First and foremost, thank you to captainmeme for GM'ing this game! He was very professional and forgiving.

Did players know how many SCs their opponents controlled, or when a player was eliminated?

They did not know how many SCs their opponents controlled.

They did know when a player was eliminated and the current draw votes.

Thanks, captain, for all your great work on this game. It can't have been easy to keep track of all the moves and to correct all the mistakes (sorry for mine). I can't honestly say that I enjoyed the experience, but it was a clever idea.
I enjoyed viewing the slide show and was particularly impressed with the inventiveness and complexity of some of the moves, particularly the way England found the way into Germany via Marseilles.

Thank you so much Captain for putting this on for us, I bet it wasn't easy.
My favorite part about my game is my sneak into Mars to try for the German land, but settling for Paris/Brest. I wanted to see if I could get people to think others were taking centers from them and not me. However, my wall came that as you can see, I could not for the life of me find an opening into skan. I am both ammused and annoyed by the fact the one time both I and Germany tried moving to barents we bounced and probably assumed the other had been there and never tried again.

Germany, did you realize you were that close to a solo? I was wondering why you never went aggressive against my island, you probably would have outed me and wrapped up the game earlier had you did.

Italy...I feel we were not on the same page since Port had been left wide open for ya, here you had me believing you were trying to get in.

France, I give you tons of credit for staying alive, each spring phase I kept expecting to see "France was defeated" to the point I had to ask captain that there were no more defeats.

Russia, my first ally, wish things could have gone better for us, by the hel move, I see you were the first of many frustrations for me :P

and man, how much of luck does this become, I look at all the times I pick a center to try for and another one would have been open. Ah well...

I found this fascinating.

Many thanks to captainmeme for administrating it.

I never, ever, want to play this again. Fascinating as it was, so much was guesswork that it was impossible to know what was really going on.

Yeah, I definitely knew I was close and could have soloed. People were bored with it and I am heading on a trip through the states. This isn't showing up in the GR or anything so I figured we should just end it.

I loved the bounces we had in Barents and whatnot. I think I even messaged you after one of them. I spent ages trying to figure out where you were.

nah, we had radio silence after you supported me out of sweden (Russia ruins everything for me)
See I just figured you had an entire line of fleets from Barrents to belgium and was toying with me for some reason.

This would have been a fascinating game to be in. If there's another, particularly another gunboat, I'd love to participate.

It was not fun, I think on almost every level, and probably worse for people who didn't do well.

Especially as Turkey, once I survived the opening, there were already cries about how strong Germany is. The problem is, I have no way to verify this, and even if I don't attack my neighbors...where does it stop? Is there ever a point where they go "oh yeah that Germany thing totally solved, we can fight now"? Being a across the solo threat in a gunboat sucks but at least you know that's what's going on. In this game I couldn't even know that's what's going on, much less have fun.

1901 is fun and interesting both theoretically and in practice. It's just steep downhill after that though.

So..Fog of War variant?

Fog of War let's you see adjacent to your units. This variant you literally only get a list of your unit positions to work with. You can't even see the spaces next to you.

Here's an example of what you had to work with. This is ALL you had to work with (along with previous ones):

"Blind Dip FP - Turkey, Autumn 1909

F Spain (sc) - Portugal failed, unit disbands.
A Rumania - Galicia failed, unit disbands.

The following units require orders:
A Sevastopol
A Armenia
A Bulgaria
A Greece
A Trieste
F Black Sea
F Aegean Sea
F Adriatic Sea
F Naples

The phase deadline is at 2pm GMT (9am EST) on the 14th."

You send orders back, and then you get another one with the new positions of your units.

You don't even know where the dislodgement came from if you get dislodged, you don't know if a move fails because a bounce or they beat you, etc etc. Don't know if/how your supports got cut. Don't know how supported they are.

Yes, I see that. (hah)

It sounds like the blind players (hah, again) liked the experience, but want more info. Fog of War seems like a popular variant. I'd like to see it here as something not quite as tricky as Blind Diplomacy.

"It sounds like the blind players liked the experience"

Actually I don't think a single one of us, except my exception for only 1901, has said it was a positive experience (except for CM's excellent GM'ing). And I counted three people, at least, swearing to never play it again, although to be fair they didn't say they'd never play anything similar to it again either. .

I won't be running any more of these. It's fairly obvious that there's some enjoyment that can be had from having to work things out, as in FoW, but this variant takes that way too far and makes it far too difficult to do so. Also, there's an inherent imbalance because the players who are ahead have much more information to work with - this is also present in FoW, but not to the same extent.

It's an interesting concept and certainly fun to watch, but it does not appear to be fun to play.

I'll likely be running different (and hopefully more fun) SRGs in the near future, so keep an eye out for them :)

Thank you for doing this, Captain! It was interesting, but I like actually seeing stuff.

@TheReinvented: yeah, we weren't really on the same page, mostly because I was paranoid that you were taking my SCs.

@Yonni: you were probably a turn from a solo, wow. I had no idea that you were in Tuscany.