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, ...)