Diplomacy. It was Henry Kissinger's favorite game. It was also a significant part of our lives in the early 1980s, back when Porter thought he had time to spend on interminable strategy board games. He played in person; he played by mail. He designed and implemented a multi-tiered rope-and-pulley game board system for our basement, so he could keep track of several games at once. By far his favorite—no doubt because it is all skill, no luck—was Diplomacy.
I doubt the number of games Porter persuaded me to play exceeded two, but that didn't stop the whole family from being sucked into the vortex. Somewhere in the process of all the conventions, fanzine activity, and of course, game playing, we made some lifelong friends, including two for whom Porter would subsequently be best man at their weddings. Heather gave Porter his less sinister nickname, Dippy Daddy. (The other, bestowed by one of his favorite opponents, was Porter the Knife.) Two of our close friends published their own "Dipzines"—small publications with a few articles that primarly served the purpose of managing play-by-mail games—to which I occasionally submitted an article. In one of them I even had a short-lived cartoon, which I called Dip City.
Bill Highfield and Janet
Time, life, and a move brought an end to that era of our lives, but the Internet recently brought it back to mind. Someone is collecting and posting old Dipzines, which I found through a Google search while looking for something else that I no longer recall. Lo and behold, there were a few samples of Bill Highfield's The Modern Patriot (scroll down the page to find it) and a good collection of Don Sigwalt's Hoof and Mouth. Of most interest to me, however, was the inclusion of Hoof and Mouth Issue #27x.
A minor side of the hobby that appealed to me was the creation of fake issues. That is, someone would publish a Dipzine issue that had the appearance of one of the regular zines, but was not; usually it was a spoof containing clues to its deceptive nature. As a puzzle-lover, I enjoyed reading the fakes.
I enjoyed even more creating my own. When Don's typewriter broke down and he came to our house to use ours, I had the final piece for my own puzzle: access to his mailing list. I was already familiar with his zine, his style, and his life, not to mention his regular contributors. Putting together #27x was great fun, and I eagerly awaited the response I was sure it would generate.
That's when I discovered there's such a thing as being too good. Despite all the clues, to my knowledge no one ever guessed that the issue was a fake. Even the principals had no idea I was behind it. We gradually faded away from the hobby and 27x into the mists of time. Until now. Because I'm still proud of it. It won't mean much to anyone not familiar with the real Hoof and Mouth, but if you want you can see it here. I also can't resist reproducing my favorite part of the issue:
