First, a request: please reply to this email! (Just to me, NOT to all! No need for EVERYONE to be getting tons of boring acknowledgements!) Apparently Marty has not been getting mailings, so I'm wondering if anyone else isn't, and perhaps knowing who is/isn't getting them will help me track down the problem.

And if you somehow know that you're not getting this email but think you should be, tell me that too...

On to the fun stuff:

The Wednesday March 4 RussCon was back to a more normal turnout, 8 of us.

Ken brought his new German import game, Euphrates and Tigris, and it has beautiful Mesopotamian components! It supports 4 players. It's got some pretty interesting unfamiliar but not complex rules and is a cool game! One of the nifty things I like about it is that you have 4 different victory points being accumulated (red, green, blue, black) and your final score is the minimum of the 4. Thus you need to keep yourself well-balanced in the 4 categories. Running away with one category almost certainly will do you no good. I've seen this device in some other games, but can't remember where. Does anyone else know of other games that have that idea? The rules do a nice job of having some mechanics be "color blind" and other mechanics be color-specific.

If anyone wants to learn Euphrates and Tigris before next time, Ken reports:

>This is the Euphrates and Tigris web page I found. If you read the rules
>you won't have to depend on my memory and/or interpretations.

http://freespace.virgin.net/chris.lawson/rk/e-t/

We also played a game of Konzern (German card game supplied by Alfred) which I hadn't gotten to play last week. It's a fast-moving luck game, sort of a business game mixed with Yahtzee (!) -- turns out we were doing a lot of the rules wrong though, so we'll have to try it again. Unusually, the cards all have the text printed in both German and English, very nice!

Alfred also has one of the Winsome Games crayon train games in a tube which looks quite cool -- it combines the "drawing tracks with crayon" aspect of running a railroad with the more realistic stock stuff of 18xx games, apparently. (I never did catch what the name of the game was! We're probably playing it next Wednesday, so I'll have a fuller report then.) It's not at all a crayon train game like Empire Builder, Iron Dragon etc (which I regard as inherently evil long-last luck-based games).

We'll have to play the train game, just to break the pattern of only playing German games...!

Overall game results:

Ken won 2/4 of his games (won Euphrates and El Grande)
James won 1/2 (won Loewenherz)
Alfred won 1/3 (won Konzern)
Russ won 1/4 (won Euphrates)

Also here were Marty, Brady, RussD, and JP.

For those interested in cumulative rank ratings, here's results from all Wednesday RussCons ((# opponents beaten - # opponents beating you) / # opponents):

Tom       8/12 =  0.67
EricH     9/16 =  0.56
Jonathan  2/6  =  0.33
Evan      4/13 =  0.31
Doug     10/49 =  0.20
James    17/99 =  0.17
RussW    14/92 =  0.15
Tim       1/11 =  0.09
Ken       5/62 =  0.08
Baron     1/15 =  0.07
Marty    -3/53 = -0.06
Alfred   -3/21 = -0.14
JP       -4/24 = -0.17
Brady   -16/85 = -0.19
Kevin    -5/23 = -0.22
RussD    -8/32 = -0.25
Jay      -1/3  = -0.33
Rick     -7/20 = -0.35
Peter    -9/16 = -0.56
JeffS    -3/5  = -0.6
Dawn     -4/6  = -0.67
Lance    -8/11 = -0.73

Note that Ken has finally surpassed that master of uniformly random Montgolfiere strategy, the Black Baron!

And finally: 2038 this Sunday at 1:00 is officially booked up with 6 players now. (Me, Ken, Marty, RussD, Rick, and Marty's friend Bob.)

Next Wednesday at 7:00 will be RussCon as usual. We may have visiting Chicago dignitaries again.

See you there!