Every month or so a retired colleague, JF, invites a crew of friends over to his house to play. He gets a nice mix of people --- maybe half a dozen, young and old, male and female, silly and serious --- to spend a chunk of the day socializing and rolling dice, shuffling cards, or pushing blocks of wood around a board. Typical activities in recent gatherings:
- Hearts - the classic, cruelest card game
- Axis and Allies - a global-scale computer-based strategic WW II simulation
- Medici - a new German board/card game of bidding and resource allocation
- Civilization - the computerized version: evolve a society from stone age to space travel (alas, we have never had enough time to get very far beyond the more primitive levels)
- Diplomacy - a six-hour-long orgy of negotiation, alliance, and betrayal, on a map of Europe ca. 1900-1915; simultaneous movement and no random elements (except for the players!); "Dippy" is to "Risk" as chess is to checkers
- Rail Baron - build a network of railroad lines across a map of the USA and run trains along them; monopolize access to regions and drive opponents into bankruptcy; much more playable in the computer version than over-the-board, where action is interrupted by too much bookkeeping and table-lookup
All pleasant pastimes for a Sunday afternoon....
Thursday, July 26, 2001 = 2001-07-26
(see ZarStory)
TopicPersonalHistory - TopicRecreation
(correlates: CommentYourCode, StagesOfCredibility, GovernmentJob, ...)
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