2004-05-26 RussCon Report

News

16 of us played 19 games. Welcome newcomer KevinY (a guy from go club who we've been trying to get into RussCon-style games for a long time, and JP finally succeeded last weekend, heh).

The semi-occasional DaveB appeared, with boxloads of games from his recent email, doing the old Selling Off Vast Tracts of Games thing. He wants to get rid of clutter, other people want cheap games... it's a win/win situation!

Flipside (Glitter Monkey Rodeo) is a local event that's like a smaller version of Burning Man. JP & I are going - first time for such an event for either of us. We'll be camping for 4 days in a community of weirdness. We've been preparing busily the past few days since this event encourages people to do some kind of weird art or performance or whatever. Since the official theme this year is inspired by the Year of the Monkey, I made a stencil of a "Barrel of Monkeys" monkey and put a chain of 25 of them hanging around my shoulders on a shirt. During the first half of RussCon, JP also finished stenciling his monkeys onto a shirt. I also had lots of monkey CDs around the house which we stenciled. I'm not really sure how this whole long weekend will all turn out, but I'm cranking out this Report quickly before we leave today (Thursday)... (Thanks to Chad and Anderson for getting us interested in the first place, to Anderson and Sarah for helping us get tickets, and to Whendy and JimG for loaning us a variety of camping gear.)

Game Results

EinfachGenial	4	Fina 3 RussW 1 Daniel -1 Jeffles -3
Crokinole	2	Ben 1 Whendy -1
RicochetRobot	3	Jeffles 2 RussW 0 Ben -2
Crokinole	2	( DaveB MikeC ) 1 ( Whendy KevinY ) -1
Blokus	4	MikeC 3 JimG 1 KevinY -1 Clayton -3
Tichu	2	( JimG Jeffles ) 1 ( Ben Whendy ) -1
ZirkusFlohcati	4	KevinY 3 William 1 Clayton -1 RussW -3
Carcassonne	4	RussW 3 MikeC 0 Clayton 0 KevinY -3
Wizard	6	Jeffles 5 JimG 3 JP 1 Ben -2 Whendy -2 Justin -5
EinfachGenial	3	Whendy 2 Fina 0 RussW -2
Cloud9	5	Ben 4 Jeffles 2 MarkY 0 Justin -2 William -4
Vampire	4	RussW 3 Whendy 0 Justin 0 Fina -3
BoggleBowl	2	( William Jeffles ) 1 ( MarkY Ben ) -1
Exxtra	4	Whendy 3 RussW 0 Fina 0 Justin -3
PuertoRico	4	JP 3 JimG 1 Clayton -1 KevinY -3
Bluff	6	Justin 5 Clayton 3 RussW 1 Whendy -1 KevinY -3 Jeffles -5
Crokinole	2	( Ben William ) 1 ( MarkY Matt ) -1
RicochetRobot	3	RussW 2 Justin 0 KevinY -2
Tichu	2	( William MarkY ) 1 ( Matt Ben ) -1

Einfach Genial seems to be the hot new RussCon game, which is interesting since it's such an abstract unthemed game; the previous game to fill this role would probably be Blokus. They both don't take long to explain or play, and both have pretty plastic pieces placed on a grid....

Meanwhile I continue to enjoy Ricochet Robot a lot. Jeffles trounced me and Ben, proving his mastery again; later I taught KevinY (who did quite well for a first timer, only barely falling to 3rd place against Justin in the end) and I got to be the Jeffles of that game.

The Carcassonne game proved quite suspenseful - the final spread in scores was just 4 points from 1st place to last place.

In Vampire, I found myself in the happy position of having all colors except orange. Everyone else had decent orange sets. I could bring out a wimpy set of 3 oranges, which would be worthless, and end the game. But I could calculate that even with my oranges being worthless, if the game ended then, I had enough points to win. Woot!

Ratings

Rank Ratings:       
 2.4204 JimG
 2.0794 RussW
 2.0794 MikeC
 1.7918 Jeffles
 1.6740 JP
 0.8755 William
 0.6931 DaveB
 0.0000 Fina
-0.3930 Whendy
-0.4055 Daniel
-0.6931 Ben
-0.6931 MarkY
-1.2809 Clayton
-1.3863 Matt
-2.0794 Justin
-4.4998 KevinY

Win Ratings:
 3.5835 Jeffles won 4 of 7
 2.0149 RussW won 3 of 9
 1.7918 MikeC won 2 of 3
 1.5686 William won 3 of 5
 1.2040 JP won 1 of 2
 0.6931 DaveB won 1 of 1
 0.4055 Fina won 1 of 4
 0.4055 Justin won 1 of 6
 0.3285 Ben won 3 of 8
-0.0645 JimG won 1 of 4
-0.2469 Whendy won 2 of 8
-0.2877 Daniel won 0 of 1
-0.7577 KevinY won 1 of 7
-0.9163 MarkY won 1 of 4
-1.3330 Clayton won 0 of 5
-1.3863 Matt won 0 of 2

Jeffles and JimG and I are Co-Devils! (Bah, I didn't want to do that well in the ratings this week - I wanted to be in the middle of the pack!) MikeC is Vice-Devil! Then JP and William.

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 emailed out the following Meta Game:

Yeah!
Devil *and* Meta-devil at the same time.
A truly glorious achievement!

Not only that, I forced the four people below me in the ratings graph into a strict marching order.

For next week's meta game, count the number of poeple you are connected to in next week's ratings graph. You get that many entries in the meta-lottery.

For each question you ask about this meta-game, you lose one lottery entry.

(Jeffles and Whendy asked questions.) From the graph, you can see that Fina is connected to the most people (four) this week, so Fina is the Meta Devil and will design next week's Meta Game!

Update: JP later emailed:

Note the word "meta-lottery".

I'm not sure if Russ actually performed a lottery, but this quote seems to imply that he did not. I'm certainly not going to ask him. Then I'd lose a lottery ticket.

Instead I'm going to officially change the rules to state that the person connected to the most other people wins.

Besides, we need to be packing and leaving, not wasting time on a silly meta-game.

Oops, um, yeah, maybe this was one of those special lotteries where whoever has the most lottery tickets is the winner... see you on the flipside!

2004-05-26 RussCon Report

News

Game Results

Ratings

Meta Game

Evening's Soundtrack

Links