WhisperzQ: That's the thing about having it as just two teams. Almost all games that involve more than two people or teams have this conspiracy problem. Poker is notorious for this problem when played with strangers. The game Risk is too. It just seems to me that those games that have the players work towards a positive goal are prone to conspiracy if all the players don't play for themselves. Two handed games are fair as far if I make a bad move, you win. In three or more handed games, this isn't always true. I make a bad move and you might lose because of it and the other guy wins. Just try and devise a game that gets around this. If you know of one, please post it on this site, maybe we can get Fencer to add it.

Any deviousness in a Team Pond game will be more than acceptable and fair. If it doesn't work, your team loses. If it works, your team wins, the other teams loses and no one is cheated or hurt. Say we started with two teams of eight players each. All sixteen players bid. Before the game starts, the eight players of each team might want to talk about playing certain bids or something else but they don't have to. As the game gets down to say 5 players, it would either be 3 against 2 or 4 against 1. I really don't know how it would go. I'm thinking the the remaining team members would be sending ideas back and forth. Could 1 person make the next round against 4? I'm sure it could be won 8 to 0 too.

If this way of playing Ponds has is flawed too, then there's not much more I can suggest. You have me thinking about conspiracies. I suppose one big problem would be team members that don't follow the team's plans, or worse reveal them to the other team. Traitors! It'd still be fair. The team loses and that's how it goes. Nothing like your example when two or more people purposely bid crazy to gain advantage and hurt uninvolved players.

Ponds is still on the site because people like to play it no matter how flawed and conspiracy prone that it is. You can do as I have done and stop playing the game, or just bite the bullet and play knowing that can happen. Your view of fairness in this game is different than other people. Some of whom veiw what bothers you as part of their fun in playing the game, though from what was written earlier I'd say most people don't like conspiracies. Besides your veiw of the fairness of it, others might not like it because they aren't in on it. I doubt much if your list idea would work as sooner or later something of this nature will come about. Just typing the wrong button can happen too. That happened to me in that Very First Pond. It wasn't until a few rounds into the game that Fencer made it possible to change your bid.

What do you think Fencer, Team Ponds? I'm sure some of the fellowships would have fun challenging each other, plus you could have round robin tournaments like we have for the other games too. There could be independent teams too. Just sign up at the tournament page. And of course invitationals. I get a number of people to join my team and we challenge someone else to get a team together.