Blog launch & site news

Maybe this won’t be a last­ing fea­ture of the site, but since we’re using WordPress for con­tent man­age­ment, and it is first and fore­most a blog­ging sys­tem, I thought I would go ahead and use the blog.

First up, I was think­ing of imple­ment­ing a Wiki and/​or a forum as well for any­one who wish­es to con­tribute to the site. The pur­pose of the wiki would most­ly be to define game con­cepts or write up his­tor­i­cal game inci­dents. The pur­pose of a forum would be more for per­son­al rem­i­nis­cences and chat­ting. If you would con­tribute to one or both of these, please com­ment on this post as to what you want to see. Not much point in doing either unless there would be enough peo­ple using them.

Also, if you want to help and you are a web developer/​designer, a for­mer Empire play­er who has seri­ous mate­r­i­al to con­tribute, or some­body who wants to make new Empire mate­r­i­al (maps, game pieces, what­ev­er), please get in touch. The more the mer­ri­er!

Also, though there are but­tons on the bot­tom of every page to “like” that page on Facebook, there’s also a Facebook page for Empire. Feel free to go there and become a “fan”… once we hit 25 fans we can get a cus­tom URL, as the cur­rent one is kin­da lame: http://​www​.face​book​.com/​p​a​g​e​s​/​E​m​p​i​r​e​-​t​h​e​-​b​o​a​r​d​-​g​a​m​e​-​f​r​o​m​-​R​e​e​d​-​C​o​l​l​e​g​e​/​1​9​3​8​1​2​4​2​7​3​0​8​847. Though I admit, some­thing about ask­ing for fans, which of course requires peo­ple to go use Facebook, feels vague­ly unsa­vory to me. It’s like there’s some sort of pyra­mid scheme involv­ing encour­ag­ing Facebook users to spend more time there.

In oth­er news, yes­ter­day I had lunch with Andrew Nisbet, whose name is all over this site as the main keep­er of Empire lore, knowl­edge and rules since the late 1960s. Not only did we have a nice meal, but he con­tin­ued to enlight­en me on a vari­ety of things which of course will all be reflect­ed here.…

Thanks to our dis­cus­sions, in the past 24 hours or so I have added sev­er­al para­graphs to the Detailed History, most­ly about pieces and such. Here is what’s new:

Over time, the usage of pieces ver­sus records in Empire changed sig­nif­i­cant­ly. In the late 1960s, there were pieces for every­thing in Empire, includ­ing even some immo­bile things such as fac­to­ries. Of course, a city held too many things to keep them all in one space on the board, so play­ers used a set of egg car­tons to con­tain the con­tents of all the cities. You could take them out as need­ed dur­ing the turn, and at the end of the turn you would dump all your city con­tents back into them.

Eventually records reduced the need for hav­ing quite so many pieces, and keep­ing so many on the board. City sheets tracked every­thing in a city at the end of the turn, and so did away with the egg car­tons. Had-Used-Produced (HUP) sheets allowed you to track what you built. That being said, there were still pieces being used all the way up to the end of the clas­sic Empire peri­od (the mid-1980s), but by then play­ers just pulled pieces out of a box, used them dur­ing their turn to fig­ure out their moves, and then put them away after updat­ing their record sheets at the end of the turn.

One of the lim­it­ing fac­tors with­in the game was the avail­abil­i­ty of work­er units (known as “coolies”) to move key resources from their pro­duc­tion sites to fac­to­ries and between fac­to­ries. The intri­cate move­ments with work­ers mov­ing things from one place to anoth­er and free work­ers com­ing back to replace them became known as “coolie shuf­fles.” Whether because of com­plex­i­ty or temp­ta­tion to cheat (in the face of lim­it­ed numbers/​locations of work­ers), some play­ers would end up doing shuf­fles that were not in fact pos­si­ble with­in the rules. “Checking people’s coolie shuf­fles became a rit­u­al pas­time,” says Nisbet. If look­ing at anoth­er player’s records revealed a shuf­fle that seemed implau­si­ble, if you were not your­self a vet­er­an play­er, doing such check­ing involved get­ting an expe­ri­enced play­er to see if they could come up with a way to repli­cate the same change from start­ing posi­tion to an end­ing posi­tion for the turn. If not, a chal­lenge might be made to the player’s records for them to demon­strate how they got from their start­ing point to their end­ing point for that turn.

I also cor­rect­ed some info on the maps page, notably the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and attri­bu­tion of two of the maps. I had man­aged to mis­la­bel Ackerman II as the long lost Ackerman I, and the map I was call­ing Ackerman II was in fact a map by Andrew Nisbet. Oops! All fixed now.

Next I will be back to edit­ing my rules variant/​descendant, the “Logistics branch” of the Empire rules. One thing I have been focused on is the “func­tion­al delta” between those rules and Andrew’s. By this I don’t mean so much the reor­ga­ni­za­tion and clar­i­fi­ca­tions, or adding a glos­sary, but the actu­al func­tion­al changes that I put in. There is one thing that is arguably a good idea in the­o­ry, but incom­pat­i­ble with pre-exist­ing maps, is get­ting rid of sub-squares (the ones cre­at­ed by geog­ra­phy, not those inside cities). But most of the changes had side effects that I didn’t ful­ly grasp with­out hav­ing played more. So I’ve been iden­ti­fy­ing those changes and rolling them back, try­ing to get to the point where the Logistics branch is not so much an arbi­trary vari­ant, but most­ly a more detailed/​complete/​reorganized ver­sion of the clas­sic rules, that incor­po­rates clar­i­fi­ca­tions and adden­da that came up since. It is get­ting there, one step at a time.