February 19 2003 RussCon Report

News

hello sushi I forgot to mention last week that RussD and Pauline also brought various candies from Japan, some of which were cute miniature versions of other food, such as a sushi tray complete with little chopsticks (modeled here by William), and pizzas, and french fries!

Dan has announced a new meta meta game:

As an incentive to appear at RussCon, I've decided to contribute 48 New Zealand Lord of the Ring stamps to the winners. Over the next 6 weeks, 8 stamps each week will be randomly raffled off to all game players. Each game you play gets one share in winning 1 stamp that week. Stamp winners lose their share until all players have received a stamp that week.

1st week -    40c - Gandalf and Saruman
2nd week -    80c - The Lady Galadriel
3rd week -    90c - Sam and Frodo
4th week - $1.30  - Guardian of Rivendell
5th week - $1.50  - Strider
6th week - $2.00  - Boromir son of Denethor

Collect them all. Trade with your friends. Each stamp is a beautiful piece of art designed by Sacha Lees of Weta Workshop

Thanks Dan! This is cool. Since Dan's Meta Meta Game will stretch over 6 weeks, I've introduced a new section of the Report to announce each week's results!

Our Most Assiduous Reader will recall that we have already seen some spiffy New Zealand LOTR stamps, thanks to BradSmith who's living there.

The Saturday 02-15 peace rally and march was quite a large event. I took lots of pictures of interesting signs (most were handmade and unique, unlike many rallies that have lots of mass-manufactured identical signs), and finally got off my butt and made a proper photo gallery for the first time. The gallery software, by the way, is the only one I know of that generates valid XHTML instead of ill-formed code. The drawback is it's not as full-featured as some gallery programs, but it's easy to use.

After a long period of go hibernation (I'm ashamed to admit), I am finally back into go action and returned to go club this week. Hopefully I'll get back into practice soon since the AGA and Houston Go Club have officially announced the 2003 Go Congress will be August 2-10 at the University of Houston. Our Most Assiduous Reader knows there will be no RussCon that week. But don't worry, I'll remind you when the time is closer!

Game Results

DurchDieWueste	5	MarkG 4 Whendy 0 RussW 0 Dan 0 Matt -4
Barbu	4	William 3 JimG 1 MarkH -1 Ben -3
Vampire	3	Fina 2 RussW 0 Clayton -2
Blokus	4	MarkG 3 Dan 1 Matt -1 Whendy -3
TallyHo	2	Dan 1 Matt -1
Tichu	2	( Ben JimG ) 1 ( MarkH William ) -1
AgeOfSteam	4	JeffF 3 Marty 1 Steve -1 JP -3
UnionPacific	4	RussW 3 Clayton 1 MarkG -1 Fina -3
Carcassonne	6	Clayton 5 RussW 3 MarkG 1 JP -1 Steve -4 Fina -4
DetroitClevelandGrandPrix	3	JimG 2 Ben 0 Matt -2

Fun to play Durch die Wüste again, even if I idiotically clumped 3 of my initial placements together and put the 4th in a place where it got cut off in the first round.

Age of Steam is the new followup to Lancashire Rails and Volldampf. JP reports it was pretty good, but unforgiving of newbie errors. It also seemed to take them a while to play.

hall of shame A reminder: please write and spell clearly when recording game results, make the scores and ranks clear, and remember last initials for people with common names like Mark, thanks! Again this week, I'm pretty sure MarkY didn't show up to play one game of Tichu late in the evening... Admittedly we have a cornucopia of Marks lately, but...

Ratings

New Multiplicative Rank Ratings:   
 2.8779 17.7778 MarkG (4)
 2.3026 10.0000 RussW (4)
 2.1972 9.0000 JimG (3)
 1.3863 4.0000 JeffF (1)
 1.0986 3.0000 Clayton (3)
 1.0986 3.0000 Dan (3)
 0.6931 2.0000 William (2)
 0.4055 1.5000 Marty (1)
-0.6931 0.5000 Ben (3)
-1.0986 0.3333 MarkH (2)
-1.3863 0.2500 Fina (3)
-1.3863 0.2500 Whendy (2)
-1.5041 0.2222 Steve (2)
-1.6740 0.1875 JP (2)
-3.8067 0.0222 Matt (4)

New Multiplicative Win Ratings:
 2.5257 12.5000 MarkG won 2 of 4
 1.5041 4.5000 JimG won 2 of 3
 1.3863 4.0000 JeffF won 1 of 1
 1.0986 3.0000 Clayton won 1 of 3
 0.6931 2.0000 William won 1 of 2
 0.6286 1.8750 Fina won 1 of 3
 0.5754 1.7778 RussW won 1 of 4
 0.1823 1.2000 Dan won 1 of 3
 0.0000 1.0000 Ben won 1 of 3
-0.2877 0.7500 Marty won 0 of 1
-0.4700 0.6250 JP won 0 of 2
-0.4700 0.6250 Steve won 0 of 2
-0.5108 0.6000 Whendy won 0 of 2
-0.9808 0.3750 MarkH won 0 of 2
-1.6094 0.2000 Matt won 0 of 4

MarkG is the Devil! JimG & I are Co-Vice-Devils. JeffF is Vice-Vice-Devil. Then Clayton. Matt is the Generous Angel.

Meta Game

JimG was the Meta Devil. Here is the Meta Game he mailed out:

Let's see, we've done movies, and we've done game rules... what's another easy as pie meta game I can mine this idea for?!

[dim bulb grows brighter] Ah ha! Have it!

This time, we'll look at song lyrics. But, just to keep in theme, try to have lyrics you submit reference games (by proper name or common name) or gaming or similar, for example:

Snippet might be:

"You always won, every time you played the game"

Answers would be:

Bob Seeger, "Still the Same".

I will accept other lyric snippets, but submitters will earn a bonus meta game point for submitting lyrics which meet the above (rather broad) criteria. Players of the meta game will score 1 pt for each correct association with a song title, and one for performer (max two pts per lyric snippet). I will have the usual sheets available for tomorrow night, and will try to provide more space for your answers than Zach did for the movie trivia meta game...

And here are the quotes JimG printed out for us to identify, compiled from many submitted by a half dozen folks; warning, this is a hard quiz!

A lady doesn't wander all over the room, and blow on some other guy's dice.

Bob liked to play his Poker, Pinocle, Whist and Euchre, but Shooting Dice was his favorite game.

But the game never ends when your whole world depends On the turn of a friendly card

Don't surround yourself with yourself, move on back two squares

Don't you know the deuce is still wild?

Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games, Hiding out in treetops, shouting out rude names.

Every single day, every word you say, every game you play

I need a love, not games

If you're going to play the game boy, you got to learn to play it right

It's so easy when you know the rules It's so easy all you have do is fall in love.

Let's play master and servant

Let's play Twister, let's play Risk

Like a game, if you lose, go to jail

Monopoly is so much fun I'd hate to spoil the game

Painted wings and giant's rings make way for other toys

Plays by sense of smell

Playing card games with the old man in the Club Car / Penny a point, ain't no one keeping score

So Come all of you Go players and a warning take by me. No matter how you play, you will rue the day if you fill your own liberty.

Strange what desire will make foolish people do

The joker ain't the only fool who'll do anything for you

We all play the game and when we dare, Cheat ourselves at solitaire

When the odds are sayin' You'll never win That's when a grin Should start.

Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play

You can't win and you can't break even - you can't get out of the game

Answers here. JimG was pretty flexible on the performer/writer/singer answers, and didn't use a lot of the really obscure/hard submissions he got, but even so this was a hard quiz. Out of a possible 50 answer points, the top score for answer points was 17.5. Here are the scores (total=answers+submissions)...

20.5=17.5+3 RussW
17=12+5 MarkG
11=11+0 Clayton
10=9+1 Dan
8=8+0 Matt
6=0+6 PJ
5=4+1 Ben
5=0+5 Marty
2=0+2 Whendy
1=0+1 Clay, JP

Thus I am the Meta Devil and will design next week's Meta Game! The most-submitted song was Man on the Moon (Whendy, Marty, JP) which is funny since only I got the title and only Dan and I knew it was REM. JimG noted that PJ gets the award for most points for someone who didn't actually play the final meta-game with 6 (Yesterday, Paradise City, The Gambler, Every Breath You Take, Master and Servant, Queen of Hearts), and PJ should get a bonus meta-point for providing the way cool web site link below (which I was not previously aware of, hence the way-coolness of it!):
http://www.leoslyrics.com/

Reminder of the new incentive to compete in the Meta Game: The Meta Devil gets full table rights, just like a regular Devil from now on, so they could stake out the dining table or the kitchen table. Of course Vice-Devils continue to get secondary dibs on the tables if no higher-ranking Devil or Meta Devil takes a table.

Dan's Meta Meta Game

Dan reports:

1st week -    40c - Gandalf and Saruman
2nd week -    80c - The Lady Galadriel
3rd week -    90c - Sam and Frodo
4th week - $1.30  - Guardian of Rivendell
5th week - $1.50  - Strider
6th week - $2.00  - Boromir son of Denethor

Collect them all. Trade with your friends. Each stamp is a beautiful piece of art designed by Sacha Lees of Weta Workshop

Winners can pick up their stamps at any time.

In fact, I wrote a little Java program to assign winners. The program keeps a list of players (I did not play), the number of raffle shares, and the number of wins. A random winner is selected from the players with the fewest wins. That is repeated until all prizes are gone.

And here are this week's winners:
Share owner=MarkG, shares=4, wins=1.
Share owner=RussW, shares=4, wins=1.
Share owner=JimG, shares=3, wins=1.
Share owner=JeffF, shares=1, wins=0.
Share owner=Clayton, shares=3, wins=0.
Share owner=William, shares=2, wins=0.
Share owner=Marty, shares=1, wins=1.
Share owner=Ben, shares=3, wins=0.
Share owner=MarkH, shares=2, wins=0.
Share owner=Fina, shares=3, wins=1.
Share owner=Whendy, shares=2, wins=0.
Share owner=Steve, shares=2, wins=1.
Share owner=JP, shares=2, wins=1.
Share owner=Matt, shares=4, wins=1.

Thus MarkG, RussW, JimG, Marty, Fina, Steve, JP, and Matt each get a Gandalf & Saruman 40c stamp! I note all 3 players who played the most games (4) won a stamp, and Marty who played only 1 game was fortunate and won a stamp.