Windy City Weasels

We're off to a great start in 2010. The club held five games, including house games every other Saturday. A total of 26 players participated, with Amanda Baumgartner leading the way by playing in all three Saturday games. Seven other players played in two games.

The 26 players included one who hadn't played with us since March 2006, and five who were playing with us for the first time. One of those new players will be our seventh in the Super Bowl Sunday game next week.

That game will be the first of two in February. The second is Westward Hosed!, a game on Feb. 20 at Gary Przybocki's home in Montgomery, which is just south of Aurora. (By the way, the steady diet of house games we've offered recently is possible only because a bunch of new hosts stepped forward. If you're looking for a game that suits your schedule, volunteer to host. We promise not to trash your house.) Gary's game still has three open spots. How about some of our players from the Naperville area? You're not going to find an easier game for you to get to, unless you host it yourself! If you're in the city and would like to go but need transportation, let me know. I'll be driving out there from Halsted and Roosevelt, which is near the Red and Blue lines.

And we still have openings for our March Madness games: two for the game at my place on March 6, six for the game at Dan Burgess' home on March 13, and we're looking for a second board at Thom Comstock's place on March 20. As you've probably seen, games will fill quickly as we get closer to the dates, so if you want to play, reserve your spot soon. You can do that through Meetup (the preferred method--sign up for your free Meetup account today!), by posting in the comments section, or by emailing me.

Hope to see you at a game soon!

Katie O'Kelly, the Sub-Prime's wife, lost her mother yesterday after a long illness. Please join the Sneak in keeping Katie, Kevin and their family in your thoughts and prayers.

For those of you who like to plan ahead, the tournament rules for the 2010 CODCon Open are now available in the Files Section. The rules include the schedule for the tournament, which will be held April 10-11 at the College of Dupage in Glen Ellyn, as well as an explanation with examples of a new scoring system that we'll be using.

The new system is called Squares or Sum of Squares, and it's what's known as a divide-and-conquer system. That means that in order to maximize your score, you want not only to be big but to divide the centers you don't own fairly equally among the other players.

I've never been one for making New Year's resolutions for myself, but I love making them for other people. Here are five for you, my fellow Weasels.

1) Get out to a house game or two this year. Just read some of the comments in the game threads (like this one), and you'll see how much fun we all have playing Diplomacy. It's even more fun when we add new faces to the mix.

2) Consider hosting a game. If you've wanted to play but can't seem to find a game that fits your schedule or is within a reasonable radius of your home, then here's a simple solution: Pick a date that works for you, and offer to host. Provided that you give sufficient warning--at least one month is best, but earlier this month, we filled a game on a couple of days' notice--we should be able to find six other players for you.

 Greetings fellow weasels,

Three months from today, we will kick-off a two-week period of tournament
diplomacy that will get us rolling into the summer months. CODCon and National DipCon are on back to back weekends, and our goal is to have 6 boards at CODCon and to have 4 Weasels travel to San Francisco to participate in the DipCon, of which I will be one of them. Following are the details for the events.

CODCon will take place on Saturday April 10th and Sunday April 11th at the
College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, IL. Like previous years, we will play three
rounds of Diplomacy (Sat morning, Sat evening and Sun morning). There will be other gaming going on as well, both in between rounds and afterwards on Saturday if people are interested. We'll be sending out a sign-up sheet around the March Madness events, but put this on your calendars.

DipCon will take place from Friday April 16th thru Sunday April 18th in San
Francisco during the Cherry Blossom festival. There will be four rounds of Dip (Fri night, Sat morning, Sat night and Sunday morning). Friday night's round starts at 7pm local time, so I plan to take a morning flight to the Bay area and stay for the entire tourney. I'm tracking flights now, but plan to book no later than March 1st. If I see a good price, I'll post it out here. If anyone is interested in going to see the Guv-anator... please email me and we'll see if we can coordinate travel schedules.

It should be an exciting two weeks of Diplomacy. We hope to see many of you for at least one game.

-kevin

The North American Diplomacy Federation is proud to present the 2010 Grand Prix!
 
This year's race will feature 12 eligible tournaments. To qualify, each tournament must field a total of at least six boards in the three largest rounds. The 12 eligible tournaments are: