GOTW intro follows...

I feel like I'm quite unknown at BGG compared to MWChapel (whom I actually know from gaming in Austin), but he encouraged me to accept GotW since it's supposed to introduce lesser known BGG users, so OK then, thanks Mike! We'll see what happens.

I was born in Houston, Texas (where my family still lives), back in 1962. I spent my post-college years in Austin, Texas, and now I live in Wrocław, Poland. ("Why Poland?" you ask? I'll come to that.)

I have the typical varied gaming background. These days I tend to play Eurogames and abstract pure strategy games (e.g. GIPF project games) mostly. I play face-to-face much more than by web or email, including typically a game a day at home with my fiancee Anna.

A bunch of gaming memories (holy smokes, this turned into a long list of gaming memories):

Toy gadget games: Mouse Trap, Crazy Clock, Ice Cube, Which Witch, Green Ghost.

Family games: Monopoly, Careers, Dirty Water, Waterworks, Life.

Mastermind: my first geeky mathy game; I loved it.

Chess: It's a classic that I've played sporadically through the years, but it never grabbed me like I hoped it would.

Backgammon: my mom got into it, and then my brother and I got interested. I still enjoy it and play it.

Early pseudo-wargames: Stratego, Risk

SPI wargames: StarForce trilogy, Invasion America, Sorcerer (the first "real" game I bought), Strategy & Tactics magazine (Road to Richmond was my first issue), Sniper

Metagaming Microgames: Ogre, Melee + Wizard and all those solo adventures, Chitin: I, Rivets, Ramspeed, etc etc + Space Gamer Magazine

TRS-80 computer games: Temple of Apshai, Med Systems adventures, etc

Play-by-mail games: Flying Buffalo (Starweb, Nuclear Destruction, Feudal Lords, etc) and various other companies and games

Role-playing: D&D (I owned the original white box set), Call of Cthulhu (my favorite setting), GURPS (my favorite geeky mechanics)

"Special Powers" games: Cosmic Encounter, Illuminati

Scrabble: sometime my mom and I developed a tradition of playing Scrabble almost every time I visited. I play it in Polish now!

Squad Leader, Up Front: one glorious summer in grad school, a friend and I played these a lot.

Solo wargames: Ambush, RAF, Mosby's Raiders, Raid on St Nazaire, B-17, ...

Computer games: Nethack, Warlords, Heroes of Might and Magic

1830 (lead programmer, including rules and AI), Master of Orion 2 (rules and AI programmer): I worked at SimTex. This was fun but also very stressful - several months of mandatory 90-hour work weeks leads to burnout. Working there also helped solidify a group of friends who met regularly to play boardgames.

Go: A new SimTex cow-orker taught several of us. (Thanks, Rob!) I read lots of Go books, bought many that didn't get read, played in local tournaments, went to the US Go Congress each summer, have been to the European Go Congress... Go made me realize that simple elegant rules with deep strategy is wonderful.
1830 and Go were both important for helping me finally love games of no chance and no hidden information (abstract games, logical games, pure strategy games, combinatorial games, whatever you want to call them).

CCG's: I was into Magic: The Gathering from the beginning, but I burned out quickly after the alpha period due to the "collectible" aspect.

Semi-Cooperative/Adventure games: Wizards, Chill: Black Morn Manor, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Star Saga 1 & 2 (unusual computer/board/RPG hybrid game!)

Long boardgames: Titan, 18xx, Age of Renaissance, RoboRally, etc

Eurogames: Settlers of Catan, Entdecker, Löwenherz, Carcassonne, and the following tidal wave of Eurogames

Acquire: An old friend had raved about this 1960s 3M/AH game; I finally got it, liked it, and was pleased to see "Eurogame" roots go far back. Acquire helped me realize that small and elegant is beautiful even in non-abstract games.

RussCon: In 1998 my gaming friends started meeting weekly at my house. After a while someone jokingly called it RussCon, and the name stuck. We played various BGG-style games. This turned into a very successful long-lived gaming group that met every week until the end of 2005. I wrote a little article about how the group succeeded that a lot of people have linked and told me was useful. I met a lot of friends via RussCon - most of my US GeekBuddies are people I know in real life from RussCon.

Ricochet Robots: I sucked at this game and hated it at first, but it kept being played at RussCon, so I forced myself to stick with it, and eventually became competent and enjoy it. It was a nice breakthrough to finally enjoy such a realtime game.

Popular games I'm not so into, but occasionally enjoy(ed): dexterity games, realtime games, party games, poker, CCGs, RPGs, sports.

One unexpected but pivotal turn in my life was learning Esperanto in 2003. I had traveled abroad a lot in my teen years (my mom had worked as a travel agent and got good travel deals), but I'd settled down and traveled less as I got older. After learning Esperanto, I started traveling abroad again, to China in 2004 and Europe in 2005 (for 4 week-long Esperanto events in a row) At my first European event, an Esperanto cultural festival in Helsinki, Finland, I met Anna from Poland. One late night she proposed a game of Backgammon - a good sign! I went on to Lithuania for a week, then we met again at another Esperanto event in Zakopane, Poland, and she invited me to visit Wrocław after my following week in Hungary. And so we soon found ourselves in one of those rare strange romantic situations that you know sounds absurd, but if you don't take the chance, you'll always regret it and wonder what would have happened...

So I spent the autumn of 2005 selling off and giving away 99% of my stuff (including a wall of boardgames). (That was quite an experience. I recommend it!) I hosted the final farewell RussCon, and then I moved to Wrocław, Poland in December, where we've been living together ever since, in the most fulfilling and happy relationship I've ever had. Which also includes playing boardgames together. (Among her many virtues, Anna wisely spends more time playing games than being addicted to BGG...)

Wrocław, Poland's a big change from Austin, Texas. E.g. I'm vegan, and that was much easier in Austin... And the weather is colder! What's this white crap falling from the sky, in November?! And the Polish language is hard. Really hard. You won't believe how mind-boggling hard. It's so hard, I study Latin to relax! Like most people who grew up monolingual (a disadvantage of being a native English speaker), I find it hard learning a language as an adult. My Polish is slowly improving, Anna's English is much better than my Polish, and Esperanto remains our default home language as it's the language by which we met, got to know each other, and fell in love. There are certainly frustrating challenges to having given up my old life to live in a place with such a language barrier, and having a relationship between people from 2 different continents - but I have never been happier!

The Polish gaming scene is not as big and active as Austin's was, but it's growing rapidly, and it is fun to feel a part of this energy. There is a good group in Wrocław that's growing and has already run two weekend cons (Gratislavia) this year. There is an excellent (and rapidly growing) weekend con Pionek every 3 months in a nearby town Gliwice (the latest was this weekend, November 29-30!) I find that I often have more success speaking Polish with boardgamers than with "normal" people.

Anna likes short games and got me more into abstract pure strategy games, e.g. Quarto, Rumis, GIPF games, Trax, Hive, etc, as well as continuing to enjoy Eurogames. For longer Eurogames, I'm currently into Power Grid (or Wysokie Napięcie as I know it here in Poland), Caylus, and Cavum.

I also have nostalgia for old-school hex-and-counter wargames, which are much harder to find opponents and time for. Anna's not into wargames, though she likes the quasi-wargames Neuroshima Hex and 2 de Mayo... I've recently enjoyed Manoeuvre as a wargame lite, though it's not Anna's cup of tea.

It's also nice to be close to Germany, as we've gone to Essen the past 3 years. And we made it to BGG.CON in 2007, thanks to visiting my family and friends in Texas at the time.

Professionally, these days I teach English and do translation and text checking for income, having burned out on software development. Recently we've had some professional work translating Polish games to English, which is very pleasing!

I'm an early BGG user (apparently user #125, if the gallery ID number means that), but became much more active since moving to Poland. My BGG activies are mostly:
* reading about games (duh!)
* keeping my BGG collection up to date with ratings and comments and polls about # players and language dependence
* logging my plays compulsively
* answering rules questions
* writing reviews
* correcting errors in game descriptions, etc
* reporting bugs
* adding lots of site documentation to the BGG wiki - a useful resource most users don't seem to know exists
* making wiki pages with FAQs for specific games (see List_of_game_FAQs), which I really hope becomes a more widespread custom
* pestering Aldie and other admins to fix botched foreign text (game titles, publishers) and Unicode bugs
* occasionally getting caught up in forum discussions about game design, game theory, etc
* occasionally getting caught up in frustrating time-sucking political/religious/etc forum debates
* writing far too lengthy GOTW biographies

Hobbies include:
* Esperanto reading, writing, translation, teaching, events, Wikipedia, Reta Vortaro (online dictionary), film subtitling, etc
* trying to learn Polish
* re-learning Latin (which I'd studied some in school, and is much easier than Polish)
* incompetently fooling around on the guitar and other musical instruments
* travel (I recommend couchsurfing.com!)
* cooking
* occasional yoga and meditation

Past hobbies I hope to get back into One Of These Days:
* Writing fiction
* Making art and comics
* Recreational programming (especially with an eye toward game AI)
* Wargames (solo and 2-player)
* incompetently fooling around on the piano

OK, 2 truths and a lie:

I have scientifically researched the game of golf with a former NASA engineer.

I have accidentally caused an abandoned 3-story office building to collapse in Portland, Oregon.

I have shot and eaten a cape buffalo in Botswana, Africa.

I'll get the questions started.

1. Do you miss Austin? You ever think you'll return to the states to live?

Have a fun week Russ!

Congratulations Russ! I have always wanted to know about this "Polish" Geek who speaks and knows so much about the US. Now I know!

Here are my list of standard questions:

You crack open a new game. What smell do you enjoy more: the release agent of the plastic bits or the new cardboard smell?

Say something nice about your lowest ranked game. Say something not so nice about your highest ranked game.

What is the one feature you wish BGG would implement?

What do you feel is your greatest contribution to the Geek (e.g., GeekList, file, article, etc.)? What moment on the Geek would you like to do over (e.g. embarrassing post, flame war, etc.)?

What are the 10 links you have on Page 1 of your QuickBar?

What is your favorite game based on a book (preferably a fictional book)? What is your favorite game based on actual real life events?

What is your approach to evangelize would be gamers? What is your standard recommendation for a gateway game?

If you ever became tired of gaming, what would be your next hobby that consumes your time?

I'll guess 32 is the lie. The others seems believeable enough to be true!

Excellent choice!

My boyhood hero Theodore Roosevelt was an early supporter of Esperanto.

During the treaty negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War the reporters covering a crucial diplomatic meeting on a large yacht rigged a small craft with a sign reading PRES BOT -- much to the delight of TR.

Esperanto? Am I supposed to write to Santa in Esperanto now? Being from the North Pole, I always figured that he spoke Polish...

In Red Dwarf it was the encounter with the SSS Esperanto that led the crew to be attacked by the despair squid and to hallucinate an alternative reality when they were really supposed to use the laser cannons from the SSS Esperanto to defeat the despair squid since "Esperanto" apparently means "one who hopes" and -- hope defeats despair.

Congratulations, Russ!

I'd ask some questions, but you covered an exhaustive amount of material in your "bio"! All Russ-related mysteries can now be considered solved!

#2 is the lie.

32? There were only 3 statements!

Yup. This GOTW makes perfect sense.

A few questions:

1) How many languages are you fluent in? Do you have any thoughts about the lack of bilingual education in the US?

2) What's up with the avatar? It just looks to me as though you got tired of the song "Don't Worry, Be Happy..."

3) Have you ever tried designing game boards for pre-existing games? Is this why you are a game-resigner, or are you just SCooby Doo reincarnate?

4) If you were in the states Thanksgiving or Christmas, what would your Thanksgiving meal be like?

5) I am veeeeeeery culturally unaware of the current economic status in Poland. What are the toughest economic times you have ever seen, and could you teach us capalistic pigs a thing or two about tough economic times?

6) Finally: Marvel or DC comics? If there is any comic book artist you say you emulae/admire the most, who would it be?

* Do you happen to do any work, or know the Compuware guys who work on the Vantage Agentless product? I know they work in Poland somewhere, not sure where...

* What game that you have not played would you most like to try?

* Why Esperanto?