Don't have to, Dachspmg's already done it several times by his own accounts.
Yes, back in summer 2005 when I went to Philmont, I introduced the rest of the crew to the wonders of NESing. We finished one game (a military victory by one coalition after some 8 turns), got through another by nuclear annihilation, and went through about the first five thousand years of a fresh start before the trek ended. It made for good conversation when we were stuck in tree cover with no good scenery anyway. As to the mechanics...we had eight active players in all games, ran the entire thing out of a steno pad, with both written updates and orders. Stats were slightly less complex than the original ITNES I stats (having just come off of IT I a month or so earlier, I was pretty obsessed with the das rules) and updates were anywhere from two a day (on hiking days) to one epic six-update day on the bus down from Denver. I did the original world maps (all random maps) in pen, and used pencil for military progress and borders so I could keep everything for one NES on one map. They weren't particularly time-consuming, because exacting accuracy wasn't really expected, so I could crank out an update in ten minutes or so, stats, map, and all. Diplomacy was pretty easy to carry out too, because everyone was in close proximity.
Supermath said:
NESes are not computer games because they're so hard to do paper-based and face-to-face. If the idea were around 30 years ago, I'm sure we'd have Play-By Mail NESes, much in the same way as there was for Diplomacy.
Personally, I think that the difficulty of paper NESes is doubleplusoverexaggerated so long as you don't go for any particularly high level of accuracy, especially in the military sphere. And efforts have been made at creating a game that works like NESing - look at the two SuperPower games, which, although extremely buggy, aren't
terrible simulations of NESing, in ambition anyway (Burkinabi-Nepalese War anyone?). Combine SuperPower with HOI2 and you could have a pretty close approximation to what we're trying to do. Then, of course, you have to add the other players.
