The Mine Shaft Gap

In posting this I feel a little like one of those people who forwards lame jokes in email around the office.
But this one seems to be going viral, albeit in the small-ish community of gamers. I’ve already seen a bit of discussion building out there on the concept of “strip Settlers” and “strip Agricola”.

Certainly this is not a hint to my usual circle of gamers that I have any interest in playing strip-anything with any of them. Although somehow combining it with Lightning Reaction could be interesting, in an weird, Abu Ghraib kinda way…
I have nothing further to say on this topic. (For now.)

Source: http://www.xkcd.com/.
Thanks Mark for finding.

Venue: Paul’s place.
Present: Paula, Paul.
Played: Aqua Romana, Carcassonne the Castle.

This was an atypical weekend for Paula and me. First, we had tickets to a Saturday performance of Urinetown, the Tony Award-winning musical with the somewhat off-putting name. Ordinarily I doubt we would have considered going to this, but for Tripod.
Tripod are an Australian 3-man band, known for appearances on TV, the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and (a few years back) a regular guest spot on Adam and Will’s breakfast show on Triple J. Their particular gimmick is their song-in-an-hour challenge, in which their audience (or Adam and Will) give them the core elements for a song - random words, characters, musical styles - and then they disappear for exactly one hour to write a song around those elements.
Anyway, some months ago we were in our local ABC Shop looking for a gift for someone, when we saw a Tripod CD, and decided to buy it on impulse. We became hooked pretty quickly, but there was one track in particular that really appealed to Paula - Urinetown. My favourite line from the Tripod spoof goes something like this: “…She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Skin as white as porcelain. Eyes bluer than the bluest water. A handy duck-shaped neck for all those hard-to-reach places…”
So when we heard that the real Urinetown was coming to Sydney, we agreed to book tickets.

The second thing we had for the weekend was a birthday present from my sister, Tanya: Passes to the new Minus 5 ice lounge at Circular Quay. Everything is made of ice - the walls, the seats (but covered with animal skins), the bar, the cocktail glasses. They provide a heavy snow coat, gloves, and (if you need them) boots, and your 30-minute entry comes with one free vodka cocktail. This is more a tourist novelty activity than a session at a bar or pub, as you seem to spend about as much time lining up, preparing and being briefed as you do actually in the place. But it is a unique experience, one that I’m glad we had the chance to do. The pics here are really a last-minute thought taken on the Nokia which, at -8.5 deg C., obviously was not outside its operating temperature. That staff member wasn’t exactly invited into the last picture, but what the heck.

So, we had a loaded weekend, and the grandparents were prepared to take the kids for more than 24 hours straight. We booked a city hotel winter package deal, watched the Wallabies thrash the Springboks (on TV) on Saturday night, then before catching a movie on Sunday payed a visit to Games Paradise, where we picked up a copy of Carcassonne the Castle and Aqua Romana.
Because it was going to be late by the time we got back from picking up the kids, and we hadn’t seen them for a day, I decided to dip out of the regular Sunday night session which was this week scheduled at Richard’s place. Instead, Paula and I tried out our new acquisitions after the kids had gone to bed… (I’m referring to the boardgames here.)

Aqua Romana: The topic of my first true game review. As described, this isn’t what I was expecting, which was something that had more to do with resource management in aqueduct building. Still, with two players it is an interesting abstract path-building game, with strategy elements emerging in the playing of bonus tiles for future advantage, or hindrance of other players. In our game Paula was more effective at taking advantage of the bonus tile placements, which translate directly to bonus points.
Because we played the scoring rule wrong, there was one aspect of play that we didn’t see. In particular, you can choose to terminate an aqueduct at any time and take the points, which you should do if you’re not likely to score any more with a given workman. The limited number of score podiums (podia?) means that if someone gets to your score before you, you will lose out and go backwards.
Exactly 90 mins for two of us, incl. rules explan. This should actually go faster with more players, because the number of available turn options per player is reduced. In a two player game each player controls a maximum of 6 dudes. In a 3p it is 4 each, and in a 4p it is 3 each.

Results: Paula: 56. Paul. 52.

Carcassonne The Castle: Paula’s eye had been on this one for a while, as good two-player games are particularly important for holidays and trips, and rare moments with no young children around.
It was only after starting that we realised this was a Knizia title, although I wouldn’t say it obviously has his stamp on it. In this variation on a theme all tile placements are within the confines of a pre-set castle wall. The tile elements are roads, fields, houses, and towers, and one twist added is that, with the exception of road trails, you don’t have to match like-tile edges. So towers can adjoin houses, etc. with the effect that a given tile, in the early stages of the game at least, seems to have more legal play possibilities.
Although I like Carcassonne, I rarely seem to do well at it, and so far this is no exception. I often feel that the tiles I draw are unhelpful, and I have to rely on a lucky break (that never comes) to get one that I can use well.
So why do my opponents have more luck than me? I don’t know. Perhaps there really is some kind of universal, supranatural conspiracy.
Total time (incl. rules and setup): 1hr. My favourite in the Carcassonne family remains Neues Land.

Results: Paula: 97. Paul: 63.

Mark recently discovered this story about those hoopy Norwegians using a (figurative) mine shaft to store a collection of seeds to be saved in case of a hypothetical doomsday scenario.
My question is, what seeds are they storing? “…It will ultimately house replicates of every known crop variety…”, says an anonymous statement.
Ultimately.
Not immediately.
So you can bet they’ll start with skanky Scandinavian plants.
Well, this is a disaster waiting to happen. We all emerge from our mine shafts after 100 years of nuclear winter to prepare the soil for… what?
Not that I’m a botanist, but I couldn’t think of one plant they grow in Norway. So I Googled, and the best I could come up with was pine trees, heather, and something called “fagerkokke”.
Now, I’m sure these are all very nice plants, and probably quite acceptable for the Norsemen to chow down on, but they’re nothing I would want to eat. After living in a mine shaft on nothing but tinned baked beans for years, my digestive system just wouldn’t be ready for crunchy pine cones, and whatever the fager fagerkokke is.
Where are the mangoes? The bananas? The pumpkins…?

I detect a Norwegian conspiracy. We need to act quickly, to ensure that there is something for the rest of us to eat on the other side of doomsday.
Mr President, we must not allow… a fruit and vegetable gap.

Our private weekend boardgaming mini-convention is now over and declared a success. The only regrets are not having played enough games with everyone! And perhaps not taking the opportunity to stroll around the location at the Del Rio Resort at Webbs Creek, near Wiseman’s Ferry, which was in perfect early Autumn weather for almost the entire time.

Over the next week or so I’ll try to report on all the results recorded - over 20 games played in all. Hopefully these will be alongside pictures, amply and capably taken by Brad.

I finally dubbed the event ConTrail for two main reasons; the first as a hint that this was a Con(vention) held at a somewhat remote location, and second, the area is near the site of the historic Great North Road, built from sandstone primarily with convict labour, hence a true Convict Trail. See here if you are at all interested in this history: http://www.convicttrail.org/about.php.
I also liked the association with jets even though there was no real relevance, until either Ken or Alex found one: The resort is right alongside the Hawkesbury River and is a popular spot for water-skiers, their boats being the only thing upsetting the serenity of the location. Occasionally one could see plumes of water spraying up behind the skiers, perhaps an analog of the cloudy wake left in the sky by jet planes!

But by about 4:30pm on Sunday we were all driving back to our respective homes, most of us via the Old North Road through Glenorie and Dural. I swear that as the sun was getting low I could make out true contrails high in the western sky…
I don’t know - perhaps they were just long thin clouds by coincidence. But as the sun set behind them while they slowly dispersed, to me it was a metaphorical tribute marking the end of an outstanding weekend.

Thank you gentlemen: Alex, Ken, Brad, Marcus, Craig, Pat, Rick D., Richard V., and Michael.

What is “the mine shaft gap”?
What’s your point in using it here?
Who’s that guy in the top right corner?
You’ve got something else to say about Dr. Strangelove here, haven’t you?
Why don’t you just use BoardGameGeek?
Why are the pictures here so crappy?
What is an RSS feed and how do I use it?

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What is “the mine shaft gap”?
The phrase comes from the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
In the second-last line of the film, George C. Scott’s character, General ‘Buck’ Turgidson, declares, “Mr. President, we must not allow… a mine shaft gap!”

You probably know the story, but here comes a synopsis anyway. The background is that, at the height of the cold war, a rogue US Air Force commander has ordered a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia. The Russians advise that they cannot prevent this triggering a “doomsday machine”, an automated retaliatory device that will extinguish all life over the entire surface of the Earth. The doomsday machine was built because they believed the Americans had already started work on one themselves, and the Russians were therefore afraid of a ‘doomsday gap’.

Dr. Strangelove’s solution to save the human race is to take a nucleus of prime human specimens (top government and military men, and a ratio of 10 ‘highly stimulating’ females per male to ensure optimum breeding success) and rebuild civilization underground in mine shafts until the radioactive fallout clears.

This presents another opportunity for General Turgidson’s paranoid arguments. The full quote follows: “Yeah. I think it would be extremely naive of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policy. I mean, we must be… increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other mineshaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out in superior numbers when we emerge! Mr. President, we must not allow… a mine shaft gap!”
Source: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0055.html

Alright, so what’s your point in using it here?
Well, I’m a fan of boardgames, especially those in economic/military expansion genre. A common observation is that one’s own expansionist strategy in a game is very much distorted by those of your opponents. You might like building farms and factories, but if your opponents are building nukes and empty mine shafts, you could be facing problems down the track.

The ‘mine shaft gap’ refers therefore to a particular gaming phenomenon in which there is an actual or potential significant disparity in the offensive or defensive capabilities of two opposing sides, to the extent that one player is compelled to change their original development strategy in favour of a more militaristic one. In the real world, this is scary. In the gaming world, at least in my experience, it can be very funny.

Who’s that guy in the top right corner?
That is George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove, the original protagonist of the mine shaft gap paranoid theory, espousing the magnificence of US B52s and the ability of their pilots to fly under Russian defensive radar systems.

You’ve got something else you want to say about Dr. Strangelove here, haven’t you?
Well, yes.
Another one of my favourite lines from that movie is rather more obscure:
Group Captain Mandrake: “…And if those devils come back and try any rough stuff, we’ll fight them together, boy, like we did just now, eh? You with the old gun, and me with the belt and the ammo, feeding you, Jack. Feed me, you said, and I was feeding you, Jack!”

I can’t explain why; I just like this line, “…feed me, you said, and I was feeding you…”
Sometimes I can’t help myself and roll this one out, in circumstances when two game opponents might temporarily help each other, perhaps to collectively hurt a third opponent, or perhaps out of altruism. Did I say altruism? I meant temporary loss of sanity.

Why don’t you just use BoardGameGeek?
A few reasons, and BGG did occur to me. BoardGameGeek is a great site, probably the best there is, for information, reviews, recommendations, session reports, player aids, variants, etc., on anything to do with board games. You can log on and post your own session reports there. In fact, many of the session reports here are reposted on the ‘geek.

* The intention with this place was to include mainly session reports, but also other game-related, and even more peripheral stuff.
* One of those related things could also be to track our designer sessions and follow-up remarks,
activities etc. - Not really suitable for BGG.
* Not sure about the level of flexibility of BGG entries, eg., can you add pics to their session reports?
* A blog provides more personal, ‘territory ownership’, even an element of seclusion/privacy. Having said that, I have no problem in it being visible to a much broader audience. The intention/expectation was a noise-free (or rather noise-reduced) spot mainly for us guys.
* Of course, these types of initiatives often die naturally when enthusiasm wanes. There are still no guarantees that this lasts any longer than next week! Mind you, the core of our little gaming group has been going strong now since 1996…

Why are the pictures here so crappy?
Well, most of them should actually be quite good these days, mostly taken by Brad, with his semi-professional equipment on game nights, and emailed to me within a few days for inclusion in session reports, etc. Some of my earliest pictures, and occasionally others when Brad is not available, have been taken with the “toy” one in my mobile phone - a Nokia 6610i at a resolution of 352 x 288 (ie., about 0.1 megapixel)! For the most part these are not great, since the resolution is so low, the unprotected lens tends to get dirty in my pocket, and I’m probably not a particularly good picture-taker anyway.

What is an RSS feed and how do I use it?
RSS provides a means to syndicate web page content that changes frequently. Examples are news headlines, blog entries, etc. You use a news reader or aggregator to get a ‘live’ display of the headlines of the new entries as they are published. The feed source is simply a url, and assuming the source provides its content in a form that can be syndicated, you just need to provide your aggregator/news reader with the url address, and it will do the rest.

The new url for the Mine Shaft Gap RSS feed is http://www.themineshaftgap.com/blog/?feed=rss2.
If you use the Firefox browser, this has an RSS aggregator built into its Bookmarks function. Go to the Firefox menu and select Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks -> File -> New Live Bookmark… and enter this url into the Feed Location box.
If you use Internet Explorer, apparently RSS feeds will be supported in the next version (time of writing: Feb 2006).
Or, you could get serious and download one of the 100’s of RSS feed aggregators available; just google RSS aggregator, or something similar.
I occasionally use Sage, which is a plug-in for Firefox.

Don’t ask me what RSS stands for. I’ve heard it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, but I’ve also heard that it’s supposed to stand for something else (more technical). Look it up on Wikipedia if you really need to know.