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Dixiecon began as
a way for the Carolina Amateur Diplomats to get more involved in the wider Diplomacy hobby. In 1984, the core CADs discovered
the game when they tired of rolling all the dice in a Risk game. Centered in Charlotte at that time, the CADs played close
to 100 recorded games with their own scoring system before they discovered the wider hobby in 1986.
With David
Hood, Michael Lowrey, Paul Woods and others moving to Chapel Hill for college in fall 1984, the CADs branched out to the eastern
part of the state and began to build their numbers to a much larger size. After a trip to Dipcon 1986 in Fredricksburg, VA,
the CADs decided after urging from hobby legend Larry Peery to begin Dixiecon both as a club gathering and a wider hobby tournament.
The 1987 event was largely CADs and nearby Virginians, but over the next couple of years interest swelled in the event,
largely because the games were conducted without time limits and because of the high quality of the play. By 1990, Dixiecon
was hosting Dipcon and World Dipcon on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, with a total attendence of about 120 (some of whom played
the side tournaments in 1830, Titan and Nuclear War, big Dixiecon favorites at the time.)
The 1990's saw big changes
with Dixiecon. The first Beltway Invasion began, with a group of Maryland/DC area Dippers beginning to dominate play, such
as Mark Franceschini and Jim Yerkey. Later in the decade, this would be supplemented with a new wave from the same area of
the country, the Pitkissers. Although Diplomacy people sometimes assume that good players will get destroyed in later tournaments
because of their reputations, the evidence at Dixiecon does not bear this out. Strong players like Chris Martin, Bruce Reiff,
Tom Kobrin and Steve Koehler continued to show up in the Hall of Fame list multiple years, with Chris Martin doing a hard-to-believe
repeat in 1998/99.
The last few years, since the 2002 Dipcon, have seen a resurgence of attendence at Dixiecon
as the wider Diplomacy hobby has added players to most tournaments. There were times, particularly in the early 1990's, when
Dixiecon was one of only a small handful of Dip events continent-wide. Happily, there are now a dozen or more tournaments
vying for an expanded number of FTF Dippers. We hope you will give Dixiecon a try.
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