How this is all going to work in practice?

Rightyho, first off - yay! We have seven people for the seven countries. They are

Darryl
Paul
Tim
Stu
Mark
Neil G
Neil W

Who will we all play?

To determine who's playing which country I'll be doing a LIVE DRAW, involving hats, on this blog on Sunday 31st, in the early evening at 7pm to allow initial diploming to occur on Sunday evening should you desire.

How long have we got

Well, I think the first turn needs to be two weeks long to allow all the countries to dispach carrier pigeons and look at their armies. Hello army.



That means after the draw on the 31st, I'll need to recieve the first set of orders from you at 7pm on Sunday 14th Feb. After that, turns will be weekly (although I'm on holiday for one week at the end of Feb with no internets, I'll suggest a few options and get a consensus on what you all want to do that week - likewise if there's a week when you know you won't be able to sumbit orders for similar reasons then let me know).

Submitting Orders

To me please - dunc@theautumnstore.co.uk - I'll gether them together and work out where everything goes and do a quick turn around time so you can all start the next turn ASAP.

Make sure you've read the rules about codings for how to submit orders. I was really worried I'd cock it all up the fist time I played but it's alright, honestly. Places where units are based and move to are generally refered to by 3 letter codes, which are usually their first three letters. The Guernsey Wargaming Society handily have this map of the codes on their website or if you've downloaded jDip to keep track of the game then that also has them on.

The main thing is clarity, be sure I know which unit you're talking about and what it's doing. Don't do what I did once and gave one unit two different sets of orders. As the GM didn't know what it was doing it did nothing = d'oh.

Feel free to submit as many sets of orders to me as you want, and I'll take the most recent set before the deadline as your final orders. That means you might find it useful to submit a set of orders as soon as you see the map so you don't forget to do anything one turn.

After the first turn you may need to start ordering retreats if you think a unit is going to be forced out of where it is, and you will need to start ordering new units to be built if you've captured a supply centre. I'll cover that in a seperate post later, this one is becoming a bit long.

E-mail

The game will be played via e-mail and I'll be sending an e-mail out to everyone later in the week so everyone knows everyones address and can talk to each other as soon as you get your countries.

Please could you cc me in to all of the diplomatic messages you send to each other too.

What?

I hope this post isn't long and twatty. If you have any questions then let me know and I'll do a blog post explaining it!