Thursday, February 26th, 2004

by the Writer's Guild of Wunderland

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• Rash posted cool close-up photos from his recent trip to Japan
• The Ember Update: Valentine's, Lead, Suppressed
• GinohnNews: Logs and the Logy

This week, our groups of EAC playtesters began receiving and trying out their Beta edition copies of the game. That means, of course, that we've already come up with a couple of rather major changes, which make all those beta editions slightly obsolete. But hey, that's the way the process works...

If you're lucky enough to be one of our EAC playtesters, this article will update you on some of the changes I've already decided to make to the game. On the other hand, if you've seen nothing of the game so far, here's your first glimpse at a couple of the cards!

The great news is that I finally figured out the answer to a time-travel riddle I've been puzzling over for weeks. Here's the question: How would American history be different if the British had been prevented from setting fire to Washington DC during the War of 1812? The connection was hard to see at first, but once realized, it's totally logical and perfectly suited for the game: there would be no Star-Spangled Banner!

Here's why: After burning DC, the British moved north, towards Baltimore. There they attacked Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the Star-Spangled Banner because our flag was still there after a full night of "the rocket's red glare". However, if the British had been stopped before reaching Washington, at the disastrous (and rarely talked about) Battle of Bladensburg, then they'd never even have gotten to Baltimore, and that song simply wouldn't exist!

It seems so obvious now, but I didn't connect the dots until a conversation I had last week with Meg Naab, our wonderful money manager. She was telling me about a discussion she'd been having with some of her Cooper-brothers, about other major security failures of our nation's history, concluding that one of the worst was that time in 1814 when we let enemy troops march into our capitol city and burn everything down. Then I realized: if that hadn't happened, there'd be no SSB!

So, what should be our National Anthem instead? It turns out that Meg was the perfect person to have this conversation with, since she's thought about this very question quite a bit over the years. The answer she instantly came up with was "America the Beautiful," and I couldn't agree more. So now, thanks to the miracle of time travel, this dreamed-of alternate reality is now (slightly) real!

Of course, while this new idea is Really Cool and fits perfectly onto my TimeLine, it also causes a lot of little problems. First, something else on the TimeLine had to be removed in order to make room for it (I'm getting rid of 1777'... known only as "The War Starts Some Other Way," it's the one card I really didn't have working yet) and since the card being dropped is at the other end of the TimeLine, almost all the Time Index numbers are now wrong! I've got lots of other little changes, too... even without all the corrections re-Time-Indexing will require, I've already filled up 3 pages with revised and corrected card images for the playtesters to incorporate into their decks. (Betatesters: very soon I'll be putting those files up for download... if you haven't acquired any of that full-sheet sticker paper I mentioned, this weekend would be a good time to...)

In other news, Alison is quitting her day job at the Flower Shop to work full-time at Looney Labs (whoo-hoo!), Kristin's been researching online banking (yes, we're still trying to choose a new bank), and over the weekend we were visited by Russell (he and I each won 2 of the 4 games of Homeworlds we managed to squeeze in while he was here).

Have an excellent week!