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hgwells on [email protected]
Rules Variant: It Came From Outer Space (ICFOS)
(Standard Map)
Dan Percival - Moderator



 Thank you all for sending in EOG statements - I was fascinated
to read your comments.  Following the format that a few of you
used, I will make a few comments about the variant, followed by
some observations about this game in particular.

 The ICFOS variant evolved out of my interest in elements of two
games:  Diplomacy and Go.  Diplomacy has maintained my interest
since my first game through its "unsolvable" nature... the balance
of interaction of seven players who cannot entirely trust each
but must trust in order to survive.  Go, on the other hand, is
theoretically "solvable", although the number of possible game
trees is so immense as to be unmanageable.  One aspect of Go which
I had hoped to bring to Diplomacy is the "guerilla warfare" style
of play.  In Go, no area is "safe" (or even "yours") until you
have secured it yourself.  Invasions into completely surrounded
territories are not uncommon, and the general flavor of the game
is as far from Chess as Vietnam is from Lexington and Concord.
A while ago I started work on incorporating aspects of Diplomacy
into Go, and vice versa.  The attempt was partially successful -
I have a fairly playable (if mind-twisting) variant of Go for
three players, and the first couple test-games of ICFOS have shown
to be interesting in their own right.

 At first, I did not intend attacks from space to be "jammed" at
all... I wanted to throw off the stability of an undefended home
base in favor of forcing players to find a balance between offensive
movements and maintaining defense of territory already won.  Of
course, the problem with this approach is that any unoccupied center
would certainly be subject to spaceborne attack, and so much force
would be spent in defense that the game would make no significant
progress.  Add to this the question of where to build, and thus the
concept of colonization.  I still favor less restrictive jamming
rules, just to keep the game lively... :)
 I am a little disappointed with the way in which ICFOS seems to
fall back into a Chaos-like game based around contiguous forces.
I think that a possible solution may be to play on the Aberration
or Youngstown maps, so as to extend the expansion phase through
more than a couple game-years.


 Now for comments about HGWells in particular... the Jedi opening
struck me as highly inspired, although dangerous.  I did not see
the danger of the opening so much in any weakness of the individual
"beach heads", but more in the response I thought it might provoke
in the other players.  In one move, the Jedis had laid claim to
Turkey and Scandinavia/Northern Russia, without any apparent
challengers.  The Berserkers also opened strongly, I felt, since
their opening choices laid claim to about twice as many centers as
initial units.  Other than this, I thought all the opening moves
showed possibilities, and I was curious to see how the game would
play out.
 Being Moderator has its advantages, one of which is the ability
to read all press being sent in the game.  I took advantage of this,
and was interested to see how the Jedis and the Empire used the
language of Star Wars to establish their alliance.  Once they started
working together in earnest, the only hope for Planet Cosine X was
the possibility of getting aid from either the Terrans or the
Berserkers.  Oddly enough, neither of those two powers seemed concerned
about the Empire/Jedi alliance in the Balkans, and so the Psychic
Physicists quickly lost their foothold and left the game.
 At this point I was certain that B and T would start working together
against EJ, but B had already opened up the sea war against the Terran
holdings in England.  Even more surprising to me was the fact that
although the Jedis had grown at an almost constant rate through 1905,
they mysteriously escaped becoming victims of Early Leader Syndrome
(ELS).  The Jedis maintained an appearance of neutrality against all
but X-Planet Cosine X until the last year or two of the game, which
is possibly why the Empire, Terrans, and Berserkers never talked to
each other about joining to reduce the Jedi threat which had almost
totally encircled the edge of the board by this time.

 I enjoyed moderating this game immensely, and I hope that someday
soon I will actually get a chance to experience the variant for myself.
I would suggest a seven-player game on the Aberration map (as soon as
I can convince my PS printer to cough up the map for me), since five
players seems to bring the endgame on too quickly, and the extra space
on the Aberration map would make for more expansion possibilities than
the standard map.
 Any programmers in the ranks have an idea of how to code the ICFOS
variant for the judge?  :)  Hand-moderating can be hair-raising at
times...

 Many thanks to all of you for taking the time to try out a new variant,
and thanks especially to Eric Wagoner for providing the services of
his most excellent Diplomacy Adjudicator.


 Dan Percival - [email protected]

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