A funny thing happened at our "Dude?!? It’s Tuesday!" game last night at the Red Lion in Lincoln Square. Two of the players, including a mysterious Meetup recruit, turned out to be women.
Kiya Krivickas marched in right about 6:30, confidently sat down in the middle of our group of five guys, and announced that she was there to play Diplomacy.
"Have you played before?" I asked, a natural ice-breaker given the occasion.
"Nope," she said. "I found the group on Meetup, saw that you were playing in a part of the city I hadn’t yet explored, and liked that the event was taking place during happy hour."
Okay, then. Welcome to the Weasels.
Around 7:15, Nate Cockerill realized that we had made the kind of mistake that wouldn’t have happened in simpler times. Each one of us had thought the other recruited Don Glass to play. Turns out I had misunderstood Nate’s text from earlier in the day. ("Don said he’d be our seventh" doesn’t mean "Don is coming.") I updated Meetup to reflect that Don was coming, and that generated an email to Nate, the event organizer, stating that Don was coming. But Don wasn’t coming.
By 7:15, we finally figured that out. Thankfully it was a pretty slow night at the Lion so server and sometimes diplomat Amber Bree agreed to be our seventh.
Due to the late start and a leisurely pace, we managed only four game years. Game No. 247 ended by time limit after the Fall 1904 turn in the following center counts:
Austria (Matt Sundstrom): 7; 24.020 points.
England (Nathan Cockerill): 3; 4.412 points.
France (Mike Morrison): 1; 0.490 points.
Germany (Amber Bree): 8; 31.373 points.
Italy (Jim O’Kelley): 7; 24.020 points.
Russia (Ben DiPaola): 4; 7.843 points.
Turkey (Kiya Krivickas): 4; 7.843 points.
The supply center chart is here. It was a short, fun game, and I’m looking forward to the next one, which will be this Saturday at Josh Heffernan’s home in Logan Square. I hope the players there don’t get any ideas. Just because we tipped last night’s board topper doesn’t mean we’ll tip the next one.
Aerosmith, take it away.
