2004-01-28 RussCon Report

News

18 of us played 12 games, including new guy KevinU (friend of RussD).

I blogged some stuff about futzing about with my new PDA, starting here, if anyone is curious. The current highlight is enjoying doing test-driven development with JUnit.

In February, I start a UT informal class in Mandarin, woot. Unfortunately it's on Mondays, so no Thor's Hammer go nights for me for a month.

Game Results

Cartagena	6	Tim 5 Whendy 2 JP 2 MarkG -3 Jeffles -3 RussW -3
Tichu	2	( Ben MarkH ) 1 ( Fred MarkY ) -1
Transamerica	2	KevinU 1 Clayton -1
Zero	5	William 4 MarkY 1 Ben 1 MarkH -2 Fred -4
Carcassonne	3	Clayton 2 KevinU 0 Binkley -2
Acquire	5	Jeffles 4 Whendy 2 Tim 0 RussW -2 JP -4
RealLife	5	JimG 4 MarkH 1 Ben 1 William -3 MarkY -3
RicochetRobot	8	Tim 7 Matt 5 Marty 2 William 2 KevinU -2 MarkY -2 Binkley -6 RussD -6
CarcassonneCastle	2	RussW 1 Clayton -1
PuertoRico	4	Jeffles 3 JP 1 JimG -1 Whendy -3
Bluff	4	Whendy 3 JP 1 RussW -1 Jeffles -3
RicochetRobot	8	Tim 7 RussD 4 William 4 Marty 0 MarkY 0 KevinU -4 Ben -4 Matt -7

William brought a new edition of Ricochet Robot; this second edition is called Ricochet Robots, but since it appears to be essentially the same game and everyone still calls it Ricochet Robot, I'll keep recording with the singular title. It adds a couple bits of new chrome. I watched it played for a while and still suck at it. Tim rules. I noticed that there are now 6 recorded games of Ricochet Robot in which Tim played; he won all but one of them. The other game he came in second to Alfred.

In Carcassone Castle, I am forming a theory that it's better to earn frequent small awards rather than occasional big awards, so that you land on more spaces on the score track and thus have more chances to gain the special chits. And this is consistent with my other theory that it's not worth going for a large keep. The opponent can usually play tiles to reduce the keep award at the end once they've decided they are not winning the keep contest.

Ratings

Rank Ratings:       
 5.9506 Tim
 1.9459 William
 1.2040 JimG
 1.2040 Whendy
 0.9163 Jeffles
 0.4212 Ben
 0.4055 Marty
 0.2877 MarkH
-0.2877 Clayton
-0.2877 JP
-0.5390 RussD
-0.5596 KevinU
-0.6931 MarkG
-0.8267 Matt
-1.0986 RussW
-1.7272 MarkY
-2.3026 Fred
-2.4849 Binkley

Win Ratings:
 5.7275 Tim won 3 of 4
 2.5257 Jeffles won 2 of 4
 1.3218 JimG won 1 of 2
 1.1192 William won 1 of 4
 0.6931 Whendy won 1 of 4
 0.2469 MarkH won 1 of 3
 0.1133 Ben won 1 of 4
 0.0206 KevinU won 1 of 4
 0.0000 RussW won 1 of 4
-0.1823 MarkG won 0 of 1
-0.2671 Marty won 0 of 2
-0.2671 RussD won 0 of 2
-0.2671 Matt won 0 of 2
-0.2877 Clayton won 1 of 3
-0.5390 Binkley won 0 of 2
-0.9163 Fred won 0 of 2
-0.9808 JP won 0 of 4
-1.4065 MarkY won 0 of 5

Tim is the Devil! Jeffles, JimG, and William are Co-Vice-Devils. Then Whendy.

If you are confused how the ratings work, you could peruse the FAQ.

I used GraphViz to generate the graph image.

Meta Game

JP was the Meta Devil and mailed out the following Meta Game:

diversity metagame

screw flavor text.

for each different person that you play at least one game with, you get a point.
for each different game that you play, you get a point.
for each different table that you play at, you get a point.
for each game you play on the floor, you get a point.
for each thing you bring for other people* that no one else brings, you get a point.
*this applies to food brought for others to eat, games brought for others to play, and anything else that I deem appropriate.
for each different language that you have a conversation in (at least a minute), you get a point.

most points wins.
ties broken arbitrarily by myself (or RussW if I don't do it).

score your own points and submit them to RussW or myself.

Points submitted included:

15 Matt
14 Jeffles
13 RussW Whendy
2 JP

So Matt is the Meta Devil and will design next week's Meta Game!

Links

Without Sanctuary is a dark slice of US history: vintage souvenir photographs and postcards, showing lynchers with their hanged victims.

MIT OpenCourseWare makes class materials of many MIT courses available free online

Kanji Gold is free Japanese tutorial software by the father of my cow-orker Greg

fsf-exchange.txt records attempts to grok Red Hat's licensing by my cow-orker Nugget

Integer Handling with the C++ SafeInt Class, a Microsoft article about making an int-like class that throws exceptions if arithmetic errors occur. I agree with the sentiment and consider it a very unfortunate historical accident that integer arithmetic doesn't throw exceptions like floating point does; undetected overflows cause many bugs. I dispute the author's suggestion that one try to always use unsigned ints, though; I would rather try to always use signed ints, as argued in Large Scale C++ Software Development by John Lakos.

Kurt Wenner, Master Street Painter

Darque Dungeon

Nazgul... they don't just ride horses and dragons.

Hello Cthulhu

Besta hljómsveit í heimi (miðað við stærð) ... a guy with horns attached all over his body honks various famous works of classical music

CDC Ebola Virus Outbreak Action Playset

Italian men's fashion from some fashion show

bad_porn family fashion

Panda car commercial

The ESP Game

Ebola and Black Death plush toys

Kaba-Kick is russian roulette for kids