Teesside Snog Monster (jiggery_pokery) wrote,
Teesside Snog Monster
jiggery_pokery

Some sad news

A sad note arrived on my Facebook feed earlier today; a friend had recently attended the funeral of Doug Massie. I have happy memories of playing games with Doug at plenty of games cons over the years; Doug was a thoroughly enjoyable, entertaining and well-mannered opponent, but also a heckuva player. Doug won the Diplomacy tournament at OxCon in both 2004 and 2005, finishing first out of 28 players both years, the first (and only?) ever player to repeat - and, more recently, he finished first out of 58 in the all-games tournament at the UK Games Expo in 2008.

One happy memory that leaps straight to mind was having inveigled him into his first ever game of The Chairman's Game (at which he made a remarkably gallant attempt to work his way through the madness and picked things up at a very sporting pace) he took his lead from The League Of Gentlemen and made the remarkably reasonable leap of logic that in the context of the very, er, particular utterances and procedure of the game, some particular card or other was worth a "Go, Johnny, go, go, go, go". Not right at that point in time, but definitely good. I fear that all Mao-related anecodates pretty inherently score massively on the "You had to be there at the time" scale, but I can remember being absolutely slayed laughing by this at the time. *takes card*

I'll miss Doug, and I know scores of others who will do too. My condolences to his friends and family.

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