2004-09-29 RussCon Report

News

17 of us played 13 games! Welcome back Doug and Sam who were here once before almost a year ago.

Monday 2004-10-04 is the deadline for voter registration! Travis County Tax Office lets you look up your name to confirm your voter registration info.

Alfred (the only competitor) wins the Antarctic Rails challenge. In one guess he identified the old SPI wargame War in the Ice (which posits conventional warfare between US and USSR over natural resources in Antarctica, with an optional weird fiction variant of a third player who is basically a Lovecraftian ancient alien race dwelling beneath the ice with crazy science fictional powers). It took Alfred two tries to identify the train engine, which is from 1830! I note in passing that Antarctic Rails has actually never been played at RussCon.

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 (Anderson said he'll be dancing). Should be good fun! Jeffles and I plan to attend.

I was late to my own RussCon this week, since I went to an orientation for the monthly training cycle of Literacy Austin for volunteer work which William started doing last month and got me interested in.

Game Results

Tichu	2	( Whendy Tim ) 1 ( Ben MarkH ) -1
LostCities	2	RussD 1 RussW -1
TicketToRide	4	Whendy 3 RussD 1 Sam -1 RussW -3
Trias	5	Matt 4 Jeffles 2 Clayton 0 Fred -3 Ben -3
Exxtra	5	Fred 4 MarkY 1 Ben 1 Matt -2 Sam -4
Carcassonne	5	JP 4 Clayton 1 Fred 1 Jeffles -2 KevinU -4
PrincesOfFlorence	4	Marty 3 Fina 1 MarkY -1 Doug -3
Guillotine	2	MarkY 1 Fina -1
SaintPetersburg	4	JP 3 Tim 1 KevinU -1 MarkH -3
RicochetRobot	4	JP 3 Tim 1 KevinU -1 Ben -3
Carcassonne	4	Fina 2 RussW 2 Clayton -1 Jeffles -3
Bluff	6	RussW 5 Jeffles 3 Clayton 1 Tim -2 KevinU -2 Fina -5
Stomp	2	MarkY 1 Matt -1

I was rather un-meta this evening, playing the old classic Lost Cities (in a very close finish with RussD), as well as the endlessly popular Carcassonne and Bluff. Ticket To Ride was the only remotely recent game (which appeared this year), and which I seem to totally suck at.

Stomp is the venerable 2-player classic from Chaosium, where one player has a bunch of elves in a garden, and the other player is a giant who just has two big feet.

Ratings

Rank Ratings:    
 4.3820 JP
 2.0794 Whendy
 1.3863 Marty
 1.2685 MarkY
 1.0986 RussD
 0.9933 Tim
 0.9808 Fred
 0.4055 RussW
 0.2231 Matt
 0.1699 Clayton
-0.4700 Jeffles
-1.3863 Doug
-1.3863 Fina
-2.0152 Sam
-2.0794 MarkH
-2.7076 Ben
-2.9318 KevinU

Win Ratings:
 4.3820 JP won 3 of 3
 2.0794 Whendy won 2 of 2
 1.5041 RussW won 2 of 4
 1.3863 Marty won 1 of 1
 1.1632 Fred won 1 of 3
 0.8755 MarkY won 2 of 4
 0.6931 Matt won 1 of 3
 0.4055 RussD won 1 of 2
-0.0645 Tim won 1 of 4
-0.2877 Doug won 0 of 1
-0.4700 Fina won 1 of 4
-0.5108 Sam won 0 of 2
-0.9808 MarkH won 0 of 2
-0.9808 KevinU won 0 of 4
-1.3216 Clayton won 0 of 4
-1.3216 Jeffles won 0 of 4
-1.4271 Ben won 0 of 4

JP is the Devil! Whendy is the Vice-Devil! Marty and I are Co-Vice-Vice-Devils. KevinU and Ben are Generous Angels.

Quite an unusually tall thin ratings graph this week!

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 designed the following Meta Game:

This is a slight variation on the oh-so-common metagame meta-theme of trying to get people to play new games.

You earn metapoints for playing games that are recent arrivals at RussCon.

Earn one point each time you play a game that was first played at RussCon within the past twelve weeks (including this week).

The following points are only available once per game:
3 points if you brought the game and someone played it.
2 points if this is the first night the game was played at RussCon.
1 point if the game was first played between one and six weeks ago.

Most points wins.
This weeks devil chooses how to break ties.

Here's a list of all applicable games, followed by how many weeks ago they were first played:
PowerGrid 11
TheBigTwo 11
SaintPetersburg 10
IronChef 6
Trias 5
PiratesOfTheSpanishMain 2
War 2

JP reckoned the scores as follows:

Matt 3+1+1+2+1
MarkY 3
Jeffles Clayton Fred Ben 2
JP Tim KevinU MarkH 1

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

Links

Travis County Tax Office lets you look up your name to confirm your voter registration info

Hikarunix for go geeks and linux geeks is a live Linux CD dedicated to learning, playing and studying go.

In the Bible Belt, Acceptance Is Hard-Won

Download-a-Dinosaur

Omniglot - a guide to abjads, alphabets, syllabaries and other writing systems

From Dice to Go: Asian Games Through the Ages is a symposium October 16th at the Asia Society in NYC, part of an ongoing exhibit from October 14, 2004 through January 16, 2005. The exhibit moves to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. from February 26 through May 15, 2005 and the Middlebury College Museum of Art in fall 2005.

The Kingdom of Loathing is a web-based RPG recommended by jeffford

What Are You Voting For? is a political blog site with a full-length online comic book which I'd compare to a better researched and footnoted Fahrenheit 9/11

Barcelona clubbers get chipped

SPANC might be anticipated by some RussCon gamers!

Klingons for Kerry: "A good war is based on honor, not deception," says K'tok (Earth name: Clyde Lewis), a 40-year-old Klingon from Lair Hill. "The first warrior, President Bush, deceived us all with this war."

koaloha has a wonderful story of responding to obnoxious loud street preachers by singing show tunes

Child art prodigy wows New York A four-year-old girl is wowing the New York art world with paintings that are drawing comparisons with Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky.

TGI Fridays Menu Prank by cockeyed.com