Andrey was playing Romulan and Klingon dual HQ, which is pretty smart since it is an achievement and also because he has played Romulans and Klingons quite a lot and has a lot of experience with them. Shady Resources is likely the best cheater card in this format and he was able to use it to force me to play more dilemmas, but once all 3 came out, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Surprisingly, this did come down to the last turn. Andrey had gone first and we played out my last turn to show that i would have won given one more. His deck and play were so much better than mine, but I did manage to take some risks and get some good one dilemma shut outs to keep pace with him for most of the game.

I actually played Ted first. He was playing TOS, which is what I expected everyone to be playing- and lots of low cost people and low cost ships meant lots of attempts at missions. That and the dilemmas in this format are not the best at removing target people from the attempt meant that it was all about holding the other player out of the mission as long as possible (2-3 attempts) and just getting it done sooner.

Ted was spanking me the whole game, but then he accidentally gave me two space dilemmas at my planet mission (which would have been great dilemmas for shutting me out) which moved me from being slightly behind him (he had gone first) to just ahead and allowing me to win by one turn.

My game against Michael was were my mistake with the missions produced the biggest problem. I had failed to change out the mission before my first game and ended up playing with the mission from the TNG starter. This makes the 2nd planet too difficult to bother attempting, since it is a strength mission, but being that Mike is a master skill tracker, he knew that I had not drawn into Navigation, one of the key skills for my second space mission, by the time that I had finished one planet and one space, so attempting that would be pointless and even if I did draw one, he would have an easy time shutting out my attempts with few or no dilemmas under.

So I did go to the bad planet mission. I did have a good number of people with decent strength, Like Kelley and Worf, but Mike bet well in that my high strength dudes were low cunning and shut them out with one dilemma. On my second go, he used Outmatched to shut me out one last time and give him one more go at solving his third mission. But I got lucky in my dilemma draws. The first attempt didn't see me get a Timescape, but it was able to shut the mission out with one under. Then the second did get a Timescape and a stopper thus holding Mike's third team out and netting me the win.