January 17 2001 RussCon Report

This was (approximately) the third anniversary of RussCon! Thank you very much to folks who presented me with my very own copy of Carcassonne! Very spiffy! And then about a half dozen folks went out to bring in more stuff: folding chairs (much needed, especially after one of my crappy old ones broke a few weeks ago), little folding stadium seat thingies for the floor, and a card table set up in the kitchen. This was weird to have people playing out of sight and earshot of the main stuff, so we'll see how that goes! Thanks to Jeffles & Carly, WendyWhe, Jay, Squeaky & Kara, PJ, RussD, Dan, JeffS, Matt, WendyWhi, JeffF, JP, Jerrie, Clayton, Marty for the funny card and for organizing all that, and to all other RussCon folks too. Wow! Here's to at least 3 more years... thanks everyone, this really is the funnest bunch of gaming folks I've ever had.

I will accept submissions for the All-Time Top 10 Games list for more final week. This is partly because I'm not convinced we've got a large representative sample yet, and partly because I'm too lazy to compile the report now so I'll do it next time. :) If you want to see the list of games, it's in last week's news. Come on, it only takes a minute to email me a few games that you like a lot! Just tell me your one favorite game if you're a lazy bastard like JP! :)

Game Results

Carcassonne	4	RussW 3 Clay 1 Clayton -1 Fred -3
Bluff	3	Jeffles 2 Fred 0 JeffF -2
Cartagena	5	Brady 4 Matt 0 RussD 0 ChrisH 0 JP -4
Bluff	3	Fred 2 Jeffles 0 JeffF -2
Orcz	4	Jerrie 3 Steve 1 Dan -1 Jeffles -3
GallopingPig	4	Clay 3 Jerrie 1 Dan -1 Steve -3
Carcassonne	4	JonathanC 3 Carly 1 Clayton -1 RussW -3
Carcassonne	5	ChrisH 3 Brady 3 RussD 0 JP -2 Matt -4
Guillotine	3	JonathanC 2 Carly 0 Matt -2
Downtown	5	JeffF 4 Steve 2 Dan -1 Fred -1 Jeffles -4
ZirkusFlohcati	3	Carly 2 JonathanC 0 Matt -2
WebOfPower	4	RussW 3 JP 1 Brady -1 RussD -3
Carcassonne	4	Matt 2 Steve 2 Dan -1 JeffF -3
Bluff	4	RussW 3 Steve 1 Matt -1 JeffF -3
Bluff	4	RussW 3 Steve 1 Matt -1 JeffF -3
Frank'sZoo	5	JP 4 JeffF 2 Matt 0 Dan -2 Steve -4
BattleCry	2	JP 1 Brady -1

Dan brought the intriguing Orcz. I have not heard details of how it went, but unless it sucked I want to play because it sounds cool. Competing Orc chieftains acquiring goblin slaves as a result of their glory in battle. Woohoo!

There is no stopping Carcassonne. It is a gaming behemoth that has entered the annals of RussCon history! 4 more sessions of it in one night... And thanks again for my own copy!

Web of Power just might be my second favorite of the recent German games (You-Know-What is #1), but normally I suck at it... This time, I inexplicably won! It must be the stars were aligned right due to the RussCon Anniversary. That and getting 2 different triangles of mutually supporting advisor countries, i.e. picking up 6 distinct advisor scores. Woohoo!

bluff JeffF has supplied us with Bluff again. There had been a void since William moved to NYC and took his Bluff. Man, I'd forgotten how much I enjoy that game! And I gotta admit it was great fun to kick ass twice in the two games I played of it!

Meta Party Game Results

RussD was the Meta Party Devil. Here is the meta party game he emailed out:

The William Chow Memorial Weird Food Game
RussCon simply hasn't been quite the same after William moved to New York City, leaving us without a dedicated bringer of weird food for the week. So in honor of that tradition, this week's metagame is as follows:
Contestants will bring a weird food item to RussCon and make it available to all. The only disqualified food is Chamoy Pulpa (see RussCon Report for August 30, 2000) because that is no doubt the weirdest food William ever brought. Everyone votes on the weirdest food, and to win the food must be completely consumed by those attending RussCon. After all, we don't want to burden Russ with having to dispose of the leftovers or making Remy eat them. And no weasly nibbling part of an item then tossing the rest in the garbage while no one looking! Everyone votes as for the hat game last week: submit a ranked list of weirdest foods in case a food is disqualified by not being completely consumed. Everyone is on their honor not to stuff the ballot box by casting more than one ballot.
The Iron Stomach Award
This week's game awards a special "honor" to those who have the will and intestinal fortitude to consume any Chamoy Pulpa that finds itself at RussCon. To win this title, you must consume all of a bag of Chamoy Pulpa while witnessed by at least two other people. In order to determine your intestinal fortitude, no running off to the bathroom immediately after -- in the name of science, we must know the effects of this substance on the human body!

This was an exciting event; there were few contestants, but Matt was a true team player, and a team unto himself. He brought about a dozen different weird foods, including many Oriental foods that harkened back to the days of William. E.g. wasabi-coated peas and Botan rice candy (with the edible wrappers). There was a coffee drink in a can called "Boss +1 Plus One" (slogan: "Boss" is the boss of them all since 1992). (I found it to have an unpleasant aftertaste.) Zapp's cajun crawtator chips were spicy and good, but perhaps not exactly weird. There were various odd combinations of rice, chocolate, grits, peanuts, etc. Also Clayton brought a couple of bubble gum lollipops so Matt wasn't the only weird food bringer. And there were some girl scout cookies, but there was skepticism that these qualified as weird.

The winning food was one of the wacky Japanese snack foods: officially titled Caramel Corn Strawberry (Corn Snack), we dubbed them Strawberry Cheetos, aka The Crunchberries from Yuggoth. Some of us were leery to eat them at first since they looked like puffed pink shrimps or Cthulhoid tentacles, but it turned out they had that hyper sickly-sweet childhood nostalgia comfort food taste of Cap'n Crunch's crunchberries.

So Matt is the Meta Party Devil and will email out next week's Meta Party Game!

PS: There was no Chamoy Pulpa.

Evening's Soundtrack

Various Artists, If I Were a Carpenter Rainy Days and Mondays
Cracker, Cracker Another Song About the Rain
Peter Gabriel, So Red Rain
Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy The Rain Song
Queen, The Miracle Rain Must Fall

Rain o'er me...

Ratings

Rank ratings:
 0.7143 JonathanC (3)
 0.6667 Clay (2)
 0.6667 Jerrie (2)
 0.6000 RussW (5)
 0.4286 Carly (3)
 0.4167 Brady (4)
 0.3750 ChrisH (2)
 0.0000 JP (5)
 0.0000 Steve (7)
-0.1818 Fred (4)
-0.2727 RussD (3)
-0.3200 Matt (8)
-0.3333 JeffF (7)
-0.3333 Clayton (2)
-0.3529 Dan (5)
-0.4545 Jeffles (4)

New Win ratings:
 0.7333 RussW (5)
 0.5714 JonathanC (3)
 0.4167 Brady (4)
 0.3333 Clay (2)
 0.3333 Jerrie (2)
 0.2500 ChrisH (2)
 0.0625 JP (5)
 0.0000 Carly (3)
-0.0909 Fred (4)
-0.0909 Jeffles (4)
-0.1429 JeffF (7)
-0.1739 Steve (7)
-0.2400 Matt (8)
-0.3333 Clayton (2)
-0.3529 Dan (5)
-0.3636 RussD (3)

I am the Devil! Woohoo! How appropriate and meta. Matt wins the Dedicated Award. Sea Biscuit is Vice-Devil.

Links

Summoner Geeks is a very funny weird short computer animation.

Something cool for the WWII buffs among us; an upcoming film about Stalingrad! I hadn't know about the movie Enemy at the Gates until now; the site has a trailer. A few years ago I saw a great foreign film called Stalingrad at the Dobie and Clayton missed it, nyah nyah! This one is a major studio picture -- hope you don't skip this one too, Clayton! The day after I saw this on the net I got to see the trailer on the big screen.

Speaking of WWII, here's an edgy superhero RPG coming soon from Pagan Publishing, set in Nazi Germany! It's called Godlike.

Cinema Lego. And on the subject of Lego, here's Lego Cthulhu.

If you ever played Ace of Aces, you might enjoy this web page with Ace of Aces movement details.

Here's another page with a version of the Werewolf game. (I linked to a different one on Dec 20.) We need to play this sometime.

Naked News has stripping women presenting real newscasts: tasteless stupidity? Or clever satire? I don't know.

Jay heard an Oregon radio news report about a radical new social trend: people playing boardgames face to face! Imagine: "interactive games" rather than computer games! They interview some of these "quirky" "geeks".

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears, and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call... THE CARCASSONNE.

Russ