Diplomacy World #121, Spring 2013 Issue

engaged in the hobby, spending hours and hours writing
letters, commenting, writing press, and being (with
Tro Sherwood) one of the US Orphan Service directors
helping to place orphaned postal games. This is where I
acquired my Jim-Bob moniker, was elected 1982 Toady
of the Year and a host of other personality driven
sillinesses. This was my hobby Golden Age where I met
each of the players in the game below in some manner
or three. I started my own postal szine, which still is
lurching along today on the web and I helped to bring
hobby history to the startings of the electronic hobby in
the late 1980's and early 1990's with the formation of
the rec.games.diplomacy usenet group and other
activities. I also got very involved in forming and
reforming the FTF Diplomacy activity in the New
England area a couple of times in the last two decades,
and now am running TempleCon
(http://www.templecon.org) in Rhode Island each
February (come up and see me some
time!!!). Somewhere in there, I became associated with
this Diplomacy World monstrosity and somehow held it
vaguely together so it could emerge under Doug Kent's
nagging leadership again into the TRUE hobby
institution it is today. Why anyone wants me to comment
on this game is purely anyone's guess. I suppose I
know this troupe of misfits as well or better than anyone
else around here, so I'll try to engage and entertain
you. I hope they write REAL press, so you can all
see some glimpse of what real postal style press was,
and I'll comment on that too as desirable. Well, here we
go, first some comments about each of the players....
Rick Desper: Rick Desper first encountered the game of
Diplomacy as a freshman at Georgetown University,
where the local chapter of APO ran a big-board game in
the basement of Copley Hall. Rick started playing email
dip a year later, after transferring to Wesleyan
University, getting in on the ground floor of email-dip with
legends like Eric Klien and Danny Loeb. In the 90s, Rick
matriculated at Rutgers University for grad school, and
was present for the early days of Ken Lowe's email
judge diplomacy, as well as the birth of the Usenet group
rec.games.diplomacy. Starting with Avaloncon in 1997,
Rick became more active in FTF Diplomacy, and has
attended World DipCons in England, Belgium, and
Germany (as well as several in the US and
Canada). Rick achieved a rare worst-to-first
achievement in the 2004-2005 DipCons, but still takes
more pride in the victory at the World Boardgamers
Championship Diplomacy tournament in 2003.
More recently, Rick's Diplomacy activity has waned as
his interest in the large number of excellent games from
Germany has grown. Still, Rick is always interested in
an exciting FTF game, provided that no muppets are
allowed. Rick doesn't understand why people play
Diplomacy if they are going to make no effort at trying to
win the game. (It's like playing tennis with the goal of
hitting the ball as close to the other player as possible.)
Rick's other pet peeve are movie-quiz publishers who
ask their readers to guess a category that includes 9
Oscar winners for Best Picture, and only one film that
didn't win Best Picture, and then the category is
"Pictures that won the Oscar for Best Director". Rick
finds that really annoying.
Jack McHugh: Jack McHugh is well known oyster diver
and wargame affianado who has a history in the hobby
going back to the early of days of the hobby helping to
come up with such well known terms as R, D and
OTB....Plays on several websites and has been as
unsuccessful on the web as he was on pbm.
Opening Comments:
Jim Burgess (BOLD)
Rick Desper (Normal Font)
Jack McHugh (Comic Sans MS)
Here we go with the commentary on the game. Just
as a side note, when I went to look up Tim and
Mike's Diplomaticcorp records, I found one Jack
McHugh with one of the lowest ratings on the site
with 10 eliminations..... hmmmm....
This game should be especially fun since we've
brought together some great players who mostly
have played in disparate hobbies and not with each
other. I am not encyclopedic, but the players here
who know each other best are FTF champions Chris
Martin and Peter Yeargin; Chris and Peter most
recently were together this January at Chris' biennial
FTF invitational in New Orleans; Frank Sudlow and
Gregory Alexopoulos are members of and have
played together in the Academy of Creative
Destruction (ACD), Gregory and Frank were Italy and
Austria together in the ACD game 234 back in
2009/2010, sharing a four way draw with two western
powers; and Tim Crosby (fencertim screenname)
and Mike Sims (FuzzyLogic screenname) are two of
the top players at the Diplomaticcorp
(www.diplomaticcorp.com). That leaves Jonathan
Powles, who has mainly been one of the best of the
recent players in the Judge hobby, but I don't think
he'll be hampered by not knowing the other players
as well, and I don't expect at all to see the game
break out in these pairs. I think this is one of our
most interesting Demo Game lineups we've ever
had. Peter and Chris are the FTF stalwarts, Gregory,
Jonathan and Michael have dipped their toes into
the FTF tournament world, and to my knowledge Tim
Diplomacy World #121 – Spring 2013 - Page 34