     Barbara Flaxington     53
2004    Harald Henning     77

Euro Quest Event History
2003     Arthur Field     23
2004        


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 Laurels
Rank Name

From

Last
Total
 1. Arthur Field

SC

04
92
 2. Kevin Garber

VA

02
52
 3. Brian Jones

MD

02
40
 4. Barbara Flaxington

NJ

04
38
 5. Jack Jaeger

VA

04
35
 6. Harald Henning

CT

04
30
 7. Jason O'Donnell

OH

00
30
 8. Davyd Field

SC

04
28
 9. James Hopkin

CA

02
24
10. Phil Rennert

MD

04
20
11. Eric Freeman

PA

03
18
12. Rob Kilroy

PA

00
18
13. David Wenstrup

SC

03
12
14. Eric Haas

MD

03
12
15. Marvin Birnbaum

NJ

00
12
16. John Kerr

VA

03
  9
17. Steve Cameron

PA

00
  9
18. William Duke

MD

03
  8
19. Rodney Davidson

MD

04
  6
20. Jonathan Fox

IL

04
  6
21. David Fair

MD

03
  6
22. John Wetherall

PA

00
  6
23. Daniel Broh-Kahn

MD

04
  4
24. James Carvin

PA

03
  4
25. Chris Terrel

VA

02
  4
26. Timothy Kelley

SC

04
  3
27. Mario Lanza

PA

03
  3
28. Mike Beckstrom

MN

00
  3
29. Don Bone

Australia

03
  2

Past Winners

Jason O'Donnell - OH
2000

Kevin Garber - VA
2001

Brian Jones - MD
2002

Barb Flaxington - NJ
2003
 


Deep in the Deepest Jungles ...

TIKAL celebrated its fifth anniversary as a Century event at WBC 2004, and based on the turnout, it shows no signs of abating. This official GM write-up will be broken down into four distinct areas: Demonstration, Initial Heats and Scheduling, the Semi Finals, and the all-important Final. Read on to discover if perennial finalists Jack Jaeger, Arthur Field, or Davyd Field won the tournament, or was it relative newcomer Harald Henning?

Demonstration: Let us start off with the Demonstration activity, scheduled for 7 o'clock on a Friday evening, dinnertime. Based on the Gamemaster's previous experience with demonstrations, he had limited expectations, looking for a turnout of perhaps two or three newbies. Imagine his pleasant surprise when over a dozen people appeared, possibly as many as twenty, all eager to learn the nuances of this fascinating strategy game. Fortunately Tikal, like many Euros, is easy to learn, if difficult to master.

The Tikal game itself comes with a player cheat sheet, which shows everything a player can do on a simple 3 by 4.5 inch card. No language skills are required, as there are no words whatsoever on the player card or the map. In a nutshell, a player places a tile, and then allocates 10 action points in his or her turn as he or she sees fit on the map board. Scoring is also simple: In a scoring round, and there are four of them in the game, each player receives the usual 10 action points, without the tile placement, and then they score. The last scoring round is done in reverse score order, meaning whoever is in last place at the final scoring round gets to go first in the last scoring round, often an advantage.

The monkey wrench in Tikal 2004 was that the bidding rules of the game were used, in which players bid on the tile they choose to place, some tiles having more perceived value to one player than another. Bidding provides a bit more strategy to the game, and also prevents the ubiquitous whining about poor tile selection. It also allows a player to go last in one round, and then first in the next, allowing them, in effect, 20 action points in a row.

Initial Heats and Scheduling There were three heats scheduled for the game, set for different times and different days. With this flexible scheduling format, anyone who truly wanted to play a game could get in a heat some point during the very busy WBC week. Social Tikal should be a 90-minute game, and the GM allowed two hours for each of the heats and the Semis. With very few exceptions, all games were, or could have been, finished in under two hours. The Wednesday evening heat had six games, the late Thursday heat had seven, and the Friday heat had nine games. Friday's third heat potentially was a disaster, with eight players showing up with no games. Let this be your call, people, that even four-player tournaments need players to bring their games! Fortunately, Ken Samuel, an earlier heat winner, and Alan Keisel, a non-participant altogether, unselfishly offered their games so that others could play. The GM's, and eight other players' gratitude, go to these two stalwart individuals. Heats were scored on cards, with each individual disclosing his or her finish place, ratio to the winner, and reserve pieces for a tie-breaker. This information would be used to move on in the semis.

The Semi Finals: With 21 individual heat winners, 22 including the gamemaster, the potential arose for a disastrous scheduling problem in the semi-finals on Saturday night. The semis scheduling included room for alternates including last year's champ, Barbara Flaxington, who scored within 1% of her heat's winner. The Gods of Tikal were clearly smiling, as miraculously, the problem resolved itself, with exactly 16 of the 21 qualifiers posting for the semis on time. Since Tikal works best as a four player game, it was easily agreed that the four semi-final winners would advance to a single, four-person final.

During the semis, the GM did an aggressive job moving the four scoring rounds along, with two finishing exactly in two hours and the other two, ten minutes later. Next year, all four semis will finish in two hours. The Gamemaster's eternal gratitude goes out to Jonathan Tivel, a third heat winner, who had planned to show up for the semi-finals, only to arrive at 9 o'clock, an hour after they started. Poor Jonathan spent that hour watching ESPN Classic waiting for the semis to start, not realizing they were already underway! Jonathan was outdone by another heat winner, Ben Shanks, who arrived at 9:30, or in his words, after dinner!

The Final. Part of the tournament scoring methodology for the heats was to look at the winner's total score, his score as a percentage of total points at the table, and for runners-up, the ratio of their score to the winners. Ranked in order of winner's scoring percentage, two very interesting pieces of information could be gleaned. Two of the four finalists, Jack Jaeger and Arthur Field, not only scored over 100 points in their original heats, but each scored almost one third of all the points at their table, at 33% and 32% of their boards respectively. This placed them first and second, respectively, on the winners list when based on points as a percentage of the total. On the other end of the spectrum, the other two finalists, Davyd Field and Harald Henning, scored at the bottom of that same list, each squeaking out a victory with 27% or 26% of their board's points. In both of their heats, the runners-up scored only two points less than those two winners. This ability to win a close game would serve both well in the final.

At the beginning of the final, the Gamemaster was surprised to observe aggressive bidding amongst the four finalists, which led to a low initial scoring round. Still, scoring after the first round was extremely close, with all within five points of the leader. A narrative of the final will not do as much justice as a simple scoring chart, as shown below.

Looking at the chart reveals some critical information about how the game would turn out. Normally, one would expect a player's score to increase in each of the four scoring rounds, as each player uncovers more monuments (possibly capping them) or discovers more treasure. However, intense competition in the final between Jack and Arthur over a particularly valuable monument on one side of the board ultimately hurt both of them, as their scores actually declined in the second round. (For the uninitiated, competition means throwing resources, i.e. explorers, around one or two objectives, which ultimately denies a player the ability to get as many points as he can on the board during his scoring round. When over half of ones resources are locked in a battle of attrition with another player, the only people who benefit are the uninvolved players.) Although both Davyd and Harald competed for points against each other, they appeared not to let their competition get out of hand, and their initial two scoring rounds reflected that. Perhaps they had learned from their initial heat wins the ultimate cost of competition.

By the time Jack and Arthur had reached a détente, it was too late. Both were able to start a comeback, with impressive scoring rounds after the third volcano, but it wasn't enough. Although Arthur scored the most points in the last two rounds, the impact of the two earlier rounds had already robbed him of any chance for a victory. Harald Henning, the relative newcomer to this group of Tikal Laurelists, pulled off the victory. Harald credits his final victory to a slightly different strategy - a focus on obtaining treasure and controlling medium sized monuments, as opposed to his opponents' overall focus on large monuments. Harald's key move was to cap a big monument with one guy near a large group of Arthur's men. One might also note the judicious use of bids, and the points spent on bids were clearly justified as the final score shows. So the moral of bidding is:Spend the VPs you need in bidding to get the tiles you need!

All in all, Tikal 2004 can be judged an overwhelming success, based on both the number of players (significantly higher than the previous year) and the quality of the competition (intense, as usual). The diplomacy, discussion, and dialogue at the final was as intense as any game I have ever seen, but when it was over, the four finalists shook hands, knowing full well that they would probably meet again at some future Tikal tournament. Next year, by scheduling the demonstrations well before the last of three initial heats, the tournament easily has the potential to attract over 100 participants. So we'll see you at Tikal 2005!

              Harald    Arthur    Davyd    Jack    Total
First Volcano  20        18        19       16      73
Second Volcano 23        12        15       07      57
Third Volcano  28        32        29       28     117
Fourth Scoring 35        36        29       35     135
Score Tally    90        85        82       78     335

Total Bids     16        13        10        8      47
 GM      Daniel Broh-Kahn [1st Year]   NA
    Daribuck1@comcast.net   NA

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