My 1000th Post: It's Payback Time

This is my 1000th post, and it's not going to be about me, it's going to be about you. I also have a gift for you (several, actually).

Thank you for reading and commenting, for linking and discussing. Without you, I'm just another fool writing to himself in cyberspace.

Thanks to you, I am encouraged to write every day. Thanks to you, I am inspired to post my thoughts about gaming, my poetry about law, and my pictures about nothing. Copyright laws don't inspire me, you do.

Thanks to you, I have earned around $75 in the last year in advertising and affiliate links. Since that's not enough to live on, I'm going to use it all to buy you a bunch of presents.

As thanks for reading my blog, I'm giving it all back to you.

Since this is primarily a game blog, I'm going to give it back in the form of games. Five games, to be precise. Let's get started. (*)


Game 1: Applied Game Theory

Send me an email with the subject "Game 1" and a real number an integer (see comments) between 1 and 100. Deadline for entry is 8:00 am Israeli time, Thursday, March 1. One entry per person.

The player who sends me the second highest number wins a $10.00 Gift Certificate for Amazon.com. If two players choose the winning answer, they'll split the prize. For multiple choosers, we will go to another similar game to determine the winner(s).


Game 2: Why Did The Chicken?

Why Did The Chicken? is a party game by Kory Heath published by Play Again Games. Your job is to find the funniest answers to simple questions.

Here are five questions:

2a: What did the board game player say to the grocer?

2b: How is a board game player like a newspaper?

2c: What is the difference between a board game player and a bar of soap?

2d: How many board game players does it take to screw in a light bulb?

2e: What do you get if you cross a board game player with a rock band?

Send me an email with the subject "Game 2" and your answers to these questions. Deadline for entry is 8:00 am Israeli time, Thursday, March 1. You may enter as many times as you like.

The player who makes me laugh the most wins a $10.00 gift certificate to FunAgain games. If two players make me laugh equally, I will ask them to split the prize (one gets the certificate, and must Paypal $5.00 to the other, since Funagain doesn't give $5.00 certificates).


Game 3: Rock-Paper-Scissors 11 Variant Tournament

David Lovelace has devoted his apparently empty life to creating larger and larger variants on Rock-Paper-Scissors. So far, he's up to RPS-101, which has more possible arrangements than the known number of electrons in the universe.

We're going to play RPS-11, which is RPS with 11 possible choices for each move.

Send me an email with the subject "Game 3" and a list of 21 moves using the RPS-11 chart found here. I will use a single elimination tournament system to compare ordered odd and even entries, giving passes when appropriate. I will use the same moves for each level of the tournament (unless you all really want me to extend the tournament, in which case I will allow new moves for each round of the tournament).

Deadline for entry is 8:00 am Israeli time, Thursday, March 1. One entry per person.

The tournament winner wins his or her choice of Reiner Knizia's book Dice Games Properly Explained or Sid Sackson's book Card Games Around the World (from my collection). On ties, the tied players go on to a sudden death match.


Game 4: Puerto Rico tournament

We will play a tournament of Puerto Rico on www.pr-game.com . Send me an email with the subject "Game 4" and a message indicating that you want to join. Deadline for entry is 8:00 am Israeli time, Thursday, March 1. One entry per person. I will also be playing, under a pseudonym.

I will try to create simultaneous games so that all players play each other an equal number of times. Therefore, you may be playing several games at the same time. Each player must agree to make at least one move a day. Your score for each game is the difference between your score and the lowest score. The "winner" of a game gets a five point bonus.

At the end of the tournament, the player with the highest total score among all games wins a $25 gift certificate to anywhere he or she wants.

Game 5: Site works

This site is for you, so tell me what you want!

Send me an email with "Game 5" in the subject, with suggestions for:

- Previous posts that should be in the highlights sidebar but aren't
- Posts in the highlights that shouldn't be
- Rearranging the site layout
- Better or more useful tags
- Ways to pump up my resumé

For every suggestion I receive that I use, I will send you $1 via Paypal or 5 GeekGold on BoardGameGeek (your choice).

For great comments on my resumé, and for links to public domain source code snippets that I decide to implement for my site, the reward is either a) a small card game I have for trade, or b) a copy of The Menorah Game prototype, a nice set-collection auction game I invented and am hoping to get published one day. (If it ever does get published, anyone who owns a copy of my prototype will get a discount on the actual game.)

The first person to make a specific suggestion wins for that suggestion. Enter as often as you like. There are no limits to the number of winners. The game ends when I run out of the remaining money from my blog income or my game prototypes.


Looking Forward to the Next 1000

For the next 1000 articles, I hope to keep getting out the message about the joy of board games and continue to write my thoughts about life, blogging, ethics, law, and everything in between.

If you want to support me, then when you want to buy through Amazon or Funagain, click through my affiliate links on the sidebar of my page. If you want me to get rid of the advertising, give me something else to put there instead, or help me find more affiliate programs (let's see if we can pester Time Well Spent into running one).


In the meantime, I hope you'll stick with me through the next 1000 posts and continue to comment, link, and enjoy. Thanks again.

Yehuda

Contest details: Contest is run as-is and complies with no laws of any country. I reserve the right to discriminate based on sex, religion, race, disability, eye-color, personality type, or anything else I so feel like. Entrance is permitted to whom I say and may end at any time without awarding anything. The judging will be run in a highly partial and unfair manner, and the judge will accept all offers of bribes and flattery, and may respond in a cowardly fashion to blackmail. Prize value is not guaranteed. By entering this contest, you agree to all rules written here as well as all rules I wrote in Sanskrit in a secret file on my son's laptop. If you are reading this, you are too close to your monitor.