Con of the North: Day 1 of 3

I had a long weekend.  I had Friday off as vacation and Monday off for Presidents' Day.  In retrospect, even if I hadn't had Monday off, I should have taken it off.  Aeryn and I spent three days gaming at Con of the North and I was exhausted by Monday.  I think I'm still exhausted.  That's simply a lot of sitting and mental activity to engage in for three full days.

We usually do Gameholecon in Madison, but we've never done a Minneapolis board gaming convention.  So this was the first.  And it was the first I've hosted a game/s at, although Aeryn hosted Carthage at Gameholecon before [with a rather problematic table of old dudes].

We had a great time and I'd drop it all here, but it's a little much for a single post - and rough on my typing implements - to string it all together.

The white board welcoming people to the convention  A handy place to find some ad hoc games, although there were several rooms where people were kicking up non-scheduled games. A semi-official at the event told me this year they had 1300 people register.  Fewer were there on Friday and Sunday, but Saturday was definitely packed.

 

Aeryn and I both started on Lifeboats.  I joked that this game needs a lot more alcohol.  It's a voting/positioning game.  Basically you want to get as many of your survivors to the islands as possible.  Islands are worth varying points.  Your survivors come in two flavors, one vote and two.  Each turn you vote for a boat that leaks.  You vote someone off the boat if there's no space for everyone plus the leaks.  You vote for a boat to move.  You all hop out of one boat each and have to enter a different boat. There's a trumping mechanism with the cards if you think everyone is out to get you.  So not so exciting with a group of strangers.  Likely much better with a group of people where you have an inkling about their decisions.

 

I played 5 Tribes while Aeryn went off to run some games [probably Wingspan].  I love this game.  It's got a mancala style of play where you pick up all the meeples on one square and then drop them one by one and the last one you play has to match a meeple in the target square and you take all of the meeples of that color and the color then determines a specific action, as does the square itself.  Some genii with special powers and set collection round out the point grabs.  A great group which made it that much more fun.

 

Arkham Horror 3rd Ed.  We played from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. and pretty much used up the whole time.  Your characters are trying to power up with skills and implements and find clues and stomp "doom".  Too much doom, bad things happen.  Find the clues, good things happen in the story line.  We failed hard at getting the clues earlier, although they just dumped on us later.

This is me, roaming the hood cleaning up doom and not doing much clue finding or monster ass kicking.

 

I loved this guys' character.  I joked that he looked like Joshua Jackson from Fringe running around shirtless.  One of the cards I read out loud for his encounter noted that it had rained on him and water and light were glistening off him.  Much funnier when he's shirtless.

 

Eventually this giant toad demon starting eating all our neighborhoods.  Not adventurers IN the neighborhoods.  But the hoods themselves.  As well as anyone in them.  At the end, almost everyone was et and I was down on that far end in an orgy of monsters, but not toad food.  It took us a long time to lose.  I liked one of the players noting, "We are a feast for someone's horrid master."

 

Ark Nova.  I'm not playing this one.  Klund tells me it's great.  I'm of the opinion I will never, ever play something with this many pieces and this wide of a layout.  Ironic when you see the Memoir 44 game in tomorrow's post.  But I didn't set that up and didn't have to worry too much about the other 10/12 of the board.

 

There was a Con of the North room specifically for gamemasters.  There was a ring to lock a chain to and disinfectant.  I don't know how the other gamemasters prep, but it seems scary.

 

There was role playing and Space Hulk and various mini games going on all over and several of the groups sponsored rooms and events.  This guy was upstairs.

  

 A nice closeup of him.

  

The vendor area wasn't too exciting, although I did get a game and Aeryn bought Pollo our cat a catnip infused 20-sider.  This was for sale.  I can't imagine owning this game.  When I was in high school and went on a bicycle trip, Joe came out of an outhouse laughing and laughing and muttering "Here Kitty Kitty".  The outhouse was papered in risque images, including a well-endowed mouse looking for cat love.  I wouldn't get two minutes into this without thinking about that.

 

The Medical Games room sponsored by one of the groups.  I like the baby.

 

I don't know what they're playing here, but it's very reminiscent of Circus Maximus.  I probably should have asked, although the difference wasn't likely enough that it really mattered.  Cool setup and they were having a great time.

 

The Con was kid friendly and there were a lot of families and teenagers there, including a bunch dropped off for the day by parents.  The whiteboard was proof of that.

  

I don't know who Ishmall is, but the minds of teenager gamers [and teenagers in general] are weird places to see translated to a whiteboard.

 

Another case in point.

Overall we gamed from about noon to ten p.m. the first day with a short break for dinner and a pre-con brunch at the Original Pancake House.  5 Tribes and Arkham were a lot of fun, even with the Arkham loss [although that really seemed to throw the game organizer, at least the magnitude of our loss seemed to], and Aeryn met someone who had been involved in planning an aborted Blood on the Clocktower event at my Arkham table, so they talked and made plans to get it going the next day.

More subdued than Gameholecon which was nice.  I think it may have been that there were about a tenth as many [or less] role players at Con of the North.  Solid family crowd and a lot of women playing at most of my tables.

Raccoon Sky Pirates Adventure

 Raccoon Sky Pirates Adventure

4/20/2022

An intrepid band of raccoons, all with different motivations, yet a common goal, gathered together at their home, the city dump, to discuss how to achieve their aims beyond the confines of their home.

The Heist of Raccoons included:

Brisket Jack [Scott] who referred to himself intermittently in the third person.  Gray and grizzled his mask was slowly blending into his other fur.  Brisket had only four fingers on one hand, having lost one fighting a pit bull [allegedly] who had cornered some foraging kits.  Per Brisket, “Brisket chased that junk yard dog completely out of the junk yard.  Now he’s just a dog.”  Brisket seeks glory and adventure, an example for other raccoons to follow.

Vibrissa the inventor [Aeryn, they/them], who had only two legs, their back legs replaced with uneven wheels, one rubbered, one only a rim, from a lawnmower and kid’s tricycle, and a small cart, the result of a wheeled invention not going right when coupled with a jet pack and molotov cocktails.  Vibrissa once aided Kit in overcoming dump night terrors where Kit would awake to be terrified of the looming shadow of the mounds of the dump, by variously blowing up mounds in the dump.

Kit [Hank, they/them], the littlest raccoon, although more appropriately the shortest raccoon, almost a ball in stature.  “I’m shortest on two legs, but not the littlest.”  Kit as a growing raccoon, is excited to find and wash some new food, even to the point of eating it right on the spot.  Kit is more relaxed around Vibrissa as they have learned to associate inventive explosions with food.

Rabies Eddie [Kyle, me/mine] the untamable beast.  Eddie is grizzled and has seen to much and been in too many places, and often lives inside mes own head, staring off into the distance.  Maria Triple XL takes care of him but has to be careful, as there was an incident where Maria got between Eddie and some possums and bit Maria.  As Eddie says, “Things got kind of hairy.”  There’s a bit of ill will between them over the bites, despite the protective nature of their relationship.

Maria Triple XL [Chris, Bad Ass Motherfucker], the colossus, strong, deft, and brave.  And a bit stout and square.  A protective relationship with Rabies Eddie that resulting in the “biting incident”, many of which are still healing, although no rabies resulted.  Maria loves food.  Loves to swim and has a secret the BAM shares with Brisket about a lost treasure outside the dump as they were litter mates.

The Heist begins to design a ship that can carry them all to adventure and treasure.  Several ideas are bandied about including using Legos [how many, each raccoon’s weight in legos?], a bathtub, a cracked hot tub, trash cans, dirty dump water, helium, and milk crates  Initial experiments involve trying to loft Kit skyward using a milk crate, a rope, a bag, and helium. The helium works much better than expected nearly dragging the whole party off the ground.  Vibrissa eventually reads the canisters and realizes they’re not full of helium, but are full of Fizzy Lifting Gas.  Several panels of scrap wood, half a dozen beat up trash cans, two rear propellers, two side propellers, an engine/motor, and a couple of super soakers are all lashed together under a large balloon, with a beach ball used to control the amount of gas.

Brisket Jack’s artistic drawing of the TinCANic [figure 1] , the sturdiest of Raccoon Flying vessels ever constructed, naming heavily indebted to Torch Key the Raccoon who was absent this adventure.  Maria Triple XL dumps the dump water Brisket collected for the BAM, declaring at the end of the adventure, a giant expanse of warm clean water awaits. Vibrissa adds some railings for safety purposes.  

With the release of fizzy lifting glass, the Heist is away, floating roughly above fence height, then higher until they can survey what lies before them.  Maria can smell a mix of chocolate and the same scent in fizzy lifting gas to the northeast where trucks carry something from the chemical plant to a factory.

The initial journey is particularly smooth as a lightly moonlit night begins to fall and Maria guides the TinCANic onto the factory roof, landing deftly on an A/C unit to protect the props while repairing a malfunctioning rotor, following the mantra gained through a lifetime of experience, “If it doesn’t fit, force it.”  It is noted by Eddie that Maria is deft at releasing gas.

The factory reeks of chocolate and the Heist heads down the side of the building and enters a hallway via the loading docks.  Maria XL almost gets stuck between a truck and the door, but Kit assists and the Heist is in, examining a hallway full of doors.  The first room seems to be nothing more than random supplies: 150’ of bungee cord, a fire extinguisher, a ten gallon bucket of soap, some lawn chairs, and more.  A second room is nothing but Halloween decorations and hard candy.  Maria XL feels a BAM can blend in more appropriately with glasses and a fake mustache from the Halloween supplies.

Photo courtesy of Vibrissa:

Following the signs, the Heist gets to the chocolate floor entrance and forms a raccoon pyramid, with Kit on top pushing up the door handle with a broom from the supply room.  Inside the room is glorious with the smell of chocolate and a giant bucket that seems to be full of 1000 gallons of liquid deliciousness.  Both Maria Triple XL and Kit head to the top of the bucket, climbing scaffolding and walkways.  Brisket heads up after them with a bit of a completely unnecessary acrobatic flourish.

The level of the chocolate is a bit too far for a raccoon to reach and Kit suggests a raccoon chain.  Maria agrees and dunks Kit, but proceeds to fall in, both of them floating in the giant bucket of chocolate.  Kit calls for help, but Maria is content to float and bask in chocolate.  Brisket heads to find the broom and 150’ bungee cord to pull them out.

All of the ruckus attracts the attention of a human factory worker and a dog in a little office overlooking the floor.  The dog comes bounding down to attack and Brisket gets in its face, asking, “Do you remember me?” while waving four fingers at it.  The dog recognizes Brisket and whimpers and barks, but backs off.  Meanwhile the human is pulling an alarm, screaming “There are raccoons in the chocolate” and coming down the stairs to intercede.  Rabies Eddie starts chasing the human up the stairs and the human hides in his office, obviously concerned about Eddie’s potential for actual rabies.

Meanwhile, Vibrissa whacks a big red hanging button with the broom, triggering a chocolate dump and gently spilling 1000 gallons of chocolate, and chocolate covered Kit and Maria XL onto the factory floor.

A not quite exact reenactment of 1000 gallons of chocolate spilling on the factory floor.  Note that the factory was a bit more gentle in its dump.

Maria heads up the stairs to fetch Eddie, who’s in his zone, while small orange humanoids coming rushing into the factory floor from the other direction, slipping in all the spilled chocolate.  The party decides it’s time to make a hasty retreat and heads back down the hallway to the docks, leaving behind chocolate footprints and long chocolate smears, like someone dragged a dirty diaper down the hall.

In the docks, most of the humans are lining up and heading out the doors while the alarm sounds and Vibrissa takes a moment to chew through a break line in case anyone tries to follow.

The Heist rushes back to the roof and the TinCANic, but several humans see them, and a man in a large tophat and suit rushes out to shake his fist at them before disappearing back inside.  The Heist feels safer aloft, but realizes the man in the top hat is chasing them in a semi.  Hopefully the semi with the bad brakes.  But then they realize the brakes do not matter as the little orange workers scurry around the truck into the back and the whole thing begins to lift of the ground heading toward them in a straight line.  The truck is attacked with the super soakers, but the attempt is foiled by the simple invention of windshield wipers.

The stress of the escape is having an impact on the TinCANic, and in the chaos, Brisket messes up the steering, interfering with the ability to simply turn and get away from the man and the floating semi.  But with some inventive spiraling, the Heist manages to angle themselves away at a ninety degree angle while the truck goes floating in a straight line, the factory owner shaking his fist at them, and the rear of the truck full of a few little orange men and a bladder that is probably full of fizzy lifting gas.

With the broken helm, the Heist continues on, attempting to get to the “thousand raccoon tall” buildings nearby as light slowly starts to appear on the horizon and humans begin to mill about.  But before the sun can rise, a small blinking light appears in the distance, seemingly drawn by temporary noise from the motor that Kit manages to quiet, but not soon enough.  As the TinCANic moves up and down to evade it, it matches their fences height precisely.

[General flying pattern of the TinCANic post helm issues]

As it gets closer, it becomes obvious the light, which starts to flash red and blue, is a police drone. Brisket yells to get to the super soakers, and a well aimed squirt causes the drone to start to spark and wobble toward the ground.  But alas, more police drones are on the way and the Heist feels it’s time to head to ground, in more ways than one.

Maria tries to take the TinCANic in for her signature landing, but slams it into the ground hard, breaking apart moldy wood, and throwing rivets and connecting bits left and right [and up and down].  Vibrissa cuts the engine and despite the desire to investigate the tall buildings, the Heist heads for possum woods, home of Squinty Pete the possum, to lay low for the day while the humans are at their busiest and the drones continue their search.

So while the houses were never reached and Maria failed to find a giant pool or tub full of warm, soothing water, a giant pool of chocolate was a delicious, temporary substitute, Brisket Jack got to relive his days a a tamer of junk yard dogs, Vibrissa was able to test many new inventions or at least reuse of existing inventions and learned where to find lots of dizzying lifting gas, Rabies Eddie got to take on overwhelming odds against both a dog and human, a reason to go beserk on someone other than Maria XL, and Kit, though not able to find some new food to wash and eat on the spot, did allow the Heist to explore areas of the chocolate factory and was washed in edible chocolate.

Knights of Pen and Paper 2

I've been Steam-ing more than XBox-ing lately.  I like the variety of games available.  Yesterday I finished the base game of Knights of Pen and Paper 2.  The credits inform me it's a Finnish game.  That, or it was produced by a small pocket of people in northern Minnesota.  See...here they are.  The whole cast of characters at Kyy studios.  Probably hiding out north of Two Harbors in Finland, MN, drinking pine beer and eating cabbage rolls while they code.

Wikipedia says I won't enjoy the game much because it's so similar to the first game.  Eryn and I broke their critique by never playing the first game.  That's a bit of a habit lately.  There are enough games about that I can't get through one in the series, let alone a whole series, so the most recent one is the target.  I will admit, it's not particularly hard because you can overclock your characters in levels and gear, and once you start stunning whole groups they don't fight back much. But I found I was mostly playing it for the story and the humor.

There's some third wall action.  Ghost buster jokes.  2001 A Space Odyssey jokes.  And a bunch I didn't get but Eryn did because I'm old and she's not and she's much more familiar with video games post 1995 (that was the year Hexen came out, right?)

Here's the Monolith offering to increase the intelligence of the cavemen I was fighting so they'll quit fighting and give me the artifact I'm after.  It informs me at one point it's definitely a Ms. and not a Mr.  I suspect the lack of balls is a hint.

They lean heavily on typical RPG tropes.  Here's the usual flying ship.  Which mostly takes you to places you could already get to by foot.  They riff on time travel as well.  A bit of a given with the monolith.

Enjoyable.  You can finish it in a day if you're aggressive, but I slowed way down to enjoy the writing so it took a few days.  I did find myself being involved enough for a while to lose time.  That's the sign of something I really enjoy.

Wasteland 2

I've been playing Wasteland 2 on the Xbox lately.  I loved the original, although I've never gotten into the whole Fallout series.  They left a lot of the quirks in the game, and I was panicked when my surgeon was dying and I didn't have a backup surgeon available (fortunately, I had skill points I hadn't spent).  And the part where I have to find rad suits to get from point A to point B gave me flashbacks.

Here's Kyle.  I feel bad that I haven't flushed out his biography.  Contrary to that pistol in his hand, he's usually running around with a shotgun and a machine gun he hasn't trained up in yet.  He's not great in a long range fight, but he's been instrumental in taking out several wounded enemies who get close in.  And he's got some good "kiss ass" skills modified by both a trinket and a perk.  I missed his chance to kiss ass a little tattle tale who saw me bust open some doors because I was a point short.  That won't happen again.

"I know my shotgun is big, but you seem so dangerous you don't need a gun.  You could probably take me on without one..."

Adventure Game, Progress

I took a short break during some coding to go for a bike ride.  Darn nice out there, although still a bit chilly on the gloved hands if you're moving fast.

I ran into a few issues getting the basic board controller working.  I dragged the sprites onto the game objects rather than into the sprite controllers, so when I ran the board creation loops, there was nothing to create.  Had me at a loss because my code looked spot on but I was still seeing a great big empty field.  Took a lot of work to clean it all up because modifying the prefabs resulted in messing up my board controller.



The tutorial walked me through a singleton pattern attaching the game controller to the camera by checking for the singleton instance.  I'm never going to believe a Unity programmer again when they tell me they don't know any software patterns.

There's my Win32 meltdown that crashed Unity.  I'm pretty sure it's because I made an instance of the prefab and then deleted the prefab in an attempt to make a new prefab.  I can't be certain, but I suspect it's like having an instance of an object with no object?  The important thing is not to do it - very messy.

Enemies

Reorg day!  The best, right? This one looks like it will be "directionally correct" in that I go from several business units to just one (but one with multiple people) all pointing at similar functionality even though it's in multiple products.  One of my rules has always been that if you can minimize business units, you're better off.  Gives your life a focus you don't get with half a dozen of them competing for your priorities and you ending up feeling like you're not making anyone feel special (or happy).

But on to a bit of code.  Although, as I think I've said before, I'm not sure this counts as anything other than configuration coding as long as I'm generally following video instructions.  But fun.  I got the enemies running with tilt and shooting, so altogether, it actually looks like a real game.

One of the things I noticed is that my bolts weren't deinstantiating even though I'd set it up.  Eventually I realized that it had to do with turning off the GameController which was the object controlling destruction of the bolts after a while.  It's just a checkbox, but it makes a big difference.  It also controls whether the enemy ships can actually destroy your player ship, so it's pretty obvious when you've temporarily disabled it.

Here's the video of the full game in action.  I upgraded to a record with sound so you can appreciate the music and the explosions.

Unity Bug #2 - That was Fast (and funny)

Thought I'd be smart and fix the increasing difficulty Vector3 issue by just making the velocity of the asteroids faster and faster based on the wave count.  So I exposed the wave count on the Game Controller and accessed it via the move script where asteroids keep set their velocity based on a public property.

I forgot to account for my wave array being 0 based.  I failed to account for the fact that my shots and asteroids were tied to the same velocity/move script, meaning my bolts go faster as the asteroids go faster.  Perhaps not a bad thing, although strange.  And my ship's movement isn't tied to the same movement script, so it doesn't get faster as the rocks start to shoot down the screen at breakneck speed.

My first bug

I've got music and waves going and scoring and restart in my Unity3d game.  And then I tried to get fancy and add a value that slowly moved the waves closer and closer.  I thought I should add:

1.) waves move closer and closer or faster and faster.
2.) objects that aren't shot, but pass the player and destroyed against the boundary are negative points.
3.) each shot is potentially a negative point (because I'm a dick)
4.) a shot counter and objects destroyed to track a few stats to show at the end
5.) a ship destruction value (because I'm a dick)
6.) potentially a few lives with the ability to get more with a higher score.  I hope that rolls over and gives infinite lives because it would be old school.

So I started on #1 and moved the asteroids 5 units closer after the first wave.  Result...unshootable asteroids that, after the first wave, became ghost asteroids.  It seemed to be a float value and I was adding an int, so I modified it and tried again.  Same behavior.  So I use the range for the y value like the x value and added the number directly as an int and then a float.  Same behavior.  It's exciting to have a coding challenge, even if it's minor.

I feel like I'm coding VB COM again.  A lot of setting .Text against text objects and just sort of attaching things to each other to use them.  It would be nice if some of the students I interviewed played around with the Unity tutorials just long enough to talk through the object structure and why you have to locate the game controller rather than instantiate try to access it from every instance of a tumbling rock.  Good lessons there.

Destroy the Object

I'm tempted to use Unity3d as an interview tool for intern/new grad candidates as a great example of the dangers of not getting rid of your objects.  It was cool to see it hang on to shot objects forever because they never ran into a border which would de-instantiate them. Why are interview candidates not infinitely smart compared to me when I was looking for a job?  Seriously - with tools like this, you should be able to talk for hours.  And hours.

Ship

I've got my ship flying around in the second Unity tutorial.  I think 20 minutes a night (really about 30+ of work) is about as much as I can manage. I'm going to declare it good progress, despite the fact that I can fly off the bottom of the screen. I fixed that - I just have to remember if I edit values while I'm in play mode, they revert.

That error message isn't for me - that's leftover Unity 4 stuff from their finalized scripts in case I get lazy.

Science ##

I was working on a new Unity tutorial today that involved multiple light sources.  I find it amazing that I can use a piece of software to just create different levels and hues of light and the physics within the application takes care of smoothing it across the object/s.  That's an amazing amount of power to wield with almost no programmatic effort (on my part).

Here's a main light, rim light, and fill light, all bouncing off my main object with varying intensities, hues, and positions.  It mostly came down to copy and paste.

It reminded me of this cover from the Science magazines my parents ordered for me when I was younger.  There was one cover where they showed several pool balls rendered by a computer.  In 1984, this was freaking magic to me.  The fact that it was difficult to even find the covers tells you how early in popular computing 1984 was.  I couldn't find the correct magazine searching on line, but Kyle tracked it down.  It's the one in the upper right corner.  But searching around for the right cover let me see all the issues that I remember.  There isn't a single issue of this magazine I didn't cherish and read and reread and there wasn't a single cover that I didn't immediately remember.  Between those and Gaming magazine, that was a huge part of my teenage reading (well, and Mack Bolin books at $0.10 each from the flea market, but that was altogether different).  That 20 discoveries that changed our lives issue I carried around with me for weeks; maybe even months.

There was one on sharks (I believe that was early on, Science 81) that had me obsessed with the critters.  As well as this one about undersea exploration from the same year that was so cool.

And this one, a larger version of one of those in the montage above, which is a beautiful cover.  There's a wikipedia article on the magazine, but it's short and no associated covers.  Probably worth fixing were I so inclined.  The article includes this sad bit, that I remember well because I hated the format of Discover compared to Science ##, "Science was purchased in 1986 by Time Inc. and folded into Discover, the last issue being July 1986. A few issues of Discover after the merger feature a stamp noting "Now including Science 86", but this quickly disappeared. This claim was somewhat suspect, however, as all of the Science staff was immediately laid off after the takeover."

Gaming and Things

We spent the weekend in St. Peter hanging out with the Klunds, playing a lot of games, drinking Klund's coffee, and generally having a good time with them and Mean Mr. Mustard.  There was a lot of board gaming.  Several rounds of King of Tokyo, Castle Dice, Settlers of Cataan, and a spirited round of Cards Against Humanity after the kids went to bed. Or at least put on their headphones and pretended we didn't exist. Klund coined the term "Blueberry" to refer to throwing out a card that just didn't matter to get it out of your hand.  Ms. Klund learned a lot of new words.

Speaking of which, you can take part in their 10 Days or Whatever of Kwanzaa.  I don't know what you get, but $15.00 is less than two weeks of coffee, so I figure I can't go wrong.

I finished out the long weekend, which really involved two days of remote work, which was sort of not-to-the-point, by getting the trim up on the garage door.  I found some non-expanding foam and a trim nail gun and sealed off all the big gusts of wind blowing into the house.  There's still a small breeze near the top left because a.) it's cold outside, and b.) the outside (garage facing) sheetrock isn't level and the door came with edging, so it wouldn't insert completely straight.  I pondered ripping the wood edging off and didn't.  Then I pondered beating the hell out of the sheetrock with a hammer and didn't.  I reused the weird under the trim edging they inserted previously to make up for their unlevel wall and it's 95% correct.  If I add some additional weatherstripping at the top, it'll be good.  But I suspect I'll have to rip it out of there and reinsert it before I sell the house (or hire someone to do it for me...)

Twilight Struggle

Saturday, Troy invited me over to play some war games, and we agreed on Twilight Struggle, which I've never played before.  He played the US.  I play the USSR.  Had history gone according to our game, the cold war would have ended by 1969 with the USSR winning before Reagan ever had a chance to muse about Star Wars.  Besides.  In our alternate reality, the USSR owned the space race.

It was an interesting, card-driven game, where the goal was to use the cards in your hand in conjunction with placing influence points on a world map to influence the various areas of the globe to follow your ideology, while avoiding the catastrophe of nuclear war.  Think risk, but shorter (particularly if you only play six of the ten turns), and much more interesting.

My strategy was to push for victory points at every turn, which seems like a good strategy.  But it's a better strategy if the dice and the cards seem to be falling in your favor and your opponent forgets for a turn that a military operations differential at Defcon 2 or 3 can net you a few extra victory points (that's much more obvious when you're playing).

My favorite milestones of the game:

1. Refusing to influence Malaysia to be communist.  A personal homage to Ming.
2. Getting African scoring, because I threw my "left over" points all over Africa.
3. Keeping the defcon at 2 most of the game, just above nuclear war, because no one dukes it out during defcon 2, so no one takes over Africa.
4. Troy totally side swiping me in Central America/Mexico which turned on me like the Germans were hoping they'd turn on the US due to the Zimmermann Telegram.  
5. Getting South American scoring and realizing that my total lack of presence there was still more than Troy's presence and that it was enough to win the game.
6. Backing up my indignation at the U-2 Incident by encouraging UN intervention in the Ussuri River Skirmish.  The US can suck it - China will never be their friend, U-2 spy planes are pieces of junk, and I deserved a lot of victory points for my commentary on the subject.
7. We Will Bury You! - the card said I would.  I did.
8. The uncomfortable-ness that accompanies playing Missile Envy in a mano-a-mano war game.  This was the the card that would have placed the ending of the cold war the latest in our game.  It's noted that it took place in 1984.  So Reagan would have been president, and The Gipper would have been the president that lost the Cold War.  Shame.  But I quote the Missile Envy card, which you have to trade with each other (Troy played it!), "(1984) A term coined by Dr. Helen Caldicott, it reflects the general feminist critique that the Cold War was driven by male ego with very Freudian undercurrents.  When one examines the terminology of "deep penetration" and "multiple reentry" one wonders if she had a point. Caldicott went on to found Physicians for Social Responsibility, and her book became a rallying point within the anti-nuclear movement."

Excellent game.  Definitely something worth playing again.