King Of The Hill BLANKETYBLANK Not Quite Turn One We don't have turn one yet, as Simon Hornby requested a double deadline, as I said was an option. However, I can take this opportunity to clear a couple of things up. NE: Des Langford, 8 Hornbeam Lane, Barnehurst, Kent DA7 6HH 01322 348095 NW: Mark Sheiham, Flat 1, Balcombe House, Taunton Place, London NW1 6HA ** COA ** (Mark: tell me about the LaserQuest soc, please!) 0171 7232395 SW: Simon Hornby, 41 Larkin Close, Cambridge CB4 2ER SimonH@Elmail.co.uk ?? phone no. SE: Martin Bates, Somerville College, Oxford OX2 ** COA ** some0345@sable.ox.ac.uk ?? phone no. Two COAs, two e-mail addresses, two 'phone numbers. These should enable diplomacy for the interim. I received initial positions and orders from Mark and Martin; thank you. These are on pile - er, file - and will be used unless you give me new ones between now and then. Des has sent me an initial position, now on file, but Turn One orders are still required. Simon Hornby escaped being thrown out by the scruff of his neck by e-mailing me frantically (but politely) on deadline day and explaining the situation. The request for a holdover was reasonable, and I'm happy to give one. Orders from Des, and setup and orders from Simon by next time, please, else you'll suffer fates worse than fate. Order and setup changes also welcome. The bouncing rules are still causing problems, and I fear Mark Sheiham's explanation did more to hinder than help. Having looked carefully at them again and discussed it with players from ASKTHEFAMILY (the precedent of BLANKETYBLANK), the two don't contradict each other. I've received a couple of "Are my interpretations of the rules right?" queries from players, and happily, they are right. If two pieces attempt to exchange squares, then the one with higher combat value succeeds in its move, and pushes the weaker one in that direction (backwards, considering it was trying to move in the opposite direction). Should a stronger piece move onto the square of a stationary weaker piece, the stronger piece's move succeeds, and the weaker piece is displaced a space in the same direction if it can. Should two or more pieces try and move onto the same square, the strongest one gets there and the other one doesn't. Agreeing to bounce pieces in combat with another player is always a risk as they can always stab you by destroying your piece instead of bouncing it, but a bounce is generally a better conclusion all round (if you prefer your pieces in the wrong place to dead, that is) if you can agree with another player to pull it off. Oh, and if any of you try and pull a Yorkshire Pudding and move your own pieces into one another, don't worry - you can't destroy your own pieces. I think that answers all the questions... yep, pretty sure it does. Mark hasn't told me if there are enough players to start another game of this on the waiting list; if there are then I'll make draws for position and send out a start to you all between now and the next issue. Two games of King of the Hill will be enough in GIT for now, I think. If you want to give the game a go, get your name down for this second game, or you're going to have to wait quite a while and/or take pot luck as a standby... Spacefiller: Blankety Blank, now there was a show. Taken from the '70s version of THE MATCH GAME in the U.S. (which was totally different to the '60s version... and totally different to the short-lived 1975 U.S. Blankety Blanks - plural - are you confused yet?) it ran in the U.K. in the late '70s and early '80s hosted by first Terry Wogan and then Les Dawson, garnering high audience ratings (but I don't think it ever became top-rated game show for the year, being beaten by the likes of the Generation Game). Very simply, a silly riddle was read out with a word missing, like "TurboNick Parish is getting slow in his old age; so slow, in fact, that they're thinking of stopping calling him Turbo and instead calling him BLANK" and celebrities wrote down their answers (or BUM whether it fit the sentence or not in the case of Kenny Everett). Two contestants also wrote down answers to these riddles, and aimed to put down the same answers as the celebrities. The more celebrities they matched, the more points they won. High-scoring contestants got to play the Supermatch, involving a partially revealed legend like SPRING BLANK or BLANK PLAN and trying to match high-scoring answers in a prior poll of the audience. It was very silly but great fun. They're trying to bring it back next year in America, but it might not work.