2004-08-25 RussCon Report

Game Results

Drakon	4	Tim 3 William 1 JimG -1 RussW -3
Tichu	2	( Fred Ben ) 1 ( Whendy MarkH ) -1
Crokinole	2	( KevinY Clayton ) 1 ( JeffS JP ) -1
6Nimmt	6	JeffS 5 EricE 3 JP 1 Clayton -1 KevinY -3 Marty -5
Trendy	4	Whendy 3 MarkH 1 Ben -1 Fred -3
Exxtra	3	Fred 2 Ben 0 William -2
SaintPetersburg	4	RussW 3 Tim 1 William -1 JimG -3
Crokinole	2	JimG 1 Whendy -1
Crokinole	2	JimG 1 Whendy -1
EinfachGenial	4	EricE 3 JeffS 1 Marty -1 Clayton -3
Tichu	2	( Ben William ) 1 ( Whendy JimG ) -1
Blokus	2	RussW 1 William -1
Exxtra	4	EricE 3 Ben 1 Clayton -1 William -3
Goa	4	Matt 3 Daniel 1 ChuckS -1 ToddG -3
Trias	5	Daniel 4 JP 2 Matt 0 Clayton -2 KevinY -4
SaintPetersburg	4	RussW 3 KevinY 1 Tim -1 JP -3

Saint Petersburg is hot, and Tim and I both wanted to play it twice. I won both and credit my larger number of aristocrats. It was also played Saturday night at JeffS's party, as was another of Matt's games, Trias, which is an interesting strategy game with continental drift and dinosaurs which needs a largish table because the playing area is drifting farther and farther apart. A subtle rules issue arose tonight and we think we finally groked how splits and mergers are to be scored, but boy the rules needed a better editor.

I suggested Drakon for meta reasons, but the game ended up rather quick and vicious! All three of the tile stealing tiles came out very early, as did 2 double gold tiles, and it was all ended up nasty brutish and short, just like life according to Thomas Hobbes.

William and I played a 2-player Blokus (where we each control 2 colors), and discovered that I suck at remembering the turn order and he sucks at deciding his move without having to physically try fitting a dozen pieces in a dozen combinations.

Ratings

Rank Ratings:     
 3.6889 EricE
 2.0794 RussW
 2.0149 Daniel
 1.5041 JeffS
 1.3863 Matt
 1.3863 Tim
 1.3863 Ben
 0.4055 Fred
-0.2877 MarkH
-0.4054 ChuckS
-1.0987 JimG
-1.0987 JP
-1.3863 ToddG
-1.3863 Whendy
-1.4271 KevinY
-2.0794 Clayton
-2.1973 Marty
-2.4853 William

Win Ratings:
 3.1781 RussW won 3 of 4
 2.5903 EricE won 2 of 3
 1.5041 Fred won 2 of 3
 1.3218 Daniel won 1 of 2
 1.1632 Matt won 1 of 2
 0.8109 JeffS won 1 of 3
 0.8109 Tim won 1 of 3
 0.4055 Ben won 2 of 5
 0.1178 JimG won 2 of 5
 0.0000 KevinY won 1 of 4
-0.2877 ChuckS won 0 of 1
-0.2877 ToddG won 0 of 1
-0.2877 Clayton won 1 of 5
-0.4700 Marty won 0 of 2
-0.9808 MarkH won 0 of 2
-1.2683 William won 1 of 6
-1.3863 JP won 0 of 4
-1.3863 Whendy won 1 of 5

EricE and I are Co-Devils! Daniel and Fred are Co-Vice-Devils. Then Matt and JeffS. Then Tim.

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

I used GraphViz to generate the graph image.

Meta Game

BD was the Meta Devil and designed the following Meta Game:

Well, that has to be some sort of record for the world's Most Boring Meta-Game. You would think a fellow should be punished for such a thing, but instead I get to do it all over again.

OK, so I'm clearly unqualified to design a meta-game, plus which I'm not going to be there next week to keep score anyway, so, this week, we will have a meta-meta-game as follows:

Anyone interested in being meta-devil, please post an outline of your proposed meta-game (or several meta-games, if you like) to the list.

If you see a proposal you like, vote for it by sending a note to me (not the whole list) with your vote. You can change your mind by sending me another vote for a different game later on. Please note, you're voting for games here, not for people.

Whichever game has received the most votes by 11:59pm Monday wins the meta-meta-game, the prize for which is becoming the official meta-game for the week.

And if nobody proposes any meta-games, I'll come up with one of my own so painful that you'll wish you had. :-)

Dudley proposed:

Social Network
Each week Russ generates a nice little image using GraphViz. The winner of the meta-game is the person in the image who is connected to the most other people. Ties are broken by Win Ratings, then Rank Ratings, then Russ standard random tie breaker.

In this report http://russcon.org/RussCon/2004/0818.html. Marty would win with five connections.
In this report http://russcon.org/RussCon/2004/0811.html. Ben would win with six connections.

I proposed:

The games played at RussCon come from their publishers with rules printed in diverse languages, not just English. Your goal is to cover as many languages as possible. After playing a game, note which language(s) the official published rules are in, and you may add those languages to your personal list of language which you have covered during the evening. Give your list to me before you leave, or else you aren't eligible to win the Meta Game. You will earn one meta point for each language which you have covered during the evening. E.g. if you play Einfach Genial, you may add German to your list. (To aid score checking, please also note the game with the language.) Our Most Assiduous Reader will note that some games can earn you more than one meta point since they supply official published rules in more than one language. Ties broken by whoever brings La Strada (I WILL play that game at RussCon, damn it!); further ties broken by whoever plays the most games of La Strada or Saint Petersburg; further ties broken randomly.

And BD reported the results of this giant election:

The votes are in, and the winner is Russ' "Linguaphiles" game. (With a whopping two votes!)

So, Russ is this week's new and improved meta-devil!

Thus I became the Meta Devil and designed the previously mentioned Meta Game. JimG and I both realized Drakon was the game to play, as it includes rules in 7 languages: English, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, German, French, Italian. Later I noticed Blokus includes Dutch rules (as well as the already-covered English and German). William and I played both, thus tying in numbers of languages covered. Once again nobody brought La Strada, so the second tie-breaker came into play: I played 2 games of Saint Petersburg and William only played one, so I am the Meta Devil and will design next week's Meta Game!

Links

The Gallon of Milk Bet

Kill Harry

The Hacker's Diet®

Tribal language lacks words for most numbers

22+ year old Jeep rescues Hummer H2 in parking lot

Billy Collins is a recently named poet laureate; the linked poem may appeal to anyone with a rude neighbor and barking dog

Taking a closer look at the War Medals of George W. Bush

Pleasure Boat Captains for Truth

Late night commentary on W.

Bizarro World: Bush Only Screws Up Baseball

The man who invented the future: Alan Moore interviewed by salon.com

Peter David gets tattoo in support of CBLDF

Keenspot Buys Closed School in Cresbard, South Dakota (Keenspot is the same folks who run Keenspace, the free webcomic host I use for KoFC and Comicollage.)

Chuck Dowling vs free speech

The Content-type Saga explains a lot about deep brokenness in MSIE, XHTML, and all that. For instance, my files are .html and have a meta tag with content="text/html; charset=utf-8", but if you view source of http://hewgill.com/esperanto/index.xhtml you'll note the .xhtml file extension and no meta tag. Page Info shows its content type is "application/xhtml+xml" instead of "text/html", which is achieved via the Content-type header sent by the server instead of the source code in the page itself. This is more correct according to the standards, but unfortunately MSIE totally bolloxes this and can't view it. Subtle crap like this is why I think so many webpages are fucked up.

Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention by Thomas Scott

2004-08-25 RussCon Report

News

Game Results

Ratings

Meta Game

Evening's Soundtrack

Links