Friday, February 02, 2007

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...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sailing simulator! Is this what retirement is like?

EVK4 said...

Tacticat smacticat....I really don't care but I do like the new layout. You should bring back the greatest hits though.

Tillerman said...

Scatticat, Whackacat, Whatever....

What do you mean "bring back the greatest hits"? I have pulled out the Top Ten Sailing Blogs as a separate link list above the main blogroll.

Tillerman said...

Or perhaps you meant the list of Favorite Posts from Proper Course?

EVK4 said...

Favorite propercourse posts...I like that. But then again you have a lot on there already. either way, I like the new format. makes me want to do a redesign.

Tillerman said...

Thanks for the feedback on the re-design Edward. It was very easy with the new version of Blogger. And per your suggestion I've added a linklist to some popular earlier posts under 'Taste of Tillerman'.

Some of those Favorite Posts in the old version of my blog were actually just summaries of a whole group of posts e.g. all the ones on Laser Frostbiting. Next step is to use the new Labels feature to achieve the same end.

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