| Striangulation: The Prolonger of 3+
Player Games
Striangulation is getting suffocated to death from two opposing angles
or sides. It classically occurs in a 3 player game that allows for loose
alliances to be formed, but can occur in any multi-player game of 3 or
more players.
Players may not realize they are technically pursuing a striangulation
strategy, but it will occur naturally among good players, as long as they
aren’t involved in grudge matches, or personal vendettas within the
game.
What happens is that one player will start to dominate and gain an
ascendancy over the other players. The rational course of action for the
other players is to put aside temporary petty differences and squabbles
and focus on the greater mutual threat they face. That dominant player
becomes the unifying factor that drives all the weaker players into an
alliance with one objective: to beat down the dominating player until he
is as weak as they.
Performed correctly, this strategy will prove successful most of the
time, as the alliance of weaker players should have a combined strength
greater than the dominant player and will weaken the dominant player until
he is at par with the other players.
The alliance will typically be dissolved and the players will resume
their fighting for dominance, until another player begins to rise to the
top. Then the others will likely form a new alliance, and the process will
repeat itself again.
In certain situations, and of course everything depends on the
personalities of the game players, the first such alliance that forms will
find it to be mutually agreeable to all members to continue the war
against that first dominant player until the first dominant player is
completely destroyed and absorbed by the members of the alliance. This
becomes a convenient way to take the momentum and temporary terms of peace
and neutrality between certain players and allow them to both equally
increase their own position relative to the other. In a typical
three-player game, the end result is that the first alliance runs the
dominating first player into the ground; the second and third players
split the spoils of war and settle down for what is now a two-player game
of equals.
This is a great strategy for weaker players to propose in order to keep
themselves in the game, but they must remember to propose it early enough
to make a difference. If striangulation is delayed long enough, the
dominating player may be able to take on all the rest of the players combined,
and will still win.
This also won’t work if the game is extremely high octane, such as in
Risk at the end of the game where a player can go from very weak to very
strong through the introduction of a matched set of Risk cards and the
enormous reinforcements that may go with that set of cards.
Peaking too early can be a common problem for good veteran players. The
best player in the game is also the one most likely to start out with an
early lead, and therefore the one most likely to get striangulated first.
As already pointed out, the one that dominates early may likely be the one
targeted for destruction first.
A good strategy in games that are likely to get involved in
striangulation is to hold back somewhat. Don’t stick your neck too far
above the herd early on. It’s better to position yourself for massive
gains very quickly in the middle or end of the game. This can often be
done by timing your move on the heels of a dominant player “takedown.”
Urge the other players to get actively involved in attacking the dominant
player as an alliance. Put yourself in a position such that when the
dominant player is getting dragged down by the alliance, you’ve laid
back and haven’t been as involved, but allowed the other player(s) in
the alliance to do most of the work. Then, once they’ve done most of the
work, strike out quickly and grab the lion’s share of the former
dominant player, as well as capitalizing on the ending of the alliance in
order to smash your former ally. If handled properly, you can use the
striangulation of another apparently dominating player as your own
springboard (much like using the gravitational field of a large planet to
catapult a spaceship into higher speeds). |
