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2004-09-22 RussCon Report

antarctic rails

Antarctic Rails, a russcon game
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News

16 of us played 14 games!

Daniel brought the largest most dangerous cheesecake ever before seen. No ordinary man can finish a slice of this rich behemoth. He also brought some award certificates received which honor his service in Iraq, including that one really cool one which he'd told us about earlier, yeah, you know the one I mean, at least if you've talked with him yourself. The sad news is this was quite possibly his last RussCon for the foreseeable future since he probably has a job lined up in Arizona that starts in a week. Congratulations, but too bad it's not in Austin!

Week 3 of Antarctic Rails art, just because Clayton and I spent so much time on this damn image. Since it first appeared two weeks ago, not one person has taken a stab at identifying the source art. Holy smokes, does NOBODY know the two games whose art was used as a source for Antarctic Rails? Was last week's lavish offer of a free meta point not sufficient incentive? Ok, the stakes are raised: I'll give a choice of one out of several of my old wargames to whoever first tells me the answer! (Winner must pick up prize in person, unless it's Alfred, to whom I still owe a game to and am being a totally heinous slacker about mailing, sorry dude, it will come eventually, yes, oh yes,...) The serious competitor may wish to examine the larger detailed copy.

Burlesque for Peace is having an event October 3 9pm at Emo's (6th and Red River). Proof of voter registration is required to enter this show! I know at least one person involved with this. Should be good fun! I plan to be there.

Game Results

RicochetRobot (dining)3JP 1 RussW 1 Ben -2
TicketToRide (kitchen)5Clayton 4 Whendy 1 Fred 1 MarkH -2 Marty -4
EinfachGenial (dining)4JP 3 MarkY 1 RussW -1 Daniel -3
LostCities (floor)2Marty 1 MarkY -1
WasSticht (living)4KevinU 3 KevinY 1 Ben -1 JimG -3
QuoVadis (dining)5Daniel 4 MarkH 2 JP 0 SarahM -2 William -4
PuertoRico (kitchen)4Clayton 3 RussW 1 Whendy -1 Fred -3
Tichu (living)2( MarkY Ben ) 1 ( JimG KevinU ) -1
Can'tStop (floor)3Clayton 2 RussW -1 Whendy -1
CarcassonneTraders (dining)5SarahM 4 JP 2 Daniel 0 KevinY -2 William -4
TakeItEasy (dining)3Sarah 2 JP 0 KevinY -2
Cartagena (living)4William 3 Clayton 1 KevinU -2 RussW -2
Can'tStop (dining)3KevinY 2 SarahM -1 JP -1
Scrabble (kitchen)2MarkY 1 Ben -1

JP pulled ahead early in Ricochet Robot, but then Ben and I began to catch up, and I was happy just to finally tie JP. We played with our new idea of keeping your gained chits face-down, to discourage precalculating remaining routes, and it did indeed seem to help that issue.

Ratings

Rank Ratings:    
 4.4998 Clayton
 2.0794 JP
 1.6094 SarahM
 1.0986 MarkY
 0.2231 Daniel
 0.0000 KevinU
 0.0000 MarkH
-0.2877 KevinY
-0.5232 Whendy
-0.6931 RussW
-0.9163 Marty
-1.0987 Fred
-1.5042 Ben
-1.8326 William
-2.0794 JimG
 
Win Ratings:
 3.8067 Clayton won 3 of 4
 2.0794 SarahM won 2 of 4
 1.0986 Daniel won 1 of 3
 0.9400 William won 1 of 3
 0.5346 JP won 2 of 6
 0.4700 Marty won 1 of 2
 0.4055 MarkY won 2 of 4
 0.4055 KevinU won 1 of 3
 0.1823 KevinY won 1 of 4
-0.4463 MarkH won 0 of 2
-0.5108 Fred won 0 of 2
-0.8630 RussW won 1 of 5
-0.9163 Whendy won 0 of 3
-0.9808 JimG won 0 of 2
-1.3863 Ben won 1 of 4

Clayton is the Devil! JP and SarahM are Co-Vice-Devils! Then Daniel and MarkY.

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

I used GraphViz to generate the graph image.

 devil graph

Meta Game

Ben was the Meta Devil and designed the following Meta Game (actually, he agreed to the following Meta Game, which was designed and emailed out by Jeffles):

Knowing that it was a tie, and that Ben detests meta games. I propose the following meta game, which Ben may accept or decline.

I've been using google too much lately, so I was curious to see what google would say for meta game.
Well, the second site listed had this as an example of meta-gaming.

<<As Gary said, an extreme example would be "You must support my attack on Warsaw with your army in Galicia or I will call round your house later and kill you." A less extreme example would be "You must support my attack on Warsaw with your army in Galicia in this game or I will not support your defence of Moscow in game X (where X is a different game in which both players are participating) " In both examples, the protagonist is using knowledge that lie outside the domain of a game to try and influence results inside a game.>>

While the coming round to your house and killing you had some interesting possibilities... I continued and found more interesting inspiration from http://www3.pair.com/garnett/EmeraldCity/metagame.htm

While that seemed very cool, it also seemed very complicated.

So just record where you play each game. We will tallly up the number of different players + number of different games played on the main table, kitchen table, living room table, living room floor and other.
For each game you then get the number of meta points we have just calculated add em all up and divide by the number of games.
Most meta points wins.
Ties broken by most locations played, then most games played, then win ranking, then random.

(I figured kitchen table would be low, and all those DAMN TICHU players would be punished!)

Using this week as an example, deleting half games played and making up locations gives us.

Exxtra Floor 4 MarkH 3 Ben 1 Clayton -1 Adam -3
Tichu Kitchen 2 ( Ben KevinU ) 1 ( MarkH Adam ) -1
RicochetRobot Living 5 JP 3 Jeffles 3 Adam 0 KevinU -2 Ben -4
ModernArt Main 4 RussW 3 Tim 1 Whendy -1 Sarah -3
Ra Floor 4 Marty 3 JimG 1 MarkY -2 JP -2
PrincesOfFlorence Main 5 MarkY 4 ToddG 2 JimG 0 Marty -2 EricE -4
Can'tStop Living 5 Sarah 4 Whendy 2 Tim -2 RussW -2 William -2
TicketToRide Floor 5 JeffS 4 Clayton 2 KevinY 0 Fina -2 TimG -4
RealLife Kitchen 3 Ben 2 William 0 Jeffles -2
Mu Kitchen 5 Adam 4 KevinU 2 Ben 0 MarkH -2 Jeffles -4

Floor = 15 = 3 games +MarkH Ben Clayton Adam Marty JimG MarkY JP JeffS KevinY Fina TimG
Kitchen = 9 = 3 games + Ben KevinU MarkH Adam William Jeffles
Living = 12 = 2Games +JP Jeffles Adam KevinU Ben Sarah Whendy Tim RussW William
Main = 11 = 2 games + RussW Tim Whendy Sarah MarkY ToddG JimG Marty EricE
Other = 0

Winner tied with 15 points (Only played on floor) Clayton , Marty , JimG , JeffS, KevinY, Fina, TimG
We would then break ties. Seems since I cut off the other half of games, they all played one game. So win ranking would mean Fina wins.

Ben accepted this proposal:

I'm fine with this meta-game, but Jeff gets to calculate the scores :-)

I agreed that Jeffles better calculate the scores because I'm not sure I grok the arcane rules even after reading them a couple times! I just get that you want to play in various locations. I think. I hope, because that's what I did. But here's what Jeffles reported to me as his reckoning of the results:

dining = 15 (6 games + 9 players) JP RussW Ben MarkY Daniel MarkH SarahM KevinY William
kitchen = 11 (3 games + 8 -players) MarkY Ben Clayton Whendy Fred MarkH Marty RussW
floor = 7 (2 games + 5 players ) Marty MarkY Clayton RussW Whendy
living = 11 (3 games + 8 players) KevinU KevinY Ben JimG MarkY William Clayton RussW

Scores:
Ben 15 + 11 + 11 + 11 / 4 = 12
Clayton 11 11 7 11 / 4 = 10
Daniel 15 15 15 /3 = 15
Fred 11 11 /2 = 11
JimG 11 11 / 2 = 11
JP 15 15 15 15 15 15 / 6 = 15
KevinY 15 15 15 11 / 4 = 14
KevinU 11 11 11 / 3 = 11
MarkH 15 11 /2 = 13
MarkY 15 11 7 11 / 4 = 11
Marty 11 7 /2 = 9
RussW 15 15 11 7 11 = 11.8
SarahM 15 15 15 15 /4 = 15
Whendy 11 11 7 /3 = 9 2/3
William 15 15 11 / 3 = 13 2/3

So tied at 15 we have Daniel, JP and SarahM who all only played at the dining room table. Sadly I don't remember my own tie breker. Hopefully you can do that.

Hmm, so the goal wasn't to sit at lots of locations, but rather to sit at the most popular location! Ok, the first tie breaker was most locations played at, but Daniel, JP, and SarahM all played only at one location (the dining table). They played 3, 6, 4 games respectively, so JP played the most and is the Meta Devil and will design next week's Meta Game!

Evening's Soundtrack

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, self-titled
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Madonna
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Relative Ways/Homage
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Source Tags and Codes
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, The Secret of Elena's Tomb

Maybe it's from reading so much lately about our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq...

Links

Burlesque for Peace is having an event October 3.

U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday remixed with Bush singing

Are Libertarians Surrendering Pacifists?

Damned Big Difference

Grand Theft America political Flash video based on the election investigations by Greg Palast

Roger Waters released 2 new songs, which are both rather political, not surprisingly! The francophiles among us might enjoy that some of the lyrics are french.

Jimmy Swaggart in an ad highlighting his recent appalling comment to his cheering congregation that he'd kill a gay and lie to God saying that the gay died.

VotePair is an interesting concept. If you support Kerry and live in a state whose election outcome is determined, and someone else lives in a closely contested swing state and wants to vote Green/Libertarian/Independent, and you trust each other, does it make sense for you to vote for their candidate (to help establish a more national presence of the third parties) and they vote for Kerry (to help rid our fair land of the foul pestilence currently wreaking fiery horror from the white house)? Buying and selling votes is illegal, but trading votes apparently is legal (certainly our elected officials do such bargaining themselves). This site facilitates the process of meeting a like-minded individual in order to trade votes thusly. It's also arguably the best available technique, given that our country doesn't use Single Transferable Vote aka Australian Style elections. A fascinating and delightful observation is that Bush supporters cannot usefully trick someone by hooking up with someone at this site, pretending to support a non-Bush candidate.

Something Awful does their inimitable treatment to boardgames: part 1 and part 2

Crimson Room is a "trapped in a room" adventure puzzle in Flash. Beware that there's a UI problem in Firefox, sadly, so I had to play in MSIE. After finding about 10 items hidden in the room and still not getting the door open I eventually quit...

Worth1000photoshop nightmare contest - see the related galleries pulldown for more if you like these.

Kids create new sign language - A new sign language created over the last 30 years by deaf children in Nicaragua, has given experts a unique insight into how languages evolve.

Should I rip this? decision chart

Deutsche Welle has Klingon pages

thunderrstorm posts neat street art from Los Angeles

The Tao of Backup and The Unix Power Classic: A book about the Unix Way and its power

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