Fallacy, because dedicating yourself to eliminating one opponent at all costs means you are not focusing your attention and resources toward winning.
It’s a silly emotional strategy that has no place here on the planet Vulcan.
I haven’t said that getting betrayed is a good thing, so I’ll leave you to beat that strawman all by yourself. However, reducing the probability of being betrayed must be weighed against the cost of actually being betrayed should such arise - unless your strategy actually eliminates all chance of being betrayed, which in practice it does not. Grim may be betrayed less often than TBF, but when he is, he is willing to sacrifice all chance of winning the current game or even of surviving to the end of same - and he is also willing to reduce his chances of finding allies in the first place. In the Risk example quoted upthread, losing a single province is of little impact, and the traitor can easily make amends and remain an excellent ally.
I will have a holiday in my heart any time I am able to ally with a grim Italy when I am playing Austria in Diplomacy and, say, have Russia’s cooperation against Turkey. I can expand far more rapidly than he can and I have excellent chances in the middle-game with my West flank secured by someone who will die before he betrays me. He can comfort himself all he likes with the thought that he has remained true to himself while he comes second or third and I score an easy solo.
I also have no objection to allying with a grim France when I am England, and arrange with Germany to stab France round about Spring 1903. France can expend all his effort in petty and unavailing revenge against me, while Germany and I divide the corpse as we see fit in view of France’s refusal to fight anyone but me. Any predictable monorail strategy is easy to outwit. 
I certainly don’t view grim as an unfair strategy, especially not in serious play. By all means, bring it.
Note: if this game applied to a game where money or some title was on the line, I hold nothing against people who employ the grim trigger since, hey, it’s 10 grand; there’s no “fair” or “unfair”; do what you have to do. The rest of my post deals exclusively with casual games.
When I first read this thread, I was attempting to think of cases where this grim strategy would be optimal and how I might react to it. Unfortunately, I haven’t played Diplomacy or many of the other games mentioned in this thread before, so my example comes from elementary-school days:
A group of five children (including me) decide to play a game of tag.
“Hi Jim. Let’s not tag each other so we can minimize the chance of being It, OK?”
“Sure.”
“However, I have to warn you. If you, for any reason, DO decide to tag me, I’m sticking to you like glue until the end of time. Just a warning.”
Wait. What?
OK, so there’s plenty wrong with comparing it to tag, but I hoped to carry across two points:
- Some game somewhere in some scenario could have the grim trigger as a viable option.
- Sometimes, people, in trying to win the game, lose light of the entire purpose of a casual game - fun.
My concern isn’t that the strategy is unfair - it’s that it is un-fun. I consider letting or threatening to let all emotional hell break loose a rather un-fun thing to do. Even if one punishes the betrayer in a calm manner, I would question the strategist’s inner emotional stability. I have no source for this, but I believe the amount of bad blood it generates alone should be enough to discount the grim as a strategy. So no, I would not play with you, and I’d be sure to invite someone else if I ever needed a last player.
I think much of people’s initial expectations can be colored by the group they play with regularly, too. For example, in a group of about eight players who I still play 90% of my games with, we have two “puppies” (they’ll ally with the nearest better player until betrayed, then pick the best current neighbor and ally, repeat), one grim, one halfway-between-grim-and-TBF (me), two berserkers (never commit to alliances, even temporary ones), and two compulsive stabbers (who tend to evaluate their ability to carry off backstabs and the benefit thereof in terms of maybe the next 3-4 moves, not the game in general).
So from my POV, with two berserkers and two compulsive stabbers being half my game group, leaning toward the Grim side is a winning-er strategy in my group, since it doesn’t affect the berserkers and the stabbers are less likely to stab me because they know I take it personally (in the context of the gameboard, anyway).
So I usually ally with the full grim or one of the puppies, then split him with a stabber at some point. =P
unfair? nope. anything you do within the rules of the game is fair play. personally, so long as you declare your suicidal triggers in advance i don’t see the issue here. in fact, having an open grim in a full Risk game basically means i have at least 2 less players to worry about. so that’s actually a plus. 
a question: why use this strategy at all? a general tit-for-tat policy would achieve the same results without being labelled a suicider. it might be viable in games where you have given up, but why restrict yourself so for all your games?
perhaps it’s because i seldom go into official alliances, but in over 170 public Risk games i haven’t had anyone betray me yet despite not being a grim. it just doesn’t happen very often, and among friends it should either never happen or always happen. (where i suppose it might be considered fun by all)
I have to admit, I don’t fully understand why some people are saying it should be harder for grim players to find allies. Assuming the other players have played with the grimmer enough to take him seriously, it seems like the best alliance on the board. Assuming he’s the only grimmer on the board, that’s going to be he only alliance you can form where you really don’t have to worry about betrayal, which in turn usually means you can dedicate more resources to the offensive and clean up. Yeah, if you’re going into it with the plan of short term betrayal, you won’t ally, but then again the grimmer probably wouldn’t want you as an ally in the first place. In fact, you could say that the grim strategy is actually an effective sorting mechanism to determine good allies, because you know that the only people who will want to side with you will be in for the long haul.
Also, why do some people prefer solo victories in Diplomacy so much? It’s been awhile since I have played, but I was always perfectly happy with an allied victory. Besides, it’s more fun to have someone by your side so you can gloat and reminisce about the game together.
Allied victory? There’s no such animal. Either the game’s abandoned as a draw in which all survivors share, or someone wins and whoever came second can console himself with happy thoughts of “allied victory” all he likes - no doubt with every encouragement from the guy whose catspaw he was. 
Anything but a solo win is a failure of some degree.
Sincerely,
garygnu, current SDMB Dip champ 
I hate to repeat myself, but yeah, sorry, here goes.
If you believe that a draw is better than being shaken out, grim trigger is an equilibrium strategy. If you only care about a solo win, then grim is not for you because draws are equally dispreferred to elimination.
I don’t know, I’m perfectly happy with a draw victory compared to being on the losing end of a midgame shakeout. That said, when I’m ahead I’ll break truces to pursue the solo but I’m the kind of guy who’ll give a turn or two warning of that fact (if I’m in a position to solo when I break alliance, I’m in a position to be generous about it to my soon-to-be second-place finisher.
Does it make me a bad person that anytime someone says something like this, my personal win condition for the next game I play with them is “prevent garygnu from getting a solo at all costs, with bonus points for forcing him to accept a duo”?
But then again, I think pushing for the solo win to the exclusion of allied wins represents a misunderstanding of how Diplomacy is supposed to work. (at the same time, anything other than a solo, duo, or trio win I look askance at, and frankly I’ve never played with enough grims/TBFs in a group that a trio win was possible :p)
Oh, so am I. I would much prefer to draw it out than be eliminated. But this is just my preference, so I can understand how someone might feel that any non-solo win is a form of loss.
I am pretty sure I started and ran the very first Diplomacy game on the dope, and I haven’t played in years. I am starting to get the itch again.
I simply do not understand your point of view.
It seems that many people in this thread are thinking “break alliance and stab your buddy in the back = fun” but “retaliate when screwed = not fun.” In a casual game with friends, I don’t get it.
If you ally with me and then pull a surprise attack against me, I am not the “asshole sucking the fun out of things.” My retaliation is no worse (and, granted, no better) than what you did to me.
If your betrayal assures that I won’t win, then what do I lose by assuring that you won’t win? And why shouldn’t I do it?
Pardon me if you answered this, InvisibleWombat, but do you enjoy playing games where backstabbing is an integral part? I’m thinking of games like Diplomacy, or A Game of Thrones. These games are designed and balanced assuming that each player is going to try for a solo victory to the best of their abilities. When one player doesn’t follow that unspoken rule, the game becomes much less interesting, not just for that player and his target, but for the other players at the board.
As your target, I don’t really care - if you’re in a position to stop me from winning after I get a free shot at you, I don’t deserve the win. But when the game gets decided because one player drops out (as seen in innumerable computer Diplomacy games), or stops trying to win, that’s just one step up from flipping over the board and storming out.
I don’t think you’ll understand what I’m driving at. I think it’s a fundamental difference in the way we approach these games. Which is cool. I’ll just have to remember to leave Diplomacy in the closet if you ever come over for game night. No problem, there are lots of other excellent games where stabbing isn’t an option.
Sure. Nothing like a good game of Munchkin
Mayhaps we interpreted the OP differently. My understanding was that Garula was referring to explicit alliances; commitments, if you will. I based my responses on that.
Let’s imagine we’re playing a game and you say, “Hey, Wombat, let’s join up and knock Garula out of the running.” I agree, and we blow Garula right out of the water. I fully expect that you’re coming after me next. We allied, we accomplished our objective, and now it’s every man for himself again.
But if you wait until I’m positioned for the joint attack on Garula and you attack me instead, I’ll be mightily pissed off. It’s a friendly game, and that’s a major asshole move. At that point, I will change strategy and do my best to wipe you out.
Do you see the difference?
While the strategy you’ve cultivated over the years is shrewd and can certainly pay you dividends over the long run, to the other players it probably appears to be what my circle calls ‘throwing the board’. Young kids will often throw a tantrum if they are losing and will knock all the pieces over and stomp away, adults don’t have to be dramatic about it, but they can certainly sabotage even a slim chance of winning to spite another player.
There’s certainly a ‘kingmaker’ joy to be had as the last swan song of your side whilst you bury the dagger into the heart of those that betrayed you. However, would you consider it fair that a married couple always teams up no matter what game they play? I don’t really see that as different from your strategy.
When I play Illuminati if there is a noob in the game I do not play to win, I play to manipulate the course of events as I teach the noob how to play.
A strategy that has worked really well is to give them great advice early on, show them the best plays, and then cause them at some point to lose their faith in my to begin to distrust me, and continue to tell them the best possible moves they can make.
Pah! Munchkin!
I see where you’re coming from, and I’d certainly never ally with me in your scenario once I’ve done that. When did that alliance end though? When Garula wasn’t a threat to anyone? When he was eliminated? When I put some forces on our border to cover - just in case? Because there are legitimate differences of opinion unless you draw up formal treaties, massive retaliation is hard to endorse. On a tangent, I consider games that lend themselves to that, like Risk with build-move-next player, deeply flawed. A stab in Diplomacy*, on the other hand, usually comes about because the stabee is fooling themselves, which in my mind makes it much less of a dick move.
Consider an alternative scenario, staying with Dip - France and Germany decide to split the low countries, France gets Belgium and Germany gets the Netherlands. Germany bounces France in Belgium, figuring what the hell. France goes apeshit, and tells England, “I will issue whatever orders you want me to. You can have Iberia, Brest, I don’t care. My one and only goal is to make sure that Germany loses, and this is the best way to do that.” The E-F-G relations make sense in the context of Grim, but I’m playing Turkey.
I’ve seen this type of situation actually happen - in that case Germany got stabbed, and turned everything over to France, walking away from the game. Germany “got back” at his stabber, but the collateral damage was everyone else at the board. To me, that’s a bigger dick move than stabbing someone who’s rolled over to expose their belly. Doubled, because of how long these games can take to play - Grim’s scorched earth can ruin weeks or months of play.
*Originally written Diplomancy. Presumably the study of spells to improve one’s Diplomacy game.
Not really. A GOOD alliance won’t break over something like using an ally for an easy card (continuing with Risk, since that’s the only game I play where alliances are useful, but not the whole point) - they’ll just use the same territory as an easy card on their next turn.
I assumed that the OPs opponents were complaining because his strategy was effective at letting him win.
I missed where the OP said
Really the effectiveness IS the point. If you are engaging in a stupid strategy that is not effective and serves no purpose other than to frustrate the other players, we just call that “being a dick”.