Ivy League warfare

"Last fall, more than 2,700 heavily armed Yale students faculty, and alumni assembled on the Massachusetts border. Several days later, they overcame the pitifully meager Cantabridgian forces of Harvard … " So begins the tale, told in the September-October issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine, of last year's edition of the GoCrossCampus Ivy League Championship Tournament. The competition is like an Internet-based version of the old board game Risk, with teams made up of hundreds or thousands of students and alumni from each campus, each team led by an appointed "commander," each vying to take over the Northeast (and squash the other members of the Ancient Eight).

The creators of GXC are four Yale undergradutes and a Columbia student, a creative team that got its start building a similar game that pitted Yale's undergraduate colleges against one another, a game that became a major local hit. They've since attracted about $1-million in venture capital, hired a 38-year-old executive vice president, and are at work on other team-based games designed to bolster camraderie within corporations.

Last year's tournament unfolded from October 22 to December 31; this year's started on September 16. Teams make moves daily. Whether you win territory depends largely on how many players you recruit to assault it alongside you, but the tournament, despite its seeming epic length, is not all-consuming: Everyone gets one move a day; you can plot it as long as you like, but the act itself doesn't take much time.

The competition, notes the author, James Kirchik, a Yale graduate now at the New Republic, has inspired some creative hack … -- er, cheating. Some players last year wrote computer programs that made it appear that their colleges had more warriors than they did, but GXC has taken steps to eliminate that problem, its says.

Harvard last year fell like the French army in 1940 (as you can see if you click on the above graphic and monitor the fate of crimson). Princeton -- confusingly depicted by the magazine as yellow, though the caption refers to Princeton's school colors ("Orange overcomes")-- was relentless. Kirchik concludes, in cadences that would make David McCullough proud: "In an all-or-nothing attempt to mount a defense, the Elis massed their remaining troops on the shores of Massachusetts. Two days later, after a final stand on the frigid beaches of Cape Cod, the Blue armies fell to the invaders."