I am very pleased that several Matrix Game play by email games have started. Matrix Games have always been well suited to the PBM format. At the moment I am an active player in two of the games (as Secretary Debs of the communist party in USSA, and as War Deathmouth of the Blood Goblin tribe in the Alley campaign). I'm thinking of jumping into Dylan's Romanian Revolution game as Ceausescu (sorry for the misspelling) just to see if I can keep the dictator alive. In August Hamster Press made its first sale of Dark Portals to Blackhawk Distributors. If you have a game store and want my stuff, please buy from these guys. Buying from them makes them want to buy more from me! You will see that I have been a very busy boy in the last month. Many new products have been written and are now for sale via the internet. I hope to have more soon. I've set up a game writing machine that should make turning out new titles relatively easy. Don't be surprized though if there are some breaks in my writing. My Private Practice is winding down and I am back in the job market for an agency job. Once I get in a new job, I probably wont write as much for a while. It is interesting to see the variations on running Matrix Games appearing in PBeMs. I am very much enjoying running the Communist revolution (even though I would personally be working against it if I were really living it). It is like fighting the Civil War sixty years late only this time the federal are in the south and not the north. Paul and I differ on how we resolve turns. I have arguments that fail, fail. Nothing happens one way or the other. Paul has arguments always do something. I only guarantee that something will happen when two players arguments conflict. Strong referees vs weak referees. Still I love being able to take actions to strengthen and push forward the revolution and know that it will count. So many games let you do what ever you want but don't have a way of considering them at the critical moment. It is like in the movie "Strictly Ballroom" "You can dance any steps you want, but you won't win!" Paul's game is rewarding strategic thinking. Back to Table of Contents -- Matrix Gamer #7 To Matrix Gamer List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Chris Engle. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com