10 of us in attendance, 2 tracks of gaming, 5 games played in total (2 El Grande and 3 Euphrates & Tigris).
It was good to have Tom and Doug appear after several weeks without them. Plus Bob made another unexpected welcome Wednesday appearance. And William is back in Austin, making it to Wednesday night gaming for the first time, yea!
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Game results:
JP won a standard El Grande game. Well, not quite standard, as somehow they got confused and played an extra 10th round...
I meanwhile introduced multiple newbies to Euphrates and Tigris, abusing the newbies to win 2 of those. Tom won the other 1 (in only his 2nd game of it).
Marty recently bought the 2 expansion sets for El Grande; one of them even had an English rules translation... So an El Grande game with the Inquisitor expansion was played, and all I know is that it complicates the game (so JP reports). Brady won this game.
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The last Euphrates was 3 player, and boy were our scores higher than all the previous games, which were 4 player! I'll be curious to see if that holds true in other 3 player sessions of Euphrates. The previous 7 recorded games were all 4 player and had the following statistics:
Winners' scores ranged from 6 to 10, with mean of 8.
Lowest scores ranged from 2 to 5, with mean of 4.
Mean score was 5.9.
Compare that to our 3 player game (scores 15, 13, 8):
Winner scored 15 (almost twice the 4-player mean)
Lowest score was 8 (twice the 4-player mean)
Mean score was 12 (more than twice the 4-player mean)
Interesting! This is also an example of why tournament scoring systems based on final absolute score rather than simple ranking can be problematical, since the final scores can have quite different and perhaps hard to analyze distributions based on the number of players. Of course such a tournament scoring scheme could circumvent this by forcing all games to have the same number of players, but sometimes that's not practical.
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Congratulations to Brady who was the top devil of the March 18 Russcon. (The advantages of only playing one game, and winning it! Truly Machiavellian, that Brady...)
Here are the evening's rank ratings:
Brady 4/4 = 1.00 RussW 6/8 = 0.75 JP 6/8 = 0.75 Tom 0/6 = 0.00 James -1/9 = -0.11 Marty -1/7 = -0.14 William -2/8 = -0.25 Bob -1/3 = -0.33 Ken -4/8 = -0.50 Doug -7/9 = -0.78
Here are the evening's win ratings:
Brady 1.0 = (4/5) / (4/5) RussW 0.7 = (3/4 - 1/4 + 2/3) / (3/4 + 1/4 + 2/3) JP 0.6 = (4/5 - 1/5) / (4/5 + 1/5) Tom 0.5 = (-1/4 + 3/4) / (1/4 + 3/4)
(and everyone else won no games, getting ratings of -1)
This time, the rank and win rating orderings were in agreement with each other!
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Cumulative rank ratings over all Wednesday RussCons:
EricH 14/27 = 0.52 Tom 8/18 = 0.44 Jonathan 2/6 = 0.33 Evan 4/13 = 0.31 RussW 29/111 = 0.26 James 16/108 = 0.15 Tim 1/11 = 0.09 Ken 6/81 = 0.07 JP 3/43 = 0.07 Baron 1/15 = 0.07 Doug 3/58 = 0.05 Marty 3/73 = 0.04 Bob -1/9 = -0.11 Brady -17/100 = -0.17 Kevin -5/29 = -0.17 William -2/8 = -0.25 RussD -10/36 = -0.28 Jay -1/3 = -0.33 Alfred -14/32 = -0.44 Peter -12/27 = -0.44 Rick -13/26 = -0.50 JeffS -3/5 = -0.60 Dawn -4/6 = -0.67 Lance -8/11 = -0.73
James and Brady join RussW in the prestigious "100 Club" (having played versus more than 100 opponents now). They have received personalized parking spaces and keys to the executive washroom.
Since Tom graciously let us push his rating down, EricH is now the cumulative devil again, the bastard! Is there no stopping this fiend? We make him play games without Peter and Lance (upon whom he uses Jedi mind tricks, forcing them to destroy each other for his own evil ends).
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There is no Sunday gaming planned.
As always, I look forward to gaming with y'all next Wednesday!
Russ