Me and my friends have been playing Risk for a long time now - and our games seem to have evolved to a 'no-tabletalk' environment. There are no laws against it so to speak but after thinking about it, I realize why it's happened.
There are a couple reasons, and I'll start with the basic one first. We know eachother personally. This is a simple yet major reason why we rarely tabletalk because we already know eachothers strategies. So there's never really an issue of what the other players are going to try to do. This plays into the next reason.
The second reason, is that most of us have been playing for so long that every move is essentially boiled down to a logical move. There is always a 'best move', for every player in any situation - and when you've been playing for awhile, you start to identify those best plays better.
Yes, logical moves are always effected by the roll of the dice, but that doesn't mean it wasn't your best option before you started rolling. Good players realize that yes, they were infact making a smart choice with their turn, but if they lose still, then it wasn't their fault directly, as dice are dice. The element of random is just how the game goes.
As for tabletalk specifically, not in terms of overall concept, we do have some friends that play with us every once and awhile who are not that skilled... they don't make smart moves very often... and we have been known to try to convince them to do things in our benifit - but this is strictly a move against inferior players who don't have a clear concept of what their 'best move' is at the moment.
So what does it all boil down to? Well, I guess I'm trying to figure out how diplomacy can play such a large roll in a majority of risk games for other people, yet for us, we (as I thought was the only good way to play) rarely ever use it, and only agianst noobs.
I find it really interesting that this community exists, and I really want to learn more about your thoughts on all aspects of table talk. Thanks! |