Tacticat Meets Monday Morning Tactician

I have been spending way too much time over the last few weeks playing Tacticat. As I suspected when I first discovered it, it's seriously addictive. Tacticat is a multi-player online sailing simulation. Typically up to 24 players (sometimes more) will race against each other around a two-lap windward-leeward course. There are simulations available for Lasers, catamarans and skiffs.

It's not perfect. What simulation is? But the site administrator is very open to feedback from players and is constantly tweaking the simulations to make them more realistic.

The more I play Tacticat the more I realise that it demonstrates and teaches some very valuable tactical lessons that are useful on the real world race course. And then I realised that several of these lessons were almost exactly the same ones that Andrew Campbell has been teaching us in his Monday Morning Tactician series on CampbellSailing.com.

So I am going to write a series of posts next week on Tacticat Tactical Tips. These will discuss some of the things I have learned so far about how to be a successful player on Tacticat; and most of them will link to articles on Andrew's site showing how this lesson applies to real world sailing too.

Lest you doubt my credentials to speak with authority about Tacticat let me point out that today I am ranked 14th out of 813 registered players on the game. Not too shabby, eh?

Now if only my real world sailing skills were half as good as my keyboard sailing abilities...