Classic Europa

Classic Europa Group

Classic EuropaClassic Europa Group

Classic Europa has a newly-made email group at IO Groups, https://groups.io/g/classiceuropa. If you think you might want to join it, check out its rules on this page. Then click the link above to go to the group and request to join it.

Curretly, there's also a Classic Europa forum in Yahoo Groups. Due to recent announced changes in Yahoo Groups (that will halt and then delete user-generated content), this group will soon be of little use, so please use the Classic Europa IO Group instead! During the transition to IO Groups from Yahoo Groups, both groups will be running, but longer term it looks like the Yahoo Group will eventually cease being active.

Rules and Guidelines

1. Purpose of the Group

Classic Europa is an entirely unofficial, fan-based celebration of the Europa games. It does not cover any other games (such as other games in general or even the Europa-like Great War or Glory series). See below for a list of all current Classic Europa titles.

2. Moderation

The Classic Europa group is a moderated group. Membership to the group is vetted by the group's moderators. Only members can post messages to the group, and moderators review the messages before they are sent to the group's members.

Why? Far too often in other forums, a very few bad apples ruin the experience for everyone else, by posting off-topic material, engaging in bad behavior, relentlessly bringing up the same comments over and over again, etc. By using a fully moderated approach, Classic Europa hopes to avoid this and thus reward the many good apples with an enjoyable experience. So far it has worked very well!

Our goal is to have fun in the group and with Europa, and we want you to have fun, too. Pretty simple, really -- let's all try to make it work!

3. Disclaimers

Europa is a trademark of Paul R. Banner. Classic Europa is an unofficial fan site and mailing list and neither licenses the Europa trademark nor operates with the endorsement or approval of Paul R. Banner.

Case White 19854. Rules for Using the Group

What is on topic:

A list of the Classic Europa games appears further down this page.

What is off topic: Essentially, everything else. We deliberately do not provide an extensive list of what is off topic. If you don't "get it," maybe this list is not for you.

Unacceptable Behavior: We disallow any and all bad-apple behavior. Insults, profanity, excessive complaining, and so on are not acceptable. We deliberately do not provide an extensive list of unacceptable behavior, since if you do not already know how to behave properly this list is definitely not for you.

Posts that violate the rules or the bounds of good behavior will not be sent to the list (and the moderators may ask you to revise them or may instead just delete them, as they wish and as time permits).

Don't post anyone else's material to this group unless you have received their permission to re-use that material. See the Use of Material section for further details. We treat this as a very serious matter, especially when copyright violation may be involved.

We know that honest mistakes and occasional lapses do occur and we account for them. We enforce the spirit of the rules, not the dead letter of the rules. This cuts both ways: making an honest mistake occasionally is fine, but deliberately trying to bend the rules and then claiming innocence is not.

Violating these rules will prompt action by the moderators, ranging from not approving an offending message up to revoking membership in the group, depending upon the seriousness, frequency, and willfulness of the offense. After several years in operation, we have not had a major offense and the few minor problems that have arisen have been cleared up without trouble. Following the rules not only works but is easy to do!

SOS box5. Some Guidelines

We encourage posts on the PLAY of the Europa games. In our experience there's not enough discussion of game play, which is a core experience of the Europa games.

We discourage all posts asking for official news about Europa, as we don't know this. Classic Europa is entirely unofficial.

We don't ban complaints on this list, but we strongly discourage things like frequent complaints on the same subject, often-repeated griping on pet topics, excessive whining and carrying on, or relentless doom and gloom. We want to have fun here. If you want to rain on someone's parade, please go where that sort of behavior is tolerated.

We discourage anonymous posters. If you want to use the list, we prefer that you to identify yourself: include your name or initials (if these would identify you), or have an e-mail address that reasonably identifies you. Far too often for comfort, anonymous e-mail from posters like "RudelManOfDestiny@flamewars.com" turn out to be bad apples trying to cause problems.

We strongly discourage cross-posting between different groups or mailing lists. (Cross-posing between the Classic Europa IO Group and Yahoo Group is OK, since it is the same group just currently transitioning between group hosts.) Just because you may be on multiple lists, that does not mean everyone is, wants to be, or should be. Also, it is doubly inconsiderate: people on more than one list get multiple posts of the same item, while people on one list may not have enough context for what's going on (especially if cross-posting starts after the topic has been brought up on a differently list). Moderators will take action on instances of willful and persistent cross-posting.

WITD6. Use of Material

Material posted to this group is for use on this group and for the personal use of the members of this group, only.

Original work remains the property of the person who created it. Unless that person has clearly given permission for further use, please do not distribute anything from this group without checking with the owner.

If you want to share something with Classic Europa but want to explicitly restrict its use, please include a copyright notice in your name or organization on it (e.g., "Copyright 2015 Your Name Here"). It is also a good idea to indicated that it is restricted. Something like this has worked well in the past:
Copyright [YEAR], [OWNER'S NAME]. All rights reserved. Do not distribute in any form without express permission of the author!

AWW7. Group Etiquette Suggestions

These are suggestions to help make the group easier and more enjoyable to use.

Excessive Quoting. Please avoid excessive quoting. They each result in posts that are less readable, less meaningful, and less useful.

Excessive quoting involves quoting most or all of a message while you are commenting only on part of it. Don't make it hard for people to figure out what you are talking about!

Take a moment to make your post both more legible and attractive, it will be appreciated.

Subject Lines. Please change the subject headers when the topic in the e-mail begins to substantially change from the original thread. It is very hard to keep track of all these things, if, 6 months from now one's looking for the "truck" thread in WW and it's buried in a "Greeks in BF & WW" subject header.

8. Classic Europa Games

FITE boxGame Designers' Workshop (GDW)

These are the "original" or "first edition" Europa games:

GDW subsequently upgraded the series and did "second generation" or "second edition" Europa games:

SF boxGame Research/Design (GRD)

GRD at first continued the second generation format of GDW:

GRD then upgraded the series as the "Collectors' Edition" Europa games:

WOR boxOther Classic Europa Games