Website glitches delay Ivy League online Risk tournament

The administrators of gocrosscampus.com declared the Ivy League Championship Tournament "indefinitely paused until further notice" last Saturday, suspending what had become an intense game complete with spies and mass emails to more than 1,200 University students and alumni, as well as thousands more participants across the Ivy League.

The contest is an online version of Risk — the popular board game in which players compete with each other for global dominance — where Ivy League students battle for control of the Northeast United States.

The website has been slow and users have had trouble logging on throughout the tournament. Even after removal of interactive game map features, troops have disappeared and processing turns has taken up to five hours as a result of the site's growing popularity.

Yale senior Brad Hargreaves, one of the tournament's founders, said it could take as long as two weeks to get the competition back up. The decision to pause the game, he said, has elicited mostly positive feedback.

"Judging from the majority of players, people would definitely rather have a game that's not frustrating to play," he said. "This is not something that's time dependent."

The game will still run on schedule, Hargreaves said, and he expects that a winner will be declared before Dec. 7 because of the nature of the game. After Thanksgiving, there will be two turns per day and as the game nears December, 12 turns per day.

Princeton forces have already eliminated Penn and Columbia from the contest, while Yale has knocked out Harvard. Of the five schools remaining, Dartmouth and Brown are not as strong as the three major contenders — Yale, Cornell and Princeton.

Since the game began, Princeton has conquered all of New Jersey, New York City, the Western part of Long Island and Eastern third of Pennsylvania, as well as one territory in Connecticut. On the most recent turn, Princeton shared a border with Yale for the first time in the game, and because of recruiting efforts had earned a troop multiplier, used to even out the playing field by bestowing more armies to schools with higher participation rates.

Some players were disappointed that the game is being paused, especially since the University has been faring so well.

"I'm bummed out," Mark Gray '11 said. "We actually just had enough people for a multiplier. And the second after we just got it, the game just shut down."

Increasing participation and the large amount of time put into the game by the University community have factored into Princeton's success, participants said.

Vice commander Matt Alexander '10, who spent as many as eight hours a day playing during Fall Break, wants the team to "keep the momentum rolling" once the game returns. Alexander sent members of the Princeton team daily email updates on battle plans.

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"We've pushed hard out of New Jersey and we're in a very good position right now with more troops per turn than Cornell, and we're also teaming up with them to defeat Yale," he said. "We have a very good shot of winning right now, even though it didn't look it in the beginning."

In addition to the official commander and vice commander, several other students are part of an unofficial governing committee, Alexander said.

Besides developing team strategies and trying to discover the battle plans of other competitors, the committee has had to keep an eye out for spies within the Princeton team.

Lillian Winans '02, whose fiance graduated from Penn, posted the Princeton battle plans on the site's public chat, which is visible to all schools, Alexander said. She has since been voted as a spy by more than 90 percent of the Princeton team and will probably be kicked out of the game when it returns.