Essen SPIEL'08 Chairman's Challenge - back on the big stage!

Tournament report:

For the tournament: SPIEL 2008 STCCG Tournament

Finally Essen SPIEL'08 is home of the STCCG again - at least for tournament players as near the international game convention the second German (and fourth in total) Chairman's Challenge took place in Essen. A total of 10 players from three nationalities showed up of whom six accepted the challenge of our Chairman Charlie Plaine: To Build, play with, and win with a Neutral Zone Deck.

Currently round 1 is running and this report will work as live-coverage for all the players out there that didn't have the opportunity to attend this great tournament. The first game between Tobias Rausmann (C*) and Tyler Fultz already ended with a fast win for Tyler. In the meantime two other players with Neutral Zone decks got defeated by their non-zone opponents. Let's see aout their performance in later rounds - will a Neutral Zone deck be to win this tournament?

Affiliation overview:

1x Bajor

4x Earth (3x Neutral Zone)

1x Ferenginar

3x Romulus (3x Neutral Zone)

1x Qu'noS

Over the course of the next rounds Tyler continued to dominate the tournament with his Reyga-deck closely followed by Tjark Ott (C) who only lost a game against the Ferengi. All-times favorite Tobias Rausmann (C) only lost against both Tyler and Kathleen Fultz and tried to defend his chance for the GUYS foil against Tjark in the last game. Other players fighting for the special prize were Timo Catterfeld (C) and Sandra Wanek (C) while Thomas Vorwerk (C) and Peter van der Helm (C) weren't able to be ranked in the top places. Although not successful the Klingon battle deck of Christian Zipper shaked up a lot of these players' decks and added a lot of flavor to dominating solvers. To quote a player: "Maybe next Chairman's Challenge could be a battle-oriented format? Would be fun!".

See pictures of the tournament here! 

*players marked this way accepted the challenge and fight for their unique copy of a Getting Under Your Skin foil.