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I make a guest appearance in today's Serious Fun, where I say this:

"Kelly, as your co-worker and, I'd like to think, friend, I advise you not to attack me."

I know the exact wording, because I had time to decide on exactly what I was going to say. Kelly had the turn after mine, and he had a Razia, Boros Archangel looking around for a target. It's difficult to convince someone with a large Vigilant flier not to do anything with it, and I was the easy target. Laura was down to six life, I think, and there's a lot of peer pressure not to kill someone off in that situation. Plus, I don't like trying to make the argument "You should attack someone else instead of me because they're weaker". Normally I like to point to a stronger enemy and explain how they're the real threat.

Unfortunately, Brian, who ended up winning the game, had an untapped Broodstar, which was something like a 9/9. Incidentally, the only reason it was untapped was that I had talked him out of attacking me on his turn, since he clearly needed something to protect him from Razia.

So my usual technique of explaining why I wasn't the correct target wouldn't work. I wasn't actually that worried about the attack itself, because I had Instant-speed creature removal in my hand. So I went with the advice quoted above. The interesting thing is that I chose not to just tell Kelly that I could destroy his creature. Heck, I could even have just shown him the Cruel Revival as a deterrent. But I think that sort of thing lacks subtlety. Also, at some point in the future, I might need to bluff him, and if I've established that I always show the deterrent, there's no way to imply it when I don't have it.

Looking back, I should probably have skipped all the above planning and just taken the six damage. I was at 28 or so, so it's not like it was killing me. And as much fun as it was to use Cruel Revival to return a zombie from my graveyard to my hand, it actually shrunk my Soulless One. Awkward.

Last night, we played Risk 2210. My initial plan was to go into the water, so my starting units were spread out across the world. The idea behind this strategy is that you grab a Naval Commander and as many Naval Command Cards as you can to start the game and hope to get Hidden Energy. Then, because you're poised to enter all the water areas, you can get a bunch of free energy, and you can then bid higher to go first on Year 2, so you still control all those Water Territories, and you theoretically have a huge advantage right at the beginning of the game. The reason this works (when it does) is that Risk 2210 only goes for five years, so people don't necessarily have time to catch back up with you.

Now, when I laid my initial units out, I was necessarily spread all over the place. And the person who started in Australia was worried about what looked like a mass of armies just off her borders. So I assured her I had no designs on the land; I just wanted the water.

And then the people who went before me took some of the water territories and generally obliterated my forces on the Americas.

So now I didn't have position to reach all water territories, and I had to come up with a new plan. That plan turned out to be "take Australia, which I had claimed I had no designs on".

Now, I think this is relatively above-board. Risk is pretty much like Diplomacy, where you always have to assume everyone will do whatever's in their best interests regardless of what they've told you. But the person I backstabbed was annoyed about it. She sounded a bit like those dopes on Survivor who are always going on about how they play "with honor" and that's why they lost.

So, my question: do different games have different standards? Is it okay to deceive someone in poker but not in Risk?