AMSTAR and POLQAN

At some point in the spring of 1993 I was playing capture the flag.

Being the anti-social person I am, I instead of playing, sat down in the woods, and thought "wouldn't it be fun if there was a 3rd team"

I may have just been 8 years old, but I let that idea tumble around in my head for years.

When I was about 12 or so I found out about the board game Diplomacy. It's kind of a mash up of Chess and Risk. Here is a map:

As such, rolling around in my mind, were not 1, but 7 "teams" playing this "game"

At the same time, I started thinking about each team having many members, which lead to a split in this idea.

One game would be more of a war game, a world simulation.

The other would be a political simulation, a game without a country.

Hence the ideas between AMSTAR and POLQAN split in two.


Many years later, I finally got a chance to start a POLQAN and the game ran for a decade. I'm even still in a POLQAN like game to this day.

However I never *did* manage to start a successful AMSTAR.

Here is just one map of AMSTAR I've made over the years:

Each city would have its own stats, and so forth.


Anyway, I just wanted to get out there the history of how I came up with AMSTAR and how it is directly related to my POLQAN ideas, and how I still want to run an AMSTAR game one of these days.