Yakoska: "test of endurance" means "test of how long you can enter the same moves before making a mistake". Not a good game.

Right, which is why I offered a solution to that particular problem.

Neither of those are solutions. Getting judges in to look at every stalemate line is not reasonable, particularly given that it means you require players to continue playing games that are essentially dead, and the 1/2n breaks the fact that diplomacy is zero-sum and that stopping the leader is an important thing to do.

Essentially, I object to the idea that a draw isn't a reasonable outcome to a game. Even when there is no tactical stalemate, you can get a "diplomatic stalemate", where, for instance, there are three even players, and as soon as one gets a small lead, the other two combine to face him, etc. etc. You could argue that eventually this game would either lead to tactical stalemate, or to a mistake being made somewhere that means that somebody finally wins, but it is no fun to just carry on playing a game which has reached that stage in hope of a mistake.

That's where the "standing orders" could come in handy. Not just in two way games, but in diplomatic stalemates, where the two on one or two on two are likely to change their sides. Then have an automated monitor that draws the game if no SCs have changed hands in a certain number of years.

I think that draws are very reasonable - they represent the (probably normal) situation that one player can't get enough power together to defeat the other six and that (probably less normal) the other six have the nous to realise that the one player is in danger of taking them all out. What I hate is knocking someone out and then agreeing to a draw. I've been on the knocked out side and on the drawing side (I was in significant danger of being eliminated myself - a draw was way above what I could have forced) and both sides it felt rotten. A stalemate takes a little time to become established. I don't think there's anyway of scoring numerically to handle this which is why I'm taking up controlled detonation of people's sculleries.

I think the idea of a WTA game in which draws were not allowed is very interesting. What about a variant where it was Winner-Take-All, AND there was a rule that if a stalemate was reached where no SC's changed hands in, say, 5 years, the game was stopped, and no-one gets any points?