I spent Friday evening and Saturday through the afternoon at Prezcon in Charlottesville, VA this weekend. It seemed a very well-run gathering of a few hundred people, the majority of them certainly over 30 if not over 40. I think I'll have a report on pulsiphergames.com.

Game design is a disease... I usually have a strong urge to play whatever the latest idea happens to be. So after having trouble with the maps of the World Wars game, I've found myself playing a cross between Germania (TM) and Britannia, tentatively called (sigh) Mesopotamia (TM). After two games it is still quite malleable, but appears to work pretty well. I was worriied that when one player in a five player game built up a huge lead, but that one (shockingly) fell to second just at the end. In the game each player controls just one nation at a time, but will control several over the course of the game, if the player chooses. He must give up his current position if he wants to adopt the position of an invading nation. The game uses Germania's combat, and some of its movement, and much of its "economy", but some movement is from Brit, and the more definite "historical" invasions of a Brit-style game. And points are counted and accumulated each turn, as in Brit rather than in Germania. Also, the game runs a set number of turns (which may be too many now, though each turn is a century). With that title you can figure that the game covers near-eastern history, 2600 BC to 500BC, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Armenia, and Egypt.

While working on Germania and on boards for other games, I've continued to have new ideas. Reading a lot about Axis and Allies (I have the first edition, and played the computer version a lot some years ago) has led to an idea for a Two World Wars (tm) game, using some methods from Germania (tm), for example combat, some from Diplomacy perhaps, to try to achieve a two-hour game with many fewer units than A&A, and with a WW I multi-player version. I have a map now (thanks to Arc GIS wielded by my wife), but haven't played.

I've also (just today) started to flesh out "Germania meets Britannia" in the ancient near east. We'll see. LEP