I’ll send you PDFs. If anyone else wants them, let me know.

Count me in.

There've been IRC meetups last silly season during those debates when people comment and vent in real time. Just saying, could be fun.

Had to get an emergency dental surgery last week, got a doctors note and right now I'm nursing myself back to health. Going on without painkillers, but just barely and I'm in no state to do much of anything anyway. There are better and worse moments.

Really? How'd you all get into playing Ur?

It's a combination of having a relatively small group of people and a common gaming/rec area with donated board games. Sooner or later you'd see people playing, ask what's that, get a crash-course and start playing yourself. It has the advantage over most games in that all you need is 4 coins, 7 tokens per player, and a sheet of paper to draw the board on.

Dunno how it got started, but that could have been anything from an article to some youtube video.

Who introduced it to you?

One of the people I know from hackathons.

What's the appeal?

It's a combination of strategy and luck. You might be winning 6 to 4 only to have your opponent get a hot streak and even the odds. As long as the game is going, you can only guesstimate winner, and I like that kind of flow a lot.

Though, honestly, it's a great game to watch other people play. I'd be amazed if it turned out that ancient Babylonians or whoever weren't placing bets on ongoing games, cause that something I saw some students doing.

Try it yourself: https://www.yourturnmyturn.com/java/ur/index.php

Do you still play it?

Not as often, but won't say no to a challenge. :P

Ur can turn into a surprisingly tense, nail-biting game regardless of players' relative level. It replaced bridge as one of the pastimes at maths division for most of my senior year, and thank god for that. We used whatever as tokens and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone there who was unable to draw the board on a random piece of paper.

What can't be found in that magic Lil Woodchucks Binder of knowledge? Kudos, I hope to be remembered as an as good teacher as you are.

Use Dwarf Fortress wiki for tips on everything from interface to construction and more.

Here is a DF crash course:

And because there's been a new major release, I'd personally recommend trying previous one (0.34 or 0.44 from above video) first. At least until most game-crashing bugs and exceptions get ironed out.

If this is a free indie game, why is it closed-source?

There's no obligation to make it open-source, especially considering how the donation model rarely works for those and DF is their only source of income. Also, it's developed in, IIRC, C without version control (ToadyOne said so during reddit AMA) for over a decade. Even if it was released, it's probably a mangled idiosyncratic mess that would take years to refactor or get anyone up to speed well enough to contribute anything.