We are eight games into our 12th season of Windy City Weasels Diplomacy and have now played 317 league games total. Nevertheless, in Sunday’s game at David Spanos’ home in Lakeview, we managed a first for the club. You’ll note in the photo above that the players include Captain Kirk and Sherlock Holmes. Not surprisingly, they both factored into the board top.
The game–which featured two first-time players and host David following in Dan Burgess’ footsteps and perhaps walking a bit farther–ended by draw vote in Spring 1907 in the following center counts:
Austria (Brian Shelden): 8; 26.446 points.
England (Bryan Pravel): 8; 26.446 points.
France (Karl Horker): 0; 0.000 points.
Germany (Mick Johnson): 5; 10.331 points.
Italy (Chris Kelly): 8; 26.446 points.
Russia (Brandon Fogel): 5; 10.331 points.
Turkey (Paul Digiulio): 0; 0.000 points.
The supply center chart is here. Perhaps the players can provide us with the details of the game…and David’s gourmet spread.
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Sad I couldn’t make it because that is the best Sherlock I’ve ever seen. Also the prime weasel looks well cut out for Starfleet.
A most fascinating and unpredictable case. My assignation as Italy, with new players on both flanks in France and Turkey, gave me a greater incentive than usual to refrain from impulsiveness and wait for relationships and opportunities to reveal themselves.
The Russian representative, a notoriously wily and skillful player, tried to lure me into action right away with a joint attack on Austria. Without delving into the sincerity of his motivations, I declined to proceed until I knew more about France and Turkey’s intentions. Those nations quickly justified my concerns by building fleets whose only practical use was to challenge Italy in the Mediterranean.
Fortunately for my prospects, only France followed up its builds with an immediate assault, and its units were not ideally arrayed for the purpose. I succeeded tactically in blunting the attack, and the French representative decided to reverse field and pursue an invasion of England. This seemed promising until his erstwhile German ally changed directions as well, plunging his armies into the heart of France rather than helping to attack the British isles. Meanwhile, Turkey remained homebound, constrained first by the pesky machinations of a loose Russian fleet and then by pressure from neighboring Austrian forces.
The combined reprieve propelled me to seize the initiative, sending fleets east and west simultaneously. I found myself productively allied with the Austrian representative, whose unlikely moniker of “Captain Kirk” belied the fact that his uniform was unlike any Austrian military or police unit in my extensive recollection. (He may, I suspect, have been a mercenary officer from a foreign power even further from the purview of Scotland Yard, or the Crown for that matter, than Austria.)
Whatever his provenance, the Austrian representative demonstrated himself to be a reliable and stalwart colleague in collaborating against the Turk. And I accurately deduced that the antipathy between the German and French representatives would leave both of them inadequate to respond to an Italian advance from the south. As a result I was able, in the final two years of the campaign, to capture Marseilles, Portugal, Spain, and Munich with only token opposition.
But the real mystery — the challenge of at least sharing a board top after a daunting start — was yet to be solved. To accomplish this, I needed not only to succeed in my own right but to undermine the game’s most successful players up to that point: Austria and England. Here I must primarily credit good fortune: after initially securing in good faith an agreement with the English representative to support one another in Munich and Berlin, I realized that supporting a German effort to recapture Berlin instead would better serve my purposes.
And while I limited my own last-turn opportunism to a move on Greece that I fully expected (and admitted to my Austrian counterpart) would not succeed, this token assault sufficiently distracted Austria’s defenses to enable Russia to seize one of his supply centers. Thus I was the happy beneficiary of other’s schemes in establishing the satisfactory balance reflected in the game’s final results.
P.S. Regrettably, I failed to achieve our host’s desire for me to say something so blindingly obvious during negotiations that my interlocutor would instinctively blurt out, “No s–t, Sherlock!”
Chris this writeup was fantastic! I definitely felt you played the best game of the night and I actually learned something from watching you play. Italy is challenging in our club when there are two new players because you get stuck between France and Turkey whom most club members agree not to attack in the early game. Most Italians make a rush to attack Austria as a result. Your patient play paid off and showed me there are still options for the veteran Italian player in this scenario.
Plus that really was the best Sherlock Holmes costume I have seen. Basil Rathbone would have been proud.
Credit for the Sherlock outfit goes to Broadway Costumes: http://broadwaycostumes.com/rental-directory/