Empire Wars Chronicles

I was supposed to play a game with Chris Q and Chris D today at Q's place but D managed to screw everything up by hosting a small party/game night at his place. Small but too big for me with plenty of girlfriends around to screw up any possibility of EW. I was going to go anyway but I had a commitment from Ziggy to play as well and I would have felt bad about abandoning it. So we decided to play at the armoury. Ziggy brought his friend Blake and I voluntold two troops to play (actually they were enthusiastic). So we had a 5 player game with 3 new players. I set it up with 4 regular empires and 1 freelancer (me), with a small amount of terrain. Teaching new players was slow as always but the guys caught on as quick as anyone. All in all we had a pretty awesome game. Joe and Pat formed an alliance right away and I didn't help things by working for them as a scout against Ziggy. Ziggy went for cruisers at the near-total expense of his escort capability so picketing was easy. At the end of the game he ended up losing two systems (one captured, one suicide-raided). Blake was left alone and was focusing on merchant capability. Aside from picketing I engaged in trade with several players. Comments were positive though identifying that combat was slow to resolve. Ziggy brought his laptop but it was too stupid to read my iPod so I couldn't show off/use the Empire Assistant, which everyone admitted would solve the difficult bits quite well. Blake was very enthusiastic about the game in general and talked about coding a purpose-built Empire Assistant. I'll be following up with him probably on Friday and I hope to keep in touch with everyone for future games.

I'm pretty close to the critical mass of experienced players I need to be able to guarantee a regular session. I figure I need 10+ to get 4-6 out on a given day and today was a big step towards that.