OK this is what I ended up doing - it turned out it wasn’t so hard after all. :-)
I made the simple chart below in a publisher program. On the second row of the chart I listed all of the players for the next game under the country roundel that they would be playing. (The roundels on the top row of the chart are placed in the order of the chairs around my game table.)
For the following game, I put six roundels in a cup and drew at random what country Keith would play next - I kept any country but Italy as he already played Italy. Keith got the USA this time, so I set the USA roundel aside and drew for Max - any roundel but Germany as he already played Germany, and so on until line 2 was finished.
For line 3, I put all the roundels back in the cup and started in column one with Tom - he could be any country but Italy or Japan this time, as he already played those two.
Once I got down to line 5 and 6, some repeats began to appear. I had to manually switch a couple of players around, so they wouldn’t be playing the same country twice before playing all of them once.
It only took a few minutes and now I have a schedule where for the next 12 games every player will play every country twice without sitting by the same people twice. This chart will also enable us to keep a record of wins-losses, number of rounds played, and even some kind of score could be recorded for game results and added up over time so players can track their performance.
