by Wolfgang Penetsdorfer

First let me give you some statistic numbers:

  - There have been 134 participants at Lure of MECCG this year. (the first Lure was with 35, the second with 72 players)
  - There were Players from 9 different countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Czech Republic, France, Poland, USA, Spain and Japan.
  - All in all we played 20 tournaments during those 3 days.
  - There were 14 new players taking part in the demos.

Statistics should speak for themselves, so no comment on this!

Then let me summarize the whole event with just a few words: it was fantastic!!
This I can say from the player´s as well as the organizer´s point of view. The fact, that I as the organizer was still able to play shows, that everything went very smoothly. That´s what Lure of MECCG wants to stand for: having a nice athmosphere where we have fun playing our favourite game!

We (Austrian group #1) arrived at the castle on Thursday, which offered us the chance to greet a few players, before the whole thing starts on Friday: it was great to meet Takao and Akira, who came all the way from Japan just to attend the Lure-festival. They even hadn´t a few days left for some sight-seeing. It´s wonderful to have such enthusiastic players among our community! Also the french group has arrived yet, as well as some Austrians and Germans. So what should we do early in the evening equipped with nothing but our cards? Start playing of course! So we had a first multi player session, which turned out to be a slaugther-game. There weren´t many characters left in the end!

The next morning I was awakened by a screaming loudspeaker: mr. penetsdorfer – please come to the reception!! mr. penetsdorfer, please come now! Uaaah! Well, it wasn´t so late the night before (2 a.m.), still I would have liked to sleep longer than just 8.30, assuming that there won´t be much time for sleep the next three days. Well, somehow I felt, that it could be a serious cause, why they wanted to see me, so I finally got up. And I was right: breakfast only lasts till 9 a.m., they told me (it lasts till 10 a.m. during weekends only, but this I didn´t know at that moment!). also we had to change our rooms till 9, since we reserved different ones from Friday to sudnay. I couln´t help but running around and shaking the others out of their beds. Ill news is an ill guest they say! (again sorry, but finally you had your breakfast!!)
Then I spent the morning with my wife - to do some preperations for the weekend of course! (sahme on you, who thought something different!)

It was really good to be there a day earlier. So I could enjoy the calm before the storm. Well, there even wasn´t a storm: the players dropped in one by one, and I just felt fine to meet so many friendly people again.
Soon I found myself standing on a chair saying hello to the crowd and giving a few instructions. I was missing my microphone+amplifier very dearly, but since we had to travel with 5 persons in a mazda 121, there was no space left for stuff like this.
Then Lure of MECCG III was started with the first tournaments. If you are interested in the results, please have a look here.

I didn´t play at the first day, since I wanted to be free for late-coming participants. But I had a lot of fun watching the drinking game tournament. Here I want to thank Kuba Krchak, who volunteered to run this tournament. Of course he also played, and czech players aren´t know for too much self-restraint, when it comes to play drinking game! But he did a great job (meaning he was still able to fill in the rankingsheet afterwards). By the way: it was the tournament with the most participants. Very significant of what kind of folk MECCG-players are!
I was very happy to present the second series of ME The Drinking Game (again 18 cards). I daresay, the quality of the cards was very decent (by the way: the original paintings are for sale, also high-quality prints! If someone is interested, please contact me). And according to how much sets there were sold, these cards seemed to be very liked.

After a few hours of sleep and breakfast, it was also time for to play. I took part in a very small tournament, which was played for the first time: Cool Play. the idea of this format is to avoid cheezy games and to play just cool combos and scenarios. Another change to normal rules is, that you may gain direct tournament points by fulfilling a certain scenario. The mixture of these direct TPs and TPs from the normal game made this kind of tournament very interesting. If you want to know more about the special rules, have a look here(or just ask me).
I chose a scenario, which was very easy to fulfill, but which made it rather difficult to win the normal game: Over the Tops of the World, where I am allowed to play MP-ressources only after playing Eagle-mounts in the same turn. Guess why I have chosen this one ;-) My deck was working pretty fine, especially my hords of orcs seemed to surprise my opponents, so in the end I was able to win that tournament. But the other players will agree, that at such a tournament nobody tries to win at all means. It´s also great fun to see the opponent´s Boromir becoming a sage and planting the White Tree! Gondor has a king, Gondor needs no other king!! Or to see Samwise becoming a fighting-machine with prowess 10. Or watching Arwen wielding a sword and laughing when marching againt the evil forces (it reminded me of a movie I have seen recently ;-)

In the evening I participated in the Dragon Hunt, also a new kind of tournament first played at the lure-festival. And this one was even better! Since there were only 4 players, we decided to play round robin. Here I played the best games since a long time, also because Hartmut and Stefan are great friends. Hartmut opened a very tasteful bottle of wine, and together we started the dragon slaying. The idea is to get some special dragon-MPs by killing at-home manifestations (minion players may also influence the dragon factions). For rules again have a look at here (or mail to me).
Stefan (hero) started with slaying a lesser bairanax at home. Well, I named him drake-killer  afterwards. My first dragon should at least be smaug the magnificent. But damn: I (playing minion) messed up the body roll. It took long to prepare my strong lieutenants for another battle, and in the meantime, stefan also killed scorba (is scorba really a dragon, not a drake??). time was marching on, so there was only one chance to win the game: I have to kill a great dragon. Let´s go for Itangast!! So there I stood at the roots of goldhill (and I really felt like standing there). My lieutenants were very strong, but is it enough to deal with 3 strikes at 19/8?? Sure I am known as a very quiet player, but I couldn´t but shout out loud, when I stroke the last dice roll at itangast´s body and that great worm fell down into the dirt right before my eyes. Dead. I killed Itangast in his own lair! Whew!! Also stefan clapped my hand, we had a great game!
Later I managed to kill itangast once more, but I tried to kill smaug three times without success. What´s wrong with him??
We ended up pretty late, dragon hunting isn´t a job for a few hours. So I want to bed to have a small cup of sleep, since I should be among the first to get up again.

On Sunday I took part in the japanese sealed deck. Here I want to thank especially Takao for being such a nice and generous guy. He and also Akira gave a lot of dearly wanted japanese stuff for prizes. I wanted him also to take part in that tournament, since he came all the long way from japan, so at least he should be able to play. but one will never overcome the kindness of takao, when he thinks he has to take care for the tournament!
I played two very hasty games, since I had to do some organizing stuff in between, nevertheless I enjoyed the games with ernst (tie) and jürgen (win) very much, we always had some fun figuring out the exact meaning of some cards!

Then it was time for me to address a few final words from my chair to the crowd. Finally I was surprised by a very special gift: almost every player donated a special card with some personal greeting to me. There are some real marvels among them. Lots of thanks again!!

I was not able to say thanks at the venue in a proper way to some people, so let me do this now here:
First Thomas Hermann, who found this marvellous place and took care, that we were able to have the festival there!
Then Wim Heemskerk, who supported us with sealed stuff at great prizes!!
Also thanks to Stefan Meier, Hartmut Lippand Christoph Schürmann, who helped me developing METDG II, Dragon Hunt, Cool Play and Dalmuti.

Thanks to Lutz Schröder for helping with his homepage www.meccg.de
And finally to all of you, especially those who came from afar: three days at a weekend is too short a time to be among such excellent and admirable MECCG-folk!

The action is over now, but be sure: this year´s Lure of MECCG ends with the promise, to meet again in another year!

Wolfgang