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Reply To: Diplomacy

July 26, 2021 at 12:37 am #1665501

Participant

6224xp

> Maybe I just played it with the wrong people?

Occasionally, you’ll find a game subject to what I call “groupthink”. You find the same strategy works every time for a particular way a group plays. Then some players from another group show up for a game, and the way they play throws off the strategy entirely, even though these players don’t win the game.

Socially, Advanced Civilization might be an example. In trading, you trade two face-down commodity cards, and some of these cards have negative effects. In one game, one of the players would only trade face-up (or was that one card face up), and this quickly caught on with *some* of the other players. The last player to not trade this way eventually agreed to it. This changed the game to be less antagonistic and more coop.

Dominion is another “groupthink” game (though in a different way), in which players might fall into common play styles, overlooking and sometimes dismissing (ie. never playing because it’s a “bad” card) one or more cards from the card pool. It’s not until outside players include these cards that the group is introduced to a strategy (not necessarily a better one) that’s new to *them*.