Prime Weasel Nate Cockerill wanted to work in one last tune-up for this weekend’s World Diplomacy Championship at DixieCon, so he scheduled a bar game at the Red Lion for the eve of the long road trip to Chapel Hill. Predictably, his choice of dates knocked out the rest of us who will be attending WDC (me, Dan Burgess, John Gramila and Matt Sundstrom), but you don’t get to be the Prime Weasel by being a Carebear.
Being a Carebear can, however, get you a shared board top with your Western ally, and that’s how Game No. 246 went down last night.
The contest ended by time limit after the Fall 1906 turn in the following center counts:
Austria (David St. John): 6; 15.254 points.
England (Nathan Cockerill): 9; 34.322 points.
France (Chris Kelly): 9; 34.322 points.
Germany (Mike Morrison): 5; 10.593 points.
Italy (Don Glass): 0; 0.000 points.
Russia (Josh Heffernan): 2; 1.695 points.
Turkey (Ulysses Peterson): 3; 3.814 points.
The supply center chart is here. Maybe the players can tell us what really happened in Game No. 246.
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1901: England, Germany, and France played standard openings with no conflict between them. Turkey went all in against Russia, while Italy went all out against Austria. Russia took Sweden but Rum stayed neutral. Italy took Trieste but misordered and Tunis stayed neutral. Austria got Serbia and Greece, Turkey got Bulgaria. England took Norway and Denmark while Germany took Belgium and Holland (!!!). France took his iberian neutrals both with armies and moved the fleet straight away to Western Med.
I would disagree with the characterization of “standard openings” in the west. Fall 1901 saw England land an army in Denmark while the German fleet moved to Baltic. In the face of this well-organized and obvious Western triple, we tried to organize the rest of the board to work together and maintain a stalemate line.
Italy made it clear that he was not interested in helping, so Austria and Turkey worked together to push into Italy and the Mediterranean, while I tried to hold off Germany and England in the North. After a couple rounds of barely holding on (mostly due to selfless ally play from Turkey), cracks started to show in the western triple with Germany pulling back to defend against an English stab that never materialized. At the same time, France actually did move against Germany.
Unfortunately, just as we were about to break through, Austria stabbed Turkey and Russia. The haughty Hapsburg then demanded in front of the entire board that Turkey and Russia provide a reason for him to consider working with them again, which put an end to any attempts at rapprochement. As ever, the main beneficiary of other people’s stabs was Nate.
Thanks for the extras Josh. I agree that there was nothing standard about Fall ’01, I just meant that the Spring moves in the north were uneventful.
I deeply regret my unwarranted haughtiness, and can see in hindsight that it cost us some points to the benefit of Nate. I will try to take a lesson from this game moving forward and maintain a more positive tone and open mind moving forward.
As usual, this game went on for just one more game year than I had anticipated when making key strategic decisions, and my ability to negotiate and turn in sensible orders does deteriorate as my focus gives way to exhaustion.