Respecting the Fog

I love to play fog games because it means I can hide the extent of my power to some players and then form an alliance with players that don't know the full extent of my empire. It also means you can recover from 3 armies remaining without drawing attention to yourself. However when I can I like to reveal the extent of someone else's realm when I feel they are in a strong position and ask for other players to weaken them. Recently in one of my games a player got very annoyed at me for revealing he had the whole of South America on world Expanded in a very early stage of the game. I was accused of not respecting the fog.

However I feel this is perfectly justified to use the chat to expose someones position to bring and alliance against a winning player. I understand that being exposed is annoying but then I think it is part of the game and I have definitely been exposed before. Is this cheating or is this fair play? Discuss

I wouldn't say cheating, but I could see the argument that technically you shouldn't even know how many are playing and who is what color, etc. If this is truly FOG then you discovered something but can't tell anyone because you don't know who is playing.

Usually my rule of tumb is: "guys, watch out, this guy is really strong in south africa" is fine, but "guys, this guy has 127 troops in brazil and 43 in argentinia, watch out" is not very sportive.

I love saying "woah not much on cap there" to someone, then other people check the cap and block themselves in

people can just say that you're lying about what they have to get people to attack them as well

hey excuse me who changed my post!! I did not say that! am I being hacked!?!

figured it out. i must of clicked on the edit post icon instead of the quote one. accidentally thinking i made my own post in reply to yours.

I don't like too much chat at all in fog games. Perhaps a comment direct to one other player such as "@blue I'm not going to attack you there" - but not referring to a specific territory.
I know there are some that like to use the comments to manipulate others. Personally I think it often leads to arguments.

A fog game with no chat, and no player count would be really fun

No chat, no problem.

What dough_boy and maafi said.

how about adding an Option to turn the Chat off?

I've gotta say I love FoW games because it is the gametype that most resembles a real war, and in every major world war there have been alliances when one superpower gets too strong and threatens the rest of the world. Vulnerable players creating alliances is a huge part of this game and if a player wants to expose the position of an opponent he/she thinks is in a winning position in an attempt to align with the rest of the players then that is all fair strategy in my opinion.

The negatives of doing this are:
A ) you paint a target on your back and tell everyone how weak you are, and
B ) you expose yourself to a backstabbing by your alliance members in order to gain your cards, after all it is a game where you try to dominate the world.

I enjoy FOG the way it is. Too much chat ruins the FOG aspect. Rather than change FOG from what it is now, perhaps introduce a new variant - FOG Espionage.

Then you can have unlimited and unrestricted chat, alliances, whatever sneaky deals you want whilst remaining within the rules.

In a way, this is not really breaking the rules, because diplomacy (clever manipulation) wins as many games as lucky drops mixed with good strategy.
Because Risk has many possible outcomes, no matter what you do, it's what others do that matters just as much and the best players use diplomacy to affect what others do, for their own benefit.
Therefore, there is nothing to say that all players in a game can't enter into an agreement before the game starts, to use diplomacy / espionage in the chat of a Fog game.
Remembering, that this can be a help or a hindrance and believed or not... "bring on the propaganda".
After all, it is a war for total map domination.
I would say though that, as in any democracy, all players in the game would have to formally agree in the chat before the game starts, this way, there can be no claim of any rules being broken, as long as no secret alliances are used in non-team games.

aeronautic, I agree completely. My only suggestion would be to add a check box on the game create so everyone knows what they are signing up too, rather than looking for consensus.

Thanks also for the advice on diplomacy. I've tended to avoid it as I felt it painted a target on my back. Maybe I need to be more devious!