Rule Leapfrogs To Title On Last Turn!

The highest score in this year's Thurn and Taxis tournament was 35, scored by Cally Perry. The biggest margin of victory was 14 points, scored by both Brandon Wines and Stephen Costa. There were only 2 scores of 0 in the tournament, and only one negative score of -2 (in the Semifinal, where people are more likely to take big risks in an effort to win).

Overall, the data from this year says that the earlier you go in turn order, the better, with 34% of 4-player games won by the player going 1st, 28% by the player going second, 20% by the player going third, and only 18% by the player going last.

Bids (which only occurred in elimination rounds)s for going first were as high as 1.5, with the average bid being just over .5. The bid on 4th was .5 in 7 of the 11 games in the elimination rounds, and 0 in the others. No-one bid on second, and the sole bid for third was .5 in the Final by Amy Rule. In no case did the bids change the order of finish. Next year, based on a vote of this year's semifinalists, the 6 initial cards will be shown before the bidding occurs, which I expect will lead to some higher bids for first place.

In the Semifinal, Jack Wolff crashed a 6-long route, which usually spells disaster, In this case, he still managed to get second place with a score of 28, three points behind Dalton Versak's 31. Antony Saccenti's Semifinal hinged on finding Nurnberg, to complete Bavaria and provide a path to Lodz to complete the world traveler. He used the administrator on 3 successive turns, finally finding the card he needed on the third try to win by 1 point over Randy Buehler. Amy Rule had 19 houses placed in her Semifinal, but an administrator action failed to find the needed card to go with Kempten and Ulm to finish her last route. But before her next turn, Kevin Breza used the administrator, revealing the card Amy needed to score a convincing 29=20 win. In the first turn of Andy Latto’s Semifinal game, finding no attractive cards on offer, he took two from the deck, drawing Sigmarinen and Kempten, which he would rate as the third best possible draw (out of 253) behind only Lodz-Pilsen and Innsbruck-Salzburg. Later, a Lodz card he needed badly appeared immediately after his turn. Each player in turn considered drawing it defensively (2 had already been to Lodz), but each decided they had more important things to do. Andy continued to have good luck with the cards, drawing the cards he needed to score both Bavaria and World Traveler on his final turn to beat Carl Chauvin 24-22.5 (Andy had bid a point to go fourth).

Thurn and Taxis often has a tension between racing through the carriages with the cartwright and scoring the bonus chits for long routes. In the Final, all 4 players opted for a racing strategy. No player ever scored a route of length 7.

Amy Rule found herself in need of Munich to complete Bavaria, and was dismayed to see each of the other three players in succession take a Munich card, leaving none in the deck. Fortunately for her, the reshuffle happened soon after, and Amy administrated to find a Munich card in the reshuffled deck. Playing this card on the Final turn, after Dalton had triggered the end of the game, enabled Amy to have a 16 point last turn, scoring both Bavaria and the World Traveler bonus while placing her last 2 houses, scoring 16 points on her final turn to win the game by 3 points.

Amy's bid of 1/2 a point to go third in turn order was one of only 3 bids ever to go third. The previous 2 were in the Semifinal and Final in 2014, by Jefferson Meyer on his way to his winning the tournament. While most players think 1st and 4th are the favored position, everyone who has bid for third has not only won the game in which they made the bid, they have gone on to win the entire tournament. Is this a coincidence, or do they know something we don't?