Greetings to you all, and welcome to dc252, A Lovers Quarrel.

There should be no surprises in this one, as I’ve played or GM’d with all of you before, and I believe most of you have played in games together. Normally I send out for confirmations in games before taking a number, but since I know you all personally, I can skip that step.

A bit about the title… Ancient Med is one of my favorite variants – it is an intimate and tactical game, with more subtle strategies than what we see in standard. It has been played 5 times in dc, so it’s one of the more heavily explored variants…

To read up on the stats, see:
http://www.diplomaticcorp.com/country_stats.php?map=Ancient%20Med.

Each player faces a dilemma from the start, and will have insufficient units to cover all the necessary frontiers… do you take to the seas and control the center of the action, or do you fortify the perimeter with armies? This is primarily a naval game, in which convoys are key – they can move units around the edge much faster than by marching on foot – yet an unexpected army move can get troops behind the defenses and turn your empire to rubble. Be aware of the center of the map, in which all 4 sea zones border each other, even via the diagonal corners. Advancing across this center in any direction is one of the keys to winning.

The game only has 5 players – yet still 34 centers just like in Standard. This makes the first year pretty easy in the sense that most players should be able to come out of it with 2 or 3 centers of growth. But after that, someone is going to get cut out of the future spoils quite quickly.

Email: Add this email address to your contacts! mike-at-fuzzylogicllc-dot-net, this is not my old address for games. For those of you playing in two of my games, yes, you’ll have a different email to send each game to! I’m finishing off the old games at the old address.

Next – Countries… I believe this map is completely balanced, and no one power affords an edge over any other… countries will be assigned randomly. However pls let me know if you’ve played the game before, if you have I’ll extend the courtesy to ensure you get a country you haven’t played last time. I don’t see that any of you have played this variant here before, so I’m guessing not.

So get back to me by Friday, and I’ll get the game started w countries as soon as I’ve heard from everyone – at the right email address.
Enjoy,
-mike