Alamaze

You will be interested in reading this!
:D

Greetings Folks,

Rick

Greetings Folks,

Its been a long time! Thanks Walter for your posting from an Alamaze Yahoo group.

We are working on a few technical issues to revive Alamaze and meanwhile want to gauge interest from the PBM player base. I'm a member here now, so I'll check this thread and other posts.

Meanwhile, I'll look forward to getting reacquainted with you guys!

Rick McDowell

Welcome aboard Rick!
Looking forward to play in your game..

Walt

I'd be interested in playing Alamaze again. I played back in 1990 or 91. Some of the most fun I had playing pbm!

I would be very interested in playing this game again as I used to play it with UK-based Pagoda games in the late 90s.

/Björn

Anyone have Almaze rules scanned online? Would be interesting...

I would love to play again. I won game #29 way back in 1989 and played a bunch of games. Sorry to hear your brother passed away - I always enjoyed talking to him.

An old Alamaze turn is attached.

Thanks!
I liked reading this!

Hey Guys,

We are getting close. We will have a few (maybe 3) weeks more of internal testing while we get a new Alamaze website up with sign up info, Rules, info on the kingdoms.

Right now you can read a bit more about Alamaze in the forum it is sharing with Fall of Rome at www.fallofromegame.com

[quote='Rick McDowell' pid='2141' dateline='1360908035']
Right now you can read a bit more about Alamaze in the forum it is sharing with Fall of Rome at www.fallofromegame.com
[/quote]

Wrong link, Rick. Try this one, instead:

http://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=11

I checked out the Fall of Rome/Alamaze forums, but was unable to download the set-up material without logging in as a user.

I tried to register for the Fall of Rome forums and it told me "Your details match those of a known spammer, therefore you have been disallowed registration."

So I clicked on the Contact Us link, which generated an email to board@kingdomsofarcania.net, and I received an auto-reply that the user does not exist when I tried to contact them to gain access to the forums.

I signed up on the Fall of Rome game site just fine, then tried the forum again, thinking maybe it cross-checks the email address of forum participants with its user database. No dice. It still says I'm a "known spammer."

Now I have emailed a support address at 'alamaze.co' that I found over on the Road of Kings site. If I don't receive a response back, I'll probably just give up and continue dropping all my PBM money on Duel2 and Hyborian War. Pretty frustrating experience so far.

Received a prompt response from support (within an hour) and now have access to the forums.

They appear to have updated the Contact Us email address on their site as well.

Looking forward to checking out the rules and set-up information!

[quote='Rick McDowell' pid='2141' dateline='1360908035']
Hey Guys,

We are getting close. We will have a few (maybe 3) weeks more of internal testing while we get a new Alamaze website up with sign up info, Rules, info on the kingdoms.

Right now you can read a bit more about Alamaze in the forum it is sharing with Fall of Rome at www.fallofromegame.com
[/quote]
Glad to hear that Alamaze may be up & running again. Sorry to hear about Phil's passing. Definitely be interested in getting into a new game. Played the Halfling in the 90's coming in 3rd maybe - I financed the Darkelf into a win. Remember exciting & intense phone conversations with the Darkelf player.:cool:

Gentlemen, Dwarves, Dragons, Elves, Ancient Ones, Etc.:

The play test is going well. Most of the effort has been on refreshing presentation of the turn results. Website coming on line is a bigger question mark for timetable, but we can start with a limited release doing sign up, queue, etc. manually. You can follow the news on the Alamaze / Fall of Rome forum.

I've attached a file with a brief overview of The Kingdoms. This or something like it will be on the website linking to the detailed 6 or 7 page Kingdom Dossier for each kingdom.

Hope to see you on the forums and then, ruling your kingdom!

You can email me at ded127@aol.com and I will share the old rules, orders, PowerPoint map, and my new expanded order cheat sheet with you.

I will be playing The Demon Princes in Game 100. The last time I looked, the Giants and Sorcerer were available. There are plenty of open seats in Game 101 as well. I hope to see you there!

I just started an Alamaze Face Book page. Like us there and you might just be glad you did down the road!

Alamaze On Face Book

Game 100 is already filled up, but Game 101 has a number of open positions. We are starting off with just the two games for the first few weeks, so if you want to get in on the action sign up now!

Lords,

Your kingdoms await. A few positions remain in Game #101.

www.http://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/

Starting March 29 if you get in.

rick

The first two games of the relaunched Alamaze are underway. Turn 1 is in the books, Turn 2 fast approaches. Two new games are also filling up, in case anyone else is interested in playing!

Alamaze Classic began its third and fourth games. We have five positions remaining in the fifth game. Sign up, tell your friends.

Attached is an example of what a kingdom dossier looks like in the new Alamaze:

Thumbs down on using black background. If I tried to print that, how much toner am I going to end up wasting?

I went to print the first page of it, just now, but apparently, we have no printer paper. How did we manage that one? So, I can't tell for sure, yet, whether trying to print the PDF kingdom dossiers, as you call them, waste printer toner/ink, because of how you have chosen to format them.

OK, we have printer paper, again, and the page from that dossier that I tried to print earlier, today, printed.

This is a dreadful waste of toner.

[quote='GrimFinger' pid='2166' dateline='1370577804']
OK, we have printer paper, again, and the page from that dossier that I tried to print earlier, today, printed.

This is a dreadful waste of toner.
[/quote]

We're thinking most players will have hard drives and just load the file from there for viewing and storage, or open an email file on any device if they are away from their main computer.

[quote='Rick McDowell' pid='2380' dateline='1374807761']
We're thinking most players will have hard drives and just load the file from there for viewing and storage, or open an email file on any device if they are away from their main computer.[/quote]

Why not just make another version of the same file with black text on a white background, and call it a print version? That would solve the issue.

Wished to remind all of Alamaze Resurgent, on our new map. Active community, visit the website. Find us at www.alamaze.co. (not .com)

Just signed up for my first game of Alamaze. There are still a few slots open if anyone wants to join me! I dithered between playing "The Sorceror" or "The Stone Giants", and finally opted for the latter, but will gladly switch if anyone here wants to sign up. The sooner we fill this game the better. Starting level of game subscription = $19.95/month, which gives you one game. This translates to somewhere between 4 and 10 turns for one game, depending on game speed. I may be wrong on that.

EDIT: I meant to say 4 to 10 turns PER MONTH for one game. I hope to get into a fast game, so that would work out to $2/turn...

Just submitted turn 3 orders for this game. The action is fast and the diplomacy is intense. The game adeptly fuses deep content and strategic options with a rule-set that is slightly simpler than I'm used to. This is a good thing. I would post about what's happening, but there are far too many secrets at stake. I'll post a recap when the game ends, which might be in 3 months.

Really enjoying the difficult choices, the perilous negotiations, and the pace!

Things I have learned about Alamaze so far:

- Contact/diplomacy with your fellow players is necessary for survival. In other words, you will be eaten alive if you are silent.
- Avoid the temptation to sell all your food every turn. Winter is coming.
- While it is easy to come up with a budget every turn (food and gold), it is more difficult (and important) to plan out how you will spend it over the first several turns. Don't spend it all too fast.
- Move quickly to dominate a region and gather up a host of towns/villages.
- You can't combine groups into a single attack. If you want to combine forces, you must first transfer troops into one group and THEN attack.
- Did I mention the importance of contact/diplomacy?
- The players and moderators are super-helpful in every aspect of the game.

Nifty! Can you share more about the player interaction? What is the extent of correspondence? What do you discuss, etc?

Alamaze players are very helpful and generally communicative. Far more so than I. In fact, I am planning an article at the end of this game called "How Not To Play Alamaze".

Some people dislike diplomacy-intensive games, including a chum of mine who is reluctant to try PBM games for this reason. I almost got him to join Alamaze with me. He said it's because he innately trusts everyone and can't see himself lying or otherwise tricking people through diplomatic contact. But I haven't seen any of that take place in this game AT ALL yet.

Deception isn't really baked into the game or the community. There are a great number of unknowns at any given point in the game, so you can conduct lots of useful diplomacy merely by trading "knowns" and fostering relationships. There isn't really a great need for deception, the way there is in, say, Diplomacy (the game), but there IS a fairly serious penalty for actively deceiving people -- players talk and post feedback on one another. And this being PBM, the player community is small enough that you are fairly certain to see familiar faces in your next game. So while there is no rule against lying, there is not much incentive to do it.

I can say more, but don't want to share while I'm still in the game.

I will say this -- I will probably sign up for another game after this one ends (or I get knocked out.) That's about as hearty a recommendation as you'll ever get for a PBM game!

Alamaze has a cohort of players who favor Anonymous games, and we are generally starting about 1 Classic (full diplomacy, 15 player game) for about every 1 Anonymous (12 player, no diplomacy game where no one knows who is playing what position).

The Anonymous games avoid the near requirement for diplomacy, but then also forgo the chance for players to learn skill from their fellow competitors by communicating (via email), and also preclude players reporting on game progress on the forum.

We also have a 5 player, 5 kingdom game we call Primeval, both in anonymous and diplomacy formats, and Warlords games - where each of 4 players controls 3 kingdoms apiece.