2004-05-05 RussCon Report

Game Results

FastFoodFranchise	5	MikeC 4 Fina 2 Jeffles 0 JP -2 RussW -4
Tichu	2	( Ben MarkH ) 1 ( Whendy Fred ) -1
ArkOfTheCovenant	3	RussW 2 JP 0 Clayton -2
Exxtra	4	Ben 3 MarkH 1 Whendy -1 Fred -3
WebOfPower	3	MarkH 2 Fina -1 MikeC -1
CarcassonneCastle	2	RussW 1 Clayton -1
Scrabble	2	Jeffles 1 Ben -1
Rheinlaender	4	JimG 3 Whindy 1 Harry -1 Matt -3
Rheinlaender	5	Whindy 4 Matt 1 JP 1 JimG -2 Harry -4
RicochetRobot	4	Jeffles 3 Ben -1 JP -1 RussW -1

I'd played Fast Food Franchise long long ago in the SimTex days with Evan and Ken et al; I remembered liking it ok, but the game tonight was pretty lame. Mike got ahead at the very start (due to starting 2 chains within a few spaces of each other and joining them for the good multiplying effect) and never looked back. I didn't get to start a chain for the first 3 turns due to repeatedly landing on advertising spaces, and was soon bankrupted when I landed on Mike's aforementioned juicy succulent chain. There seems way too much important luck in the first few turns. JP then gave up early and apparently bailed out (bad JP!) even though hindsight revealed he probably could have achieved second place (he was in a better position than Fina and Jeffles, who both didn't get to start second companies).

I was exceedingly surprised to win Ark of the Covenant, yay! I managed to pip JP (who had almost lapped me) by a few points in the end thanks mostly to finally completing a big frickin' city that had been tying up 3 of my meeples (including the doubling prophet) from very early on.

Clayton and I had a rather low-scoring game of Carcassonne the Castle, thanks to 2 different very large regions that completed with equal numbers of dudes in them. If I recall, I managed to prevent Clayton getting any of the special chits, heh.

Ricochet Robot was humbling: JP, Ben, and I all only scored 3, while Jeffles scored 8! Of course I've also been finding the daily competition at http://www.ricochetrobot.com to be quite humbling...

Nobody remembered to record either Rheinlaender game until Matt was leaving, so these rankings are constructed by email with the participants the next day...

Ratings

Rank Ratings:        
 2.1972 MarkH
 2.0794 Jeffles
 2.0149 Whindy
 1.2040 MikeC
 1.0986 Ben
 0.6931 JimG
 0.2877 Fina
-0.1054 RussW
-0.6931 JP
-1.0986 Matt
-1.0986 Whendy
-1.7918 Clayton
-2.0149 Harry
-2.0794 Fred

Win Ratings:
 1.8563 Jeffles won 2 of 3
 1.5041 MarkH won 2 of 3
 1.3218 Whindy won 1 of 2
 1.2809 RussW won 2 of 4
 1.2040 MikeC won 1 of 2
 1.1632 JimG won 1 of 2
 1.0986 Ben won 2 of 4
-0.5108 Matt won 0 of 2
-0.5108 Harry won 0 of 2
-0.6286 Fina won 0 of 2
-0.9808 Whendy won 0 of 2
-0.9808 Fred won 0 of 2
-1.0986 Clayton won 0 of 2
-1.1394 JP won 0 of 4

Jeffles and MarkH are the Co-Devils! Whindy is Vice-Devil! Then me and Mike.

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

I used GraphViz to generate the graph image.

Meta Game

Whendy was the Meta Devil and emailed out the following Meta Game:

How Sweet It Is!

This week's metagame is meant to build up the snack supplies on Russ's countertop. They're looking pretty sparse lately -- only those lame-o candies William leaves. (But good ol' Clayton brings Popables candies almost every week, so at least there's something...) In this metagame, the one with the most metapoints wins. If there's a tie, Russ gets to choose a random tiebreaker among the highest scorers. Here's how you win points.

1 point = for each player for each game they play each time they play it that has in it some of all of these: candies, cake, pies, icecream -- sweets of any kind

3 points = for each player for each unique sweets food they bring to RussCon that night **to share** (i.e., do not walk in sucking a single lollipop and claim meta points unless you can get someone else to share your spittle-covered sucker with you)

5 points = for each article of clothing each player wears with a sweet food of some sort on it

Mark your points in The Book. If you don't mark it yourself, it's lost forever and don't cry about it later.

--So maybe Jeffles needs to bring that somewhat-obnoxious game Devil Bunny wants a cake, or whatever it was...

Well, Jeffles did not want to play Devil Bunny Hates the Earth and didn't bring it. But he did bring Fast Food Franchise (which has an ice cream chain). Other than that we couldn't think of other games with sweets - Whendy thought Zirkus Flohcati might have had some circus treats illustrated, but no. So it was a bit like my recent verda stelo Meta Game in that qualifying games were a challenge to find!

Points were earned for wearing and bringing sweets, of course. I wore my old Rossini's Ice Cream t-shirt (acquired many years ago while visiting Durham, North Carolina for a friend's wedding) and Harry also had a shirt with something sweet (which my feeble memory has already forgotten). Harry also brought some tasty sweet port to drink. Whendy herself brought some candies, and Clayton, but the clear winner was Matt, who brought 11 different kinds of Indian treats - candies, cookies, and other more mysterious entities, the most popular of which seemed to be the mango candy, which was quite tasty even if they were apparently actually pineapple with "mango flavoring" of some murky sort! (Another of the foods apparently interacted badly with beer and almost caused JP to puke...) That was a huge amount of sweet sweet meta points for Matt, who is the Meta Devil and will design next week's Meta Game!

Links

our taxes at work Although I normally try not to get too overtly political in the RussCon Report, lately it gets hard to resist. It seems too important not to mention, and I want to encourage everyone to read the news and note the increase of dangerous lying and manipulation by administration members related to the Iraq war (and by apologists like Rush Limbaugh who think the torture is just a fraternity-style prank - either they're ignorant or they're intentionally not mentioning that it's more than just nudity and sleep deprivation, but includes serious torture like rapes, beatings, blood-spattered rooms, and at least 25 killed prisoners). (Daily Kos has a lot of interesting commentary and linkage, by the way.) I've been blogging a lot lately about political issues like the Iraq torture scandal, with lots of links to more info. The US invaded Iraq claiming we were going to free the Iraqi people from such things. The sad thing is this ever-growing torture scandal is just the latest in a long chain of lies and deceit, from why we invaded to how the war is progressing, but I'm glad to see it getting such attention. Even if one supported the war, it's greatly troubling that we're ignoring the Geneva Convention and warnings by the Red Cross and earlier internal military reports about abuse - which puts our own troops at greatly increased risk when they are captured - and how the administration has been misleading congress and the US public about many various affairs. I encourage folks to keep abreast of this news and where the US is heading. I believe this is more than just a party politics thing and is way more important than whether one supports or opposes Bush's tax cuts or whatever; more and more Republicans also are alarmed at what Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove, Cheney etc are up to.

America's Final Century published by a new small press Dolman Sextillion, written by Jordan Jannai, the nome de plume (or perhaps nom de guerre?) of RussCon's own Frederick Worthington Stanton III. It is a sort of history book and sf novel, explaining how we got here and where we might be going if the US government continues as it is now.

Average IQ by state and how they voted in 2000 and Bush's support is directly proportional to misperceptions of facts involving whether we found WMDs in Iraq, Iraq's ties to 9/11, and Iraq's ties to al Queda and terrorism in general.

Doonesbury lately has BD injured in Iraq (and it's the first time BD's hair is ever seen in the comic's history...) It's also interesting reading the various reader reactions.

Online Comics Day aka Webcomics Awareness Day was May 5... this was the 4th year of the event and as always I did a special strip for it. I wrangled it with cohort Jim Alexander for the first 3 years, and it kept growing; thank goodness Howard Tayler took over this year!

Stencil Revolution has galleries of cool street art... I wish Austin had more street art like the following:

artofthestate has cool political and social stencil street art by Banksy in London, some of it quite impressive in scale and quality.

i love sales guys

2004-05-05 RussCon Report

News

Game Results

Ratings

Meta Game

Evening's Soundtrack

Links