i must have won again because i'm posting. it was a 3-man-tan. but here's the thing: in recent games i've made known my tactic of affecting the outcome of the game when it's clear i'm not going to win. it has been dubbed mussolini because a relative loser is forging an alliance with a powerful evil entity in hopes of riding on his/her coat tails to victory or in this case at least taking some of the credit. i didn't work for mussolini but it does work for me much to the chagrin, mockery and hatred of fellow settlers. however, with enough proof of the mussolini concept i hope to be able to use it as a means of leverage in future games. we'll see how that works.
anywizzle, in our last game i had 10 points and the other 2 players were looking pretty good. with a little method acting i convinced red to trade with me under the pretense of needing to build a barb defense which would have been point neutral and given red the other 1/2 of the metropolis he sought. 2 cloth for 2 wood -> br/wd/shp + 2 wood + merch on wood (1VP) = settlement (1VP) and chit for discovery (1VP) = 3 veep whammy which i dubbed reverso mussolini or 'il reverso' or 'il douche' since red unwittingly formed an alliance with me enabling me to chit out the needed veeps for the vic. in retrospect it wasn't really that much of an alliance but i like making words up even more than i like taunting red.
here's the overall thing: there needs to be some real incentive for catan players to continue to settle and veep up even when it's obvious that they are building roads to nowhere. mussolini is for bastards like me who like to manipulate the off board politics of the game when possible. how about some more acceptable addtions to the game that would encourage vigorous development by everyone? what would they be?
