I started a "solo galaxy" to test out the waters and perhaps introduce the game abit and entice others to join our game.

If you contact Davin, register on his site, and ask to take part in the free playbymail game, then you will have an account with which you too can start your very own solo galaxy. Or, of course, you can live vicariously through me.

I begin playing Galaxy #64 by clicking around the web interface. It is simple, plain, and uncluttered. There is a lot of technical information availabe, but having read the rules I am able to make general sense of it. The first thing I look for is the map -- I want to see where I am in the galaxy. It's an ASCII character grid, depicting stars as asterisks, although it's customizable and responsive. It encapsulates neatly the past/future duality of this game. It looks like a print-out from 1982, but it's an interactive play-by-WEB game that seems to leverage modern technologies. You can even get your turn-report as an XML file, should you want to port the data into your own third-party database, spreadsheet, or XSLT display engine. Ancient and modern at the same time.

I start with a standard home system at the center-right of the 100x100 map, with all the other starts mapped but none "charted." This means I know they are there, but I don't know much else about them.

I begin with 10 "FX" freighters -- standard smallish ships each loaded with enough PI (production inventory) to launch one remote colony. They have 20 star drives, which means they can dart out pretty far across the map (20 spaces), but just 1 inertia drive -- enough to steam into a spacedock, but useless in combat.

I also have 10 "SC1" scout ships, tiny and cheap, intended to scout star systems first and warn of any trouble. If there were any reason to expect bad guys (or wandering monsters) in this game, I would probably keep my freighters home for the first turn and send a wave of scouts. But I might just kick-start things by scouting WITH my freighters and send the scouts further afield.

Rounding out my fleet, I have a couple of lightly armed patrol boats ("SK1" Skirmishers), a single armed carrier ("CV1J" -- the "jeep carrier"! -- clearly my flagship!) with a complement of 4 heavy fighters, and an immobile ST1 Space Station, bristling with armament for home defense. Everything is "tech level 1".

The "fighters" aren't akin to x-wings. They're more like corvettes, with more than double the armament of those patrol boats and (let's imagine) a crew of 200. They'd be hideously expensive, but because they lack star drives they are merely quite expensive. The carrier is more or less a rig to get these space frigates around. This reminds me of the old game Warp War.

There is a simple and useful ship design tool. It could use a couple of minor tweaks, but overall this is the kind of tight and easily understood game design that PBM ought to strive for. This design tool reflect this.

There is an order page on which you can record up to 50 orders. It uses a varying number of "argument" fields with each order, which should be quite familiar to any PBM gamer, but this page itself does not automation or error-checking. There IS an app available for download that is supposed to handle errors and support order writing, but I haven't installed it yet. I am leary of installing apps, and wish this functionality were available on a web site, or at least embedded in an Excel file. It would help to know what language or framework it was written in. It would also help to have a mac version, for those who are so inclined. But it is entirely optional -- you are able to draft your turn "manually", and it doesn't look too difficult.

Finally, the site offers a "suggest actions" button, which provides a set of actions you might consider issuing on turn one. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates several important orders -- how they work and how to write them. I will likely write my own, but this is a big help to be sure.

I will stop here for now. I'll submit at least one post per turn, and shoot for getting at least one turn per day submitted. Solo games can be played at your own pace, so I will get things moving more speedily once I get situated...

Looking for some advice and help on selecting and using a reader for UseNet news groups.

Submission Deadline for Issue # 11: October 20th, 2015

Issue #10, our very first foray into double digit territory, is now in our rear view mirror. Straight ahead? Issue #11!

We could use your help in making it a better issue, our best issue ever, by way of your participation.

We need your thoughts, your ponderings, your articles, your reviews. Fill out the Reader Survey, and send your response back to us. Send it all to: GrimFinger@GrimFinger.Net

Thanks for making it happen!

Send all submissions for Issue # 11 to: GrimFinger@GrimFinger.Net

Submissions Deadline for Issue # 11: October 20th, 2015

Well, issue 10 is out, Grim has done a bang-up job, and I am breaking radio silence on this forum after more than a year.

Apart from things I wrote about in issue 10, I would like to put forth a couple of possibilities to the community:

First, I am testing out Galac-tac (finally).  It is just exactly the kind of game I like best, so I'm puzzled why I haven't attempted it before.  It's a space empire game, close-ended and computer-moderated.  The rules are fairly simple, and the tactics are fairly deep.  There's a good player community, and it's run by attentive moderators.

And it is cheap.  For the time being, $5 will get you ONE YEAR of unlimited play.

I am starting with a solo game, to learn the ropes.  You play against computer opponents, and you can trigger the next turn at your leisure.  I will be starting up a thread in the PBM games section, and posting screen-shots as I go.  Check it out, and if anyone is interested in a regular game, let's get a group together.

Second, I would like to try playing a board wargame using VASSAL.  My preference is to start small with a game I know, but I am open to anything.

Anyone interested in playing the venerable first scenario of Squad Leader?  "The Guards Counter-attack?"

Please, if you will, take time to post your opinion of Issue # 10 in our poll at the top of this particular forum thread. Thank you in advance for your consideration, participation, and input!

NOTE: Click HERE, in order to download Issue # 10 of Suspense & Decision magazine, a PBM magazine for the 21st Century!

I hope that you enjoy Issue # 10!

Be sure to give us some feedback on it, after you have had a chance to browse through it and to digest it a bit.

Happy gaming and happy reading!

Would anyone by any chance have any old turns, or rule books still knocking about?

Robin

I'd like to take the time to introduce you all to Eressea. It's not an easy game to describe, because I'm no longer sure it's even a game, but here's trying to explain it by way of its history:

Eressea is a fantasy world simulation. It started with a couple of friends who discovered Russell Wallace's Atlantis and after playing in German Atlantis for a while, deciding that what they wanted was a game less focused on magical and military expansion, but an open-ended simulated world in which their small fantasy empires could exist, with no goals other than to have fun and maybe discover some emergent stories.

A small group of developers went to work, set up a game of Atlantis 1.0 with minor modifications, and invited their friends to play. Rules would be changed whenever necessary, to favor long-term open-ended play. Magic was to be completely redesigned. New friends and friends of friends were constantly added, and the world grew outward from a few original islands to more and more area for these new players. A professional game developer joined the development team (that's me), and the game eventually grew beyond mere friends of friends to have several thousand players.

The game continued to be strongly shaped by combat, and all new empires tended to go through a phase of growth, followed by the building of alliances and major battles that would usually eliminate one side or the other. The roots of the old Atlantis game are strong. With the military players' demands shaping much of the development of the game (and a new combat system, NPC monsters), the original design team split to try and build other games in 2005, leaving only me to keep the game running in the years since.

Since the schism of 2005, I have tried several things. The game is fully now automated, and if necessary, it will run for weeks without attention. Registration of new players was always a manual step, and  for several years, new registrations were closed. The resulting attrition has slowly reduced the number of players in the original game back to around 200 (I suspect some players have multiple factions, making this a bit hard to count), a much more manageable figure. To respond to demand, I started two additional games, registering a large number of players in a fixed-sized world, each time with slightly tweaked experimental rules. Starting fresh games like this compresses all the work of world generation and player registration into a week or two, which felt easier than the constant growth pattern of the original game, and given enough demand, I would start more games like that.

The design team has grown to include some of the more dedicated players, and publishing the source on github has brought in a few developers who help me with fixing bugs and building new features. We have a regular release schedule for new versions, integration test servers, and all the software development bells and whistles that a big project like this needs. I'm pretty proud that the game hasn't missed one of its weekly turn in years.

In the meantime, I believe that many of the remaining players are more aligned with the original vision of a long-term open-ended world simulation. They've fought the big battles for territory, and due to attrition, there is more territory - you can't swing a dead hobbit without hitting some lost civilization's overgrown castles. So this year, we started allowing new players into the world again - placing them into the empty wastelands with all their history and ruins. This is mostly attractive to former players who wish to reconnect with the game, and it can be a challenge, because many of these regions are resource-starved and overrun by roving bands of NPC monsters. The nice thing for me is that it's easy to automate this, because no new landmasses are added to the game, instead an algorithm finds the most suitable-looking spots for a new player.

At this point, the term "Eressea" refers to several things: First, the genre of game, to which all three of my games belong. Secondly, the original game world, which is also named Eressea, just to confuse matters. And thirdly, the open-source code base on github that runs the entire game. Each one of these is a project to itself, and there is potential for growth in all these areas. I'm growing eressea-the-world by placing players into the old world, and eressea-the-codebase by open sourcing it and inviting players to help with development.

I'm still trying to figure out how to grow eressea-the-game. I've had several interested parties who were considering running their own game, and a lot of times, they did not get betond compiling the source. I try to help with that, and it has gotten a lot easier over the years (another side-effect of the open source development), but it requires a modicum of technical knowledge. I've offered to try out compromises where I host the game for a GM (Eressea as a Service), but so far, nobody I've talked to has shown enough interest in that, either. Maybe I'm doing too good a job with my three games, and there is no need for another one? I hope not!

So, I just started playing Diplomacy recently and totally fell into a love/hate relationship with the game.

I've never played a PBM game. I remember seeing ads for them back in the day, but didn't know anything else about them.

Fast forward to today. I am a fickle luddite. I embrace technology a lot of the time, but I also have a collection of vintage/antique manual typewriters that I bang on frequently.

I would love a true PBM, where players communicate with one another only by snailmail letters. Maybe have turn results online, but all player to player communications via mail. It would give me an excuse to use those typewriters more and also give me something to look forward to when I check the mailbox.

For what it is worth, there are a lot of typewriter collectors out there that I think would embrace a similar style of game.

It'd be nice to have something like Diplomacy (simple to get feet wet, needing lots of correspondence). If I am trying to talk other typewriter enthusiasts into it though, I think a game that is slightly less cuthroat/backstabbing would be more appreciated.

Any ideas?

I will soon purge the forum user account list, notably for inactivity and spam accounts.

Forum accounts listed as Subscribers won't be affected by this particular purge.