NewsMatt recently vacationed in the French countryside (it's a rough life) and emailed us a delightful postcard reproduced in this Report! It should prove educational to those who don't know what the game name "Carcassonne" means. Now we see the inspiration of the tile art. Meanwhile, Alfred enjoyed his last RussCon for a while (unless he pulls a Jay and keeps coming back for "last RussCons" for a few weeks) as he's about to move to Lithuania. The final decision rests in the hands of drug-dealing Belgian monks living in New York City or something crazy like that, I'm sure at least part of this sentence is true. Alfred plans to start a go club and a baseball team in Lithuania. On advice from Tim, I attempted to procure morel mushrooms as a special treat for his final RussCon but failed to locate them. This just gets weirder as I go, doesn't it? Anyway, good luck Alfred! My printmaking class is over. One of the cool things we did was a trade portfolio. We each printed 12 self-portraits and exchanged them. Naturally I put them on a web page. |
| Evo | 4 | Daniel 3 Jeffles 1 Carly -1 Kara -3 |
| Rheinlaender | 5 | Matt 3 Steve 3 JonathanC 0 Marty -2 BobR -4 |
| Settlers | 4 | JeffF 3 Alfred 0 RussW 0 Clayton -3 |
| Carcassonne | 5 | Steve 4 JonathanB 2 Matt 0 BobR -2 Tim -4 |
| Zero | 4 | Carly 3 Daniel 1 Kara -1 WendyWhi -3 |
| WebOfPower | 5 | RussW 4 JeffF 2 Tim 0 Alfred -2 Jeffles -4 |
| Winchester | 4 | Tim 3 Jeffles -1 Carly -1 Daniel -1 |
| WebOfPower | 4 | Carly 3 WendyWhi 1 Daniel -1 Remi -3 |
| Wimmuln | 5 | Jeffles 4 RussW 2 Tim 0 JeffF -2 Alfred -4 |
| Carcassonne | 3 | Alfred 2 RussW 0 JeffF -2 |
| Can'tStop | 3 | Jeffles 2 Carly 0 JP -2 |
| SanMarco | 4 | Marty 3 Remi 1 Bob -2 JP -2 |
| Knights | 3 | Daniel 2 Carly 0 WendyWhi -2 |
| BigCity | 3 | Daniel 2 Carly 0 WendyWhi -2 |
| Evo | 4 | Steve 3 BobR 1 JonathanB -1 Matt -3 |
| Carcassonne | 2 | JP 1 Bob -1 |
I played in one of JeffF's wacky Settlers variants from that kit with a book and new pieces. This one was a strange train game version of Settlers, essentially Dampfross meets Settlers. I can't decide if I liked it or not! I generally prefer the pure elegance of standard Settlers and eschew all the chromey variants like Seafarers and Starfarers. On the other hand, this was a train game...
Somehow I won Web of Power. Perhaps it had something to do with trying on each move to only improve my own score instead of hurting the leader. Naaah.
Wimmuln is one of the lesser-played games that comes with Mu. I totally forgot I'd played it before. I still can't get used to the weird distribution of cards in the Mu deck, but I did enjoy this trick-taking game.
In a final game of Carcassonne, Alfred got to defeat me & JeffF (his traditional Web of Power nemeses), so he can move to Lithuania with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment!
Evo continues to be "hip" with the "in crowd" who enjoy "dinosaur games" about "evolution". I'll stop quoting random phrases now.
Meta Party Game ResultsWendyWhe was the Meta Party Devil. Here is the Meta Party Game I emailed out on her behalf: WendyWhe is off on a business trip this week, but at last week's RussCon she prepared her Meta Party Game for this week and requested I email out the info.*No, this isn't the footnote from the asterisked Russie Poo above; I have no idea what Wendy meant to write as a footnote, so she must have forgot about that. :) The entries were:
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Music from Europe. Sadly I have a shortage of Lithuanian CDs.
Rank ratings: 0.9091 Steve (3) 0.4615 RussW (4) 0.3750 Daniel (6) 0.2222 Carly (7) 0.1429 Marty (2) 0.1429 JonathanB (2) 0.1250 Jeffles (5) 0.0769 JeffF (4) 0.0000 Matt (3) 0.0000 JonathanC (1) -0.0667 Tim (4) -0.3077 Alfred (4) -0.3333 Remi (2) -0.4545 BobR (3) -0.5000 JP (3) -0.6000 WendyWhi (4) -0.6667 Kara (2) -0.7500 Bob (2) -1.0000 Clayton (1) New Win ratings: 0.9091 Steve (3) 0.2500 Daniel (6) 0.1875 Jeffles (5) 0.1429 Marty (2) 0.0909 Matt (3) 0.0769 RussW (4) 0.0556 Carly (7) 0.0000 JeffF (4) 0.0000 Tim (4) -0.0769 Alfred (4) -0.1667 JP (3) -0.2857 JonathanB (2) -0.3333 Remi (2) -0.3333 Kara (2) -0.3333 Clayton (1) -0.3636 BobR (3) -0.4000 WendyWhi (4) -0.5000 JonathanC (1) -0.5000 Bob (2)Steve is clearly the Devil! Daniel is Vice-Devil. I am Vice-Vice-Devil. Carly wins the Dedicated Award. Clayton pulled a Reverse Brady Maneuver.
Due to human error last week, Alfred was not listed as Devil but should have been. Those responsible have been sacked.
RussCon doesn't meet at a Chinese restaurant, so we can't play the Happy Lucky Chinese Restaurant Game.
If anyone wants to make the tiles for it, we could play the Unicorn Jelly game.
The next step in massively parallel computing: Furbeowulf Cluster Computing.
People interested in webcomics might enjoy recent rants about the economics of webcomics at PvP, Nukees, and Absurd Notions. I follow these discussions with interest. I'm making Ko Fight Club for the fun of it and don't expect to make money from it, but the question of whether and how webcomics can successfully generate revenue is interesting.
The Dihydrogen Monoxide controversy continues. Can you believe they let this stuff into our drinking water?
Russ
