Saturday, December 22, 2007

Happy Three-Week-Long Winter Break!

In case our adult readers have forgotten the typical college schedule, let me remind everyone: typically, at least three weeks of bumming around during the latter half of December and first half of January. I’m not sure what relevance January 8th has to the US holiday calendar, but whatever… most colleges aren’t in session.

This has interesting implications for our games. We wanted things to be over a couple weeks ago, but (given the month-long pause) that wasn’t happening. Things are working great now, so what are we to do? Two-hour turns in an attempt to get the games over quickly were a brief but probably ill-considered experiment. Now it’s the weekend before Christmas, and we don’t want to force the game on people.

So we’ve decided to compromise and finish up the Ivy League and Rice games next week with four-hour (not two-hour) turns. Hopefully this will allow everyone a little extra time to sleep, since it was evident that we were dealing with some really sleep-deprived players. (I shouldn’t have to say that if you don’t want to get up at 4 AM to place armies, don’t.) All the games will be over by the new year, so we don’t need to worry about things running into next semester.

So what’s next for us? Well, for starters, we’re going to try to keep the blog a bit better updated. Then, we’re going to be launching two games to Indian engineering schools. The games will very much be an experiment, as this is not only our first venture overseas but a new kind of team division (by majors) and a new way of marketing the games (by seeding, not by top-down adoption). Most of this is just our way of adapting to the different situation and culture at these schools.

Will it work? Who knows! That’s half the fun of GXC…