Nice(an) guys finish first! or, Looking for a Few Good Bastards

[winterbadger]

OK, a group of us are going to try playing the Perfect Captain's In The Shadow of Byzantium by mail. You can read about it here, but in summary, it's a boardgame of 13th century Byzantine politics (and that's a geographic use of "Byzantine" as well as a descriptive one).

"In the Shadow of Byzantium" puts you at the head of a principality struggling to survive and overpower your neighbours. Judicious use of slender finances to create armies, alliances and acts treachery is essential to victory. Bind other princes to you with marriage alliances to gain a breathing space to perhaps build fortifications to protect your land. Who dares truly wins in this game of big chances and big payoffs, but the winner of today could easily be the loser tomorrow.....

We have two or three spaces left, depending on whether we play with a moderator or not. Anyone interested? Our game of Princes of the East (another Perfect Captain game, that one of 11th century crusader kingdoms and their Muslim neighbors) was very enjoyable and ended in an upset victory by one of the least likely contenders.

Comments

[robbysmom.livejournal.com]

time commitment estimate?

I mean, I'd lose, but that's ok.

[winterbadger]

well, we were playing the other game on a weekly basis, which meant that we actually got one move done every two weeks. :-) for the players it took, i wold think, about a half an hour to an hour once per turn of writing up a very basic set of orders, plus however much time one wanted to devote to email diplomacy with other players. for the moderator it required more work than that, probably about 2-3 hours per turn reconciling all the player moves.

with Shadow, it's pretty interactive as written, so one of the first things players will need to decide is whether we want to keep that or alter the turn sequence so it can be a more traditional "everybody write orders and send them to moderator; moderator resolves orders and sends out resutls to everyone" sort of game. if we do it interactively, it will not take a ton of time, but it will be in little email dribs and drabs here and there, and we'll move at the rate of the slowest palyer. if we do it in a more traditional manner, moves will take a bit more time to compose, but it will all be done at once and then resolved, rather than requiring a series of separate inputs per turn.

[keethrax.livejournal.com]

How is the scheduling goign to work out?

ie turn schedule, time commitment, est. length of game?

[winterbadger]

well, it can be from 12 o 20 turns (there's a random factor). i would guess if we did it as a moderated game we could do two turns a month as we did the Princes game. if we play it as written, it will depend a lot more on player interaction, and may go very fast or slower if people don't keep up.

it would certainly be possible to drop out (and in) if necessary; we had four players drop out and get replaced at different points in the Princes game.

[keethrax.livejournal.com]

I'm certainly interested.

It would give me a game to play in which I desperately could use to break up the work moderating lords32.

[winterbadger]

If possible, join the Yahoo group at (http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/potedc/). We used it to cooridnate our last PBEM game, and I'd like to use it to coordinate this new one too.

[robbysmom.livejournal.com]

I'm in. . .

[winterbadger]

If possible, join the Yahoo group at (http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/potedc/). We used it to cooridnate our last PBEM game, and I'd like to use it to coordinate this new one too.