So I was pondering whether to weigh in or not. Part of me is thinking the GM should just keep her mouth shut and let the players play, but after sleeping on it I do want to say a few things.<br/><br/>First, and most importantly,<em>this is a game.</em>It's not intended to be a forever see-sawing balance of power as a vehicle for writing high-stress political drama, it's meant to be a board-game type situation where eventually someone or someones will win. Alliances are an essential and expected part of that. As I noted in the game description itself, if everyone just sort of picked their own corner and stuck in it, nobody would ever win.<br/><br/>At the same token, because it's a game if anyone ever looks at the board and thinks "this is unwinnable from here" or "this looks inevitable no point in prolonging the torture" then shaking the other player's hands and saying "good game." Is an entirely acceptable option.<br/><br/>I'm not going to go too deep into this as I don't want to be giving advice or altering the way anyone plays, but I want to point out is that this is turn 4, and there are 11 active players. You all knew the other players would likely be trying to stop you from winning. Now 7 of you have an additional factor to consider in this. To me, this is not where the game ends, it's where things get interesting. But again, how you play this is up to you and I don't want to say too much.<br/><br/>Game mechanics are something I'm happy to talk about more after the game is done. I'm not making any changes to the rules other than for the sake of GM sanity or to resolve impossible contradictions in them until then. This is after all a bit of a playtest as the game as never been done before, but I don't want to get distracted with that stuff while the game is still running and we haven't seen how it is going to play out yet. I'm going to ask everyone to please save their thoughts on game mechanics and balance until after the game is done, otherwise we'll get off the rails quickly. But I do mean that, save them, because when we're all done here and I'm thinking about whether to run this again or modify things and do something different I will want to hear what everyone thought!<br/><br/>The final GM word is going to be a reminder that Elliquiy has civility rules, and that<em>out-of-character</em>shaming the way anyone else wants to play would be in my mind a violation of them. I'm not saying anyone has done this, I'm just nipping this in the bud just in case. I know there are board games where that's seen as a legitimate way to try to win but this isn't one of them! :)