When we last saw Barry Preece (center), he was guiding Turkey to a monster board-top at Ballydoyle Irish Pub in Downers Grove. Remember when we used to do bar games in Downers Grove? Yah, that’s how long ago it was–March 2011.
Back then, Barry was playing in only his second game. His first came in a recruiting game that Chris Davis ran for the Chicago Game Lovers Meetup, also in March 2011, I believe. That recruiting game was off the grid–we didn’t count it. On his own, Chris arranged to teach the game to seven novices. (Coincidentally, they played that game on the same block where we played the first five games in our club’s history.)
Of the seven, only Barry wanted to play again, but one out of seven isn’t bad for a recruiting game, and when he topped that next board at Ballydoyle, we figured we had a solid new member for the club. We figured wrong. Despite our best outreach efforts, we couldn’t get him back to the table.
Until today.
But enough about Barry. The title of this article really should be the Western Double–a nod to Dan Burgess’ penchant for the Triple–because our E/F dominated this one. We called the draw in Spring 1906. The final center counts were:
Austria (Barry Preece): 5; 8.117 points.
England (Dan Burgess): 10; 32.468 points.
France (Jim O’Kelley): 13; 54.870 points.
Germany (Don Glass): 0; 0.000 points.
Italy (Nelson Flynn): 1; 0.325 points.
Russia (Amanda Baumgartner): 2; 1.299 points.
Turkey (Fred Townsend): 3; 2.922 points.
A couple of quick notes.
First, of the five neighbors who could have attacked Germany in 1901, only Barry’s Austria didn’t. It was a tough day for Don.
Second, speaking of the Chicago Game Lovers Meetup, we’ve been advertising our bar games there this season, the first time we’ve done that since Chris’ outreach in Season Six. Eleven of our 31 new recruits this season, in fact, have come from that group, and five of them have played, or will soon play, in more than one game.
Fred Townsend’s story is a good reminder of why we should continue to advertise our games there. He was a prolific player in the 1980s postal hobby. If you google him, you’ll find articles he wrote for the hobby press, and he’s one of those rare players who already have profiles in the World Diplomacy Database when they come to us. He never thought to go looking for a Diplomacy club, but when he saw a game advertised in his Meetup feed, he jumped back in. He has now played a bar game, a house game, and two rounds at CODCon, the latter while recovering from hip surgery. We expect to see him at Weasel Moot, too.
Anyway, enough prattling. You can check out the supply center chart here. Perhaps the other players will chime in with their thoughts.
I’ll leave with this: Playing Dip at Dan’s is just part of the fun. There’s also the beer on tap, rehasing the action on his deck afterward, and sometimes even other games. Today, we played three games of Resistance, which was quick and a lot of fun. Great day. Thanks for hosting, Dan!
Next up: We’ve got a two-board session at the Red Lion on Wednesday, and then Weasel Moot next month (June 13-14 at UIC). In between, we’ll hold another Red Wednesday in June, but we’ll probably move it up to the first Wednesday so as not to crowd Moot. See you soon!
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This game was my 100th league game with the club. Matt Sundstrom will be the next player to reach that landmark. He has played in 97 games.
After him are Nate Cockerill at 89 games; Mike Morrison at 75; and Peter Lokken, 67.
It was fun to host, and while everyone knows I’m not that keen on playing and hosting simultaneously, I managed to do both fairly well, for once.
I’ve always thought that EF was the best and most natural alliance on the board, and I think Jim and I proved it quite well on Saturday. With Amanda’s help as Russia we pretty much eviscerated Don as Germany, and then I turned my attention toward taking Amanda’s dots from her. Jim did very well in Italy and although we could have both increased our counts significantly, we were ready to call it a day and agreed to a draw at 13/10/5/3/2/1. Had this game continued, I probably would have had to marshal opposition and attack Jim to prevent him from a solo victory — he was cruising in the south and the opposition likely wouldn’t have been very cohesive.
Thanks to everyone for coming out! I’m not going to host again until well after Weasel Moot, but let’s do it again in August or September, and then of course let’s start thinking about dates for the Weasel Royale in October!