When you think about your diplomatic options, the psychology of other players matters a lot. Some players are more likely to align and others are not. Those that do align may be backstabbers or the best friends you ever had in Risk. You need to get to know your opponents before you can make a smart decision about it.
Playing a game with some one for the first time or playing with someone who isn't a regular presents an interesting challenge. I recently played two games of Risk 2210 AD with some friends over a two month period (one game one month, another game the next) and two of the guys we played with don't normally play with us and they are inexperienced to boot. This creates an interesting diplomatic challenge: how do you know you can trust them?
In the first game, I was in North America and South America (or the 2210 AD equivalent) and I was doing pretty well early on, especially once I expanded to the moon and some of the water colonies. My first choice for an alliance was with my neighbor in Africa so I could concentrate on the Moon and the Oceans. He would have none of it. In fact, he got so powerful early on, the rest of ganged up on him and he was bitter the rest of the night. I aligned with a friend of mine, and the two of us being very experienced, won the game. This game was interesting in that I had an "in" with my friend and we did rather well against two inexperienced players who didn't align with each other until it was too late. Having that in my back pocket, the rest of the game was relatively easy for me.
The next game we played with them, I had thought that the lesson was learned by them that an alliance is a good idea and one they need to think about early and not late. I was in North America again and thinking about expanding to Asia and the Moon. I had a devastation marker in Greenland which meant I had only two borders to protect in North America (I felt very fortunate!). My neighbor in South America was building up in Central America and I was in an arms race with him. I didn't want to waste time dealing with that so I offered an alliance with him early so I could focus on my other exploits. He seemed to agree and so I used some of the armies in Central America to go to the Moon (I had a base there). Meanwhile, my friend (who incidentally is the same guy I won the previous game with) engaged in some secret diplomacy on the other end of the table to get him to backstab me. It worked and I got jobbed. Okay, lesson learned.
Now, once that happened, I immediately turned my attention to the guy who backstabbed me and I announced this to the world. In fact, right before he betrayed me I warned him not to do so or else he would pay. He didn’t seem to realize that his move would help him in the short term, but hurt him later. His attack on me expsed his other front (which is why my friend tried to divert his attention to backstabbing me so he can go up into his back end) and eventually he faced a two front war. He couldn’t eliminate me and the rest of the players saw what happened and immediately came to my rescue to “teach him a lesson”. He ended up being the first person eliminated and I survived but I didn’t make it to the end game (I think I came in third out of five). What was really funny was that we all told him we would remember this incident in later games and he didn’t think it was fair that his diplomatic blunder should be carried from one game to the next. That is just life and sometimes we have to learn the hard way.
The upshot of all this is to really take into consideration what your opponents are capable of and plan accordingly. My mistake was to trust someone who I hardly knew and to forget that my friend is capable of some creative diplomacy on his part. My friends can be very crafty when devising strategies and diplomacy and in retrospect, that game taught me a lot of lessons that I won't forget. |