Preliminary Sketches

So it turns out there was one source that didn't work for 1903 that did work for 1911, a Winston Churchill chronology. Churchill apparently did nothing as a "Young Statesman" in 1903, but did in 1911. So hurrah. I'm also going to stretch one source, misleadingly called "The Hundred Years" even though it covers only a very few years in the hundred it claims to encompass. It has an entry for 1910 and I can probably stretch it to make some facts fit 1910. One way I do this is if, say, a building is finished in Year X, I can ask a question that includes the fact that Year X+1 is the first complete year it is open. It's not inaccurate, and it's hard to come up with stuff for some years.

The next thing I do is to sort the available sources for those that start and end in the relevant year. I have four books that end in 1911, either because the subject died or just because that was the publication year. One of my favorites, a book called "American Game Protection", an unbelievably exhaustive chronology of laws protecting birds and game, happens to end in 1911. Unfortunately, sometimes when it's simply the last entry because that's when the book got published, as opposed to some event that naturally ends the book (the end of the Civil War, for instance), the last entries are not particularly interesting.

There are also even more that start that year and far more that start the year before, either because they are based on the decade or because they are based on the start of King George V's reign in Britain. I like to use those because it's more likely they will both have something germane to the period (why start a book in 1911 if you have nothing to say about 1911) and more likely to not be more germane to some other year. Although for this game it doesn't matter.

Here's the secret: one of my rules is that I don't repeat a source during a year until I can no longer write a game that doesn't repeat a source. It doesn't matter if the source uniquely has something for another year, I can't use it until I've used them all up. This year, it took until late September when I could no longer find at least 46 sources that I hadn't used.