I had done a minimal amount of planning for this event beforehand, because it wasn't sanctioned with just 3 players pre-registered. JP joined the day before to give us our 4 (and allow for Round Robin pairings, which is ideal in a one day event) and only then did I start working on a deck. I started reading cards and visualizing a KCA Nor based build. But I didn't really start working on the deck until Saturday morning, waking up early and thinking that I had 3 hours to build it.

Turns out that I had not considered time zones and found out while in the middle of the build that everyone else was ready to start. So, I decided to pull an old deck which did well in block previously and I still needed play hits for, Dominion, and then modify the dilemmas. I tried to filter out all previous block cards, but missed Amnesty Talks until JP pointed it out to me.

The real benefit of Dominion in Block is that it has a very quick head start and can start attempting early with a very good crew for dilemma busting. The trick being that now with You Are a Monument added to the rules, I had to actually do one of the AQ missions. That adds the cost of flying through the wormhole and I wasn't sure how that would work.

But ultimately I won this game simply because I started out earlier and used stall dilemmas. Jordan had cleared two missions by the time I had won and had enough people in play to have one big crew going at a space mission while another parked the beefed up Defiant to try and get an opportunity to blow me up. Luckily for me, the opportunity never arose, as I have heard that that situational battle is what won Jordan his other two games.

Also a bit glad that I didn't have the KCA Nor build as Jordan had a Terran Empire Nor build and his control of Mirror Terok Nor would have posed issues for such a build.

The only thing that made this game not close was that Jordan didn't have an AQ mission and was playing for 140, though he was getting bonus points like nobody's business, so maybe he could have done it with 3 missions.

This was my closest game. JP was playing a KCA ship based build which could make the best use of the unique personnel downloads and had bonus free play engines in both the Nanobiotec and Maquis engines. He came over to the AQ (to get the draws from New Frontiers) and his massive presence in the AQ made me reluctant to venture there. I got lucky in the final turns when the Regency 1 took damage, killing its range and ability for situational battle, that allowed me to safely walk into the AQ and attempt a final mission.

And still, it came down to a Hail Mary. I had attempted my final mission with a big crew but failed the first dilemma, a Lineup, because all my personnel are Big Star and I didn't really have the range or Science + Nav to maneuver my ships for a second attempt in the next turn with rearranged crews. JP had solved one mission and cleared two more. One had a Dead End on it and the other was empty, so all he had to do was get another turn and the game was over. So, I really really needed to attempt on my final turn. I looked at all the options and finally found an out, a way to maneuver my two ships in play and attempt, but I would only get one attempt and I had to play little to get the discards to fly through the wormhole multiple times. And I had to send everyone in one attempt. That at least got me through Lineup, but I got lucky in that we cleared the other 3 dilemmas at the mission and that the people who remained actually had mission solving skills.

Ross' deck was the least impressive of those that I saw, but it still did incredibly well. The issue was that it had too slow of a start, but being a Terran Empire (TOS era) build, it was great at drawing and when it did get a crew going they were great at solving. He managed to hit my Linguistic Legerdemain on turn 2 and even though it had a count of 4, it was not going to lock him out. Then ship attribute boosts + a ship repair by Call for Reinforcements effectively nullified my space combo and meant that he really just needed to Hail Mary through one more mission to win (as I had done vs. JP).

But I again got lucky in that my crew got through the dilemmas at the AQ mission and were able to solve before Ross had a chance to try the Hail Mary.