Gentlemen -

This will be the shortest and easiest EOG I've ever written.

First, many thanks to Trout for a fantastic job. I've never played in one of your games before but I will certainly look for them in the future. Your humor and creativity were a blessing in a game that didn't have very much of either during the play. Well done.

I admit I wasn't really excited about the game when I saw it posted. I'm normally a sucker for a pretty map, and this one did have some interesting possibilities with all those water spaces, but I felt that having four players would doom it quickly to a two-against-two fight that would slog on forever with no one willing to risk being the first to stab. (As it turns out I was wrong about that in the early going, but exactly right after the first -- what, four or five years?) After watching the game languish in the Open Games for a few weeks I signed up. I had a break in my schedule and was hopeful that even if the game locked up as I predicted, we'd quickly reach a stalemate.

I asked for Finland. I got Russia.

I decided that the best way to make the game interesting was to form a two-man team to blitz the other side. Skip the typical snagging of the nearby neutrals and the "feeling out" negotiations, and instead go straight for the home centers of the opponents with the idea of back-filling neutrals later.

Looking purely at the map, I planned an opening blitz for Russia as partner to Finland, and another as partner to Poland. My analysis told me that Russia and Poland could move North faster than Russia and Finland could move East. Accordingly, my opening strategy was to persuade Lee (Poland) to work with me and to distract Mike (Finland). The first part seemed to work well. Lee seemed to buy into the blitz strategy -- a strategy that really benefited Poland more than Russia, I might add.

The second part went alright, too, or so I though. Mike and I had tangled in David Cohen's COTA game a couple years back. I got the better of him in that game, and he was pretty hostile about it, so I was prepared for some residual hard feelings. I figured he would be too suspicious to believe a big, friendly approach, so I started off trying to act wary but neutral, and tried to make it seem like I wanted to open slow and would allow Mike to "convince" me to work with him.

Didn't work. Mike made exactly the moves he needed to make to thwart my bltiz. He couldn't stop me from taking Helsingfors, but he took St. Petersburg from me and so there was no advantage either way.

How did this happen, I wondered? Either (a) Mike read my mind, or (b) Lee leaked the plans. Mike implied it was the latter. Since I figured he was just as likely to say that whether it was true or false, I didn't react to it, but this remains the big question in my mind about the game. (If true, I can only imagine Lee regrets it even more than I do.)

Poland's attack on Sweden was highly successful. Of course this made it hard to get Fredrik (Sweden) to help with Finland. I tried hard over a couple of game years to persuade Fredrik to help me cripple Finland quickly so that I could then help him in return with Poland. He was just encouraging enough to make me think he would do so, but he wouldn't follow through.

Meanwhile, Poland was also proceeding to grab all the neutral SC between our two countries. I feared that he was positioning for the solo so I fell back on him and, with Finland's support, was able to stop his forward progress. Once that was achieved, I tried to find a way to make a line that balanced Poland and Finland and where they would both need to keep me alive to prevent the other from winning. If Sweden would do the same, we'd have a nice little draw and be done by Thanksgiving.

This would have worked, I believe, except that Fredrik decided to throw the game to Finland. Or allowed himself to be duped. Or went on an insane vendetta against Poland. I don't care. It all led to the same embarassing result.

Hey, if that's how it's done around here I could have thrown the game to Poland three months ago and saved us all a lot of trouble.

I don't know what was said between the other players, but unless I hear that Lee stepped hard over the line of impropriety in talking to Fredrik, this result was a farce.

I'm also curious to hear what Mike told Fredrik to keep him pointed at Poland for so long and to not protect himself. Was it the promise of a two-way draw? If so, shame on you. I would be embarassed to pull that stunt on a newbie. Maybe it's your version of tough love? "The guy has to learn." Something like that? Enlighten us, please.

Okay, that's my say. Remember the bit about this being my shortest and easiest EOG to write? It really was, believe it or not.

See ya 'round, maybe.

Chris