From: Peter Card <Peter.Card@JET.UK>
Subject:      Manorcon

So while Karl Bown was jetting off around the world to Origins, the UK
University Diplomacy convention was being held in Birmingham. This
event is at least one order of magnitude smaller than Origins. As
usual, the dippy tournament didn't get in the way of all the other
games going on, up to and including the quietly intense croquet
tournament held over the weekend on the lawn outside the main hall,
under a blazing blue sky.

A certain amount of consim(-like) games were in evidence among the
general 18xx railway games, Settlers, and general games. I picked up
South Mountain and Casaer at Alesia in the second hand games sale, got
my annual humiliation at Hannibal and underperformed badly at Age of
Rennaissance.

The Throneworld game remained unfinished, as one player had to leave
to catch his train, but it had certainly reached an interesting stage.
One race, specialising in comms, had been able to jam most of the
board by the middle game, until an imperial task force descended on
his advance base and junked his comms bunkers to scenes of galaxy wide
jubilation. Then my Pasha space fleet totalled his navy, leaving his
entire ground force stranded on the world below. His remaining comms
bunkers still prevented us getting scans close to his homeworld, so he
was still in no real danger of losing territory and nobody had quite
enough strength to after the Throneworld itself by the time we had to
stop. I think this game is about 2 hours too long to appeal to the
short-sharp-games types, and has too much dice throwing for many
18xx/Civ types. I like RW a lot, but forsee trouble finding
opportunities to play it.

Peter

Last 3 consimlike games: Age of Rennaissance, Hannibal, Throneworld