2005-03-23 RussCon Report

News

13 of us played 12 games!

The remaining money from the recent Putt Putt Meta Game was used for jalapeno yam chips and spicy taro chips, two kinds of chips I believe have never appeared at RussCon before. They were both pretty tasty, I thought!

Marty is riding in the American Diabetes Association "Tour de Cure" bike ride and trying to raise money.

Spanish: 2pm Sunday at Texspresso on Anderson Lane (by Alamo Drafthouse Village) is the weekly basic informal Spanish RussCon study group... so far it consists of me studying Spanish by myself at Texspresso, except one time Whendy came with a Spanish instructional CD we played around with. :)

Game Results

RicochetRobot	5	Adam 4 Jeffles 2 Ben -2 JP -2 RussW -2
Boggle	6	RussW 5 JP 3 Adam 1 Ben -1 SarahM -3 Jeffles -5
Exxtra	2	SarahM 1 Ben -1
Ys	4	MarkH 3 Fred 1 MikeC -1 Clayton -3
Tayu	2	Chad 1 RussW -1
Settlers	4	Jeffles 3 JP 0 Chad 0 SarahM -3
LostCities	2	Ben 1 SarahM -1
Cloud9	3	RussW 2 SarahM 0 Ben -2
DurchDieWueste	4	MikeC 3 RussW 1 SarahM -1 Clayton -3
Tichu	2	( MarkH Fred ) 1 ( Chad Ben ) -1
DasZepterVonZavandor	4	Adam 3 Marty 1 Jeffles -1 JP -3
Bluff	7	Clayton 6 Chad 4 Whendy 2 JP 0 RussW -2 SarahM -4 Jeffles -6

Adam was at one with his inner robot and kicked our asses in Ricochet Robot. I feel like I have lost whatever semblance of talent I once had for this game. Still enjoy it, though!

I redeemed myself in Boggle, in a good come-from-behind - the final round I noticed SQUASH and some other such long words.

Chad really smacked me down in Tayu. I actually managed to almost come back, to my surprise, but the board was so unplayable that the end came before I could ever draw a tile which would have tied me.

I don't ever remember winning Cloud 9 before, that was fun!

Durch die Wüste is one of my all-time favorite Knizia games. Why don't we play it more often?

Ys was new, and I know nothing about it except that it seemed to take a while to play.

Ratings

Rank Ratings:       
 3.2834 Adam
 2.0794 MarkH
 1.5810 RussW
 1.0986 Fred
 1.0986 Chad
 0.9808 MikeC
 0.5108 Whendy
 0.4055 Marty
-0.8267 Clayton
-0.9808 JP
-2.0636 Jeffles
-2.5903 Ben
-3.8077 SarahM

Win Ratings:
 2.8134 Adam won 2 of 3
 2.0794 MarkH won 2 of 2
 1.5323 RussW won 2 of 6
 1.3705 Clayton won 1 of 3
 1.0986 MikeC won 1 of 2
 0.5390 Jeffles won 1 of 5
 0.4055 Fred won 1 of 2
-0.1542 Whendy won 0 of 1
-0.2877 Marty won 0 of 1
-0.4418 Chad won 1 of 4
-1.1351 JP won 0 of 5
-1.3171 SarahM won 1 of 7
-1.5042 Ben won 1 of 6

Adam is the Devil! MarkH is Vice-Devil. I am Vice-Vice-Devil.

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

I used GraphViz to generate the graph image.

Meta Game

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

I was going to have the meta game be a surprise, but I'd like people to bring any sort of supplies they might have around to help out. Anything would be nice, poster boards, sissors, ... well let me explain the meta rules first.

You have up to 6 minutes to complete an art project. No limits on what it can be, except that it should be done in the space of 6 minutes.

I may bring some supplies, but please bring your own for whatever you subject people may want to do.

As a published artist, for writing is art, if Whendy is present, then she will be the sole judge, and will decide next weeks meta winner by any process she chooses.

If she is not present, or she corrects any gramical errors in this email, then Russ will be the judge.

Thanks to Jeffles for a very interesting artistic experience. Six Minute Art was fun! Here are photos. The official entrants to this art extravaganza were JP, me, Chad, Jeffles, SarahM, and Whendy. (There was also some general playing around with Play-doh.) Whendy arrived too late to witness the frenetic yet strangely arousing performance art piece by Jeffles (which involved rolling around shirtless in blue paint and dead leaves on my back patio), plus she kind of corrected Jeffles's gramical errors in email, so he declared that I should judge. It was not easy to choose among several of the brilliant works, so I finally decided to select Sarah as the Meta Devil since she's only been Meta Devil once before, and was the only artist who liked her work enough to take it home with her. :)

Links

Don Justo's Self Built Cathedral

PostSecret

Las Pozas: In the Mexican rainforest is a remote mountain village called Xilitla, home to the extraordinary surrealist architecture of Edward James.

Giant Steps by Michael Levy is an animation with John Coltrane music