8th Annual Burning Wreck Barbecue AAR

I realized I never posted my AAR for the 2015 barbecue on the forum, only the front page of this site. Here's my AAR in its entirety.

We had 19 members in attendance for our 8th Annual Burning Wreck Barbecue on Saturday.

As you all know, we used a 3-round voting system to select a scenario in advance (in this case the final choice was AP40 Head of the Mace.)

It was nice to see everyone on time or even early for our 11:00 AM start time at Stance Nixon's house in Long Beach. Everyone paid their $10 entry fee and received a raffle ticket, after which we paired up randomly. Since we had an odd number of players, we had one 3-player game. All of the games were underway by 11:30 AM at the latest.

The pizza delivery guy arrived around 2:00 PM and we broke for lunch. The final game, between Fred Timm and Blair Bellamy, cleared at about 7:00 PM. Here are the final results:

Stance Nixon's Germans fell to Hank W.'s Brits.

Blair Bellamy's Brits defeated Fred Timm's Germans, spoiling Fred's attempt at a come-from-behind German win after loosing both Panthers on turn 1.

Eric Morton's Brits defeated Scott Thompson's Germans.

Dave Kocot's Germans defeated John Lehman's Brits.

Nadir Elfarra's Germans defeated Mike Soffa's Brits.

Eric Visnow's Brits defeated Jim Svette and Matt Cicero's Germans in our 3-player game.

Kyle Li's Brits defeated Chris Nielsen's Germans.

Dave Nicholas' Brits defeated Ed Esparza's Germans.

And in a hard-fought battle that came down to the last advance phase, Jim Cotugno's Germans defeated my Brits. This was a re-match for us, we played each other in Burning Wreck #7. Ready for best out of three Jim?

As always, there were a couple of games that were more or less blowouts thanks to the dice. But many more were down-to-wire. In the end, the defending Brit's proved to be the winning side 6 games to 3. We all felt this had a lot to do with having the British players do their set-ups in advance. Everyone was happy with the scenario choice and everyone had fun.

All of the members who had won their games received a second raffle ticket, after which we held our prize raffle, and gave away 6 very nice prizes. We then adjourned to Fuddruckers for some excellent hamburgers, and called it a night at about 9:30 PM.

This was our second time using our everyone-plays-one-scenario format, and it worked out perfectly once again. You can bet you're going to see this again next year for Burning Wreck #9.

I want to thank Stance Nixon and his lovely and charming wife Cheryl for opening their home to us once again. We had plenty of room and plenty of light, and Stance kept the air conditioning on the “arctic” setting all day, which I certainly appreciated. I also want to thank Matt Cicero for handling the money and taking care of the food and drinks for us. Everything worked perfectly. Finally, I want to thank everyone who came out and participated. It was great to see you all!