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

Sue and I finished a five-player Germania(tm) playtest, minor changes. If I'm lucky I'll be playtesting with other folks Monday and Tuesday.

I finished the CorelDraw files for the smaller version of the Dark Ages(tm) game. I've not had any luck in finding a way for a browser or Acrobat to print the map full size; CorelDraw can do it, but how many people have CorelDraw?

Peter Riedlberger (Germany) sent me the URL for an interesting essay on the faults of Risk-like games: http://www.westpark-gamers.de/Artikel/riskfaults.html.
Peter is a big fan of Britannia, so how could he be wrong?

I have pointed PulsipherGames.com to the same site as Pulsipher.Net, for the time being.

I found a source for History of the World army pieces (SVGames, online), so that I can use them for playtesting Germania(tm) at conventions.

I intend to be at PrezCon in Charlottesville on the last weekend of February. I will not be playing in any tournaments, of course (I never have, at conventions). I expect to have Germania(tm) prototypes, and perhaps something else.

This week precedes the start of classes, and my in-laws are still here, so I've not been able to work on games other than the computer version of the Dark Ages (tm) board.

Coreldraw (which I'm using to trace/draw maps) threw me a curve: I have a shoreline that goes around much of Europe, and it won't print, though all the other lines do. So I decided to break it into smaller lines, but I get the error message that it's too large to break (over 64K). I guess I'll have to copy it and then erase parts of it, to come up with a set up lines that might individually be small enough to print.

I've played the third test of "Fighting Suns" (tm); I'm using a Risk-like setup instead of starting each player from one "home planet", and this seems to work much better.

I have been playing the first two tests of a new SF game, somewhat along the lines of Germania(tm). It has been a struggle to get some fluidity into it (a hallmark of Germania(tm). I'm not sure whether I'll pursue it much further at this time.

The (tm)s, by the way, indiate that I am trademarking the name Germania. Over Christmas I read a guide to PDF publication (aimed at role playing gamers) and saw that the primary means of declaring/securing a trademark is to declare it, with the tm. While I don't expect to publish boardgames as PDFs, I do have a collection of Diplomacy variants, and a set of rules for pitched battles for D&D-like games, that I'd like to see published somehow. PDFs are the "last resort" when a conventional publisher cannot be found.

I've created a yahoo group and registered a domain name to use in playtesting games, but neither is "in business" yet.

I also ordered "Vinci" to see what it's like, and tried to find out how to get hold of a 1995 game, Kampf um Rum (Struggle for Rome), which appears to bear some resemblance to Britannia. Evidently it was published only in German, and I cannot find a source for it (though I found an English translation of a card-game successor with the same name). Boardgamegeek has an entry for it, but no comments.

As an experiment, I am setting up a blog for my boardgame design. I hope this will help when I begin working with non-local playtesters.