Diplomacy
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With risk you get more troops with more territory, same for axis and allies. Seems the mechanics of ALL games i played work that way,
If having more land means you can support less troops then having no land means you can support more troops than anybody with land? Now that seems unrealistic.
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One of the early A&A rulebooks has on its back cover an advertisement for Diplomacy. It shows a picture of a German senior officer (complete with spiked helmet and ceremonial braid and so forth) face to face with a (French?) officer who is likewise in full-dress uniform. The two men are bowing to each other, smiling, and shaking hands; each man has his left arm hidden behind his back, with a dagger clutched in his hand. The caption, as I recall it, says, “Try diplomacy first. You can always resort to more persuasive means later.”
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@Herr:
While strategy does play its role, it’s mainly a matter of forging secret and well-negotiated alliances and backstabbing the right people/nations at the right time.
I would argue that strategy is the most neglected area of this great game. Probably because suave and persuasive negotiations can go a long way to make up for strategic shortcomings.
Is it just me. Or does the diplomacy board look scarily similar to 1914 mechanics wise.
Diplomacy is like A&A in that it’s an historic war game played on an area map. They both feel a bit like “advanced Risk”. However, mechanically they are not similar. Diplomacy is more like checkers or Stratego, where only one unit ever occupies a space and units move one space per turn. Units can support the moves (attacks) of other units, and the force with the most support wins in case of movement conflict (equal forces result in a stand off). There are no dice - just the uncertainty of what the other players’ units will actually do. Diplomacy mechanics are more abstract, classic, and elegant.
Other points:
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You need seven players for a whole day - start late morning and go past your bedtime (fortunately there is lots of moving, not all day sitting at the board).
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Despite being an all day commitment, Diplomacy is an elimination game and some of your friends will be knocked out early.
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For the above reasons, the game is more suited to e-mail or postal than face-to-face play (although live play is a blast).
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There is a wonderful blend of strategy, diplomacy, and tactics; with much written on all three.
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Back-stabbing can give you a quick boost, but you can do well being honest if you have an ally who understands cooperation is in your mutual interest. Good players also are careful when expanding to be sure that they and their ally are not getting in each other’s way nor are over exposed to each other (new players constantly screw this up and wonder why they are betrayed so often). Back-stabbing too much will kill your reputation if you play with the same layers frequently.
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The game is usually a draw. When it’s down to three players, two can only work together so long before one of them is in contention to steal the win. Basically the only way to get a solo win is if somebody blunders.
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This is one of my all time favourite board games - on par with A&A. It’s a classic and will never die.
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$20 for one of the best games ever designed is a snap buy (though the box may get a little dusty). I have over four copies I think.
Another point of interest - originally produced in 1959, the first Diplomacy players where historic war-gamers (war games where primarily miniatures at the time). In the 1970s, two other gamer demographics took a interest in Diplomacy. Bridge players brought tactical (and strategic) analysis to a whole new level, while Dungeons & Dragons players excelled at the role-playing and negotiating. That’s when the game really became great.
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Pretty everything has been said already.
Buy the game, its great. There really is only one precondition, and that has also been said already: All players should be able to distinguish game from real life and be good sports. Some players just cant get over being backstabbed in a game and stay upset. I wonder why, backstabbing is such a fun aspect of the game :)
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One of the most frustrating things about Diplomacy was that after finally rounding up enough players for a 7-player game, the rules explanations took so much time. We rarely finished a game. I wrote a “Simplified Rules for Chess-style Diplomacy” years ago to introduce new players to a quicker game. Once a few games played to conclusion, you had a player who would be interested in the full length game.
The simplified rules used dice rolls for an order of play, and all spaces on the board were available for all units (no fleet transports were needed.) -
As an owner of Diplomacy for over 30 years, I cannot add much to the excellent contributions above, except to stress that (in my view) the game’s interest lies primarily in the diplomatic shenanigans engendered. A&A is far superior in it’s recreation of military strategy and options - presuming that 1914 retains this strength.
When I first encountered A&A a few months ago my Diplomacy experience caused me too see A&A’s fixed alliances as a lost opportunity. However I have gradually revised that perception. In my last game of 1941 the USA (me) and UK struggled with a recalcitrant Joe Stalin who stopped co-operating as soon as we had rescued him. Perhaps then A&A is the truer depiction of great power alliances under pressure?
Diplomacy is a great game in which luck plays no part. I have enjoyed playing it all these years. But I prefer A&A because I feel that I am reliving history.
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Don’t know if you play on triplea or not PP but they have a few free for all games which are popular. Sadly I never got to play diplomacy as I never could find anybody to play. Bought the game as a kid just because it sounded so cool and I was on a wwI trip at the time.
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Panic,
I have been saying for a long time, that it should be called Axis, Allies, and Comintern. especially the 1940 games.
When you give Russia it’s own victory conditions, the allies only want to help them for so long… and the Russians only want to be your friend when it benefits them.
It’s not to say that the Allies and the Communists pieces ever fight. But it’s a race for a separate win with different conditions, and it can get very testy if you play it that way. This also provides a very different dynamic in the pacific, where Japan and Russia can make some very interesting deals.
(IE Japan feigns a small attack, to give Russia free Mongolia 6 inf, then retreats. Russia in turn pulls all forces west to never return, and Russia also denies any allied landings on its territories, and refuses to support china.)
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Panic,
I have been saying for a long time, that it should be called Axis, Allies, and Comintern. especially the 1940 games.
When you give Russia it’s own victory conditions, the allies only want to help them for so long… and the Russians only want to be your friend when it benefits them.
It’s not to say that the Allies and the Communists pieces ever fight. But it’s a race for a separate win with different conditions, and it can get very testy if you play it that way. This also provides a very different dynamic in the pacific, where Japan and Russia can make some very interesting deals.
(IE Japan feigns a small attack, to give Russia free Mongolia 6 inf, then retreats. Russia in turn pulls all forces west to never return, and Russia also denies any allied landings on its territories, and refuses to support china.)
Very interesting Gargantua. Ripe for your own house rules?
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Don’t know if you play on triplea or not PP but they have a few free for all games which are popular. Sadly I never got to play diplomacy as I never could find anybody to play. Bought the game as a kid just because it sounded so cool and I was on a wwI trip at the time.
Planning to look at triple A when back from a holiday, barney.
A&A is great as a 2 player game, but Diplomacy needs more players to allow it’s central concept free rein. A&A also benefits from an evening variant - 1941 - which sucked me in. At the moment I play 1941 monthly, hope to play 1942.2 a few times a year and am lucky to get a game of Diplomacy every couple of years. It’s a good job I prefer A&A!
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I have been saying for a long time, that it should be called Axis, Allies, and Comintern. especially the 1940 games.
It’s a fair point that the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets were allies of convenience rather than of conviction, that the wartime alliance was marked with a lot of distrust (and a certain amount of distaste) on both sides, that the alliance only lasted as long as it had to, and that the victorious coalition fell apart after the war for the same reason that such coalitions typically fall apart: because the victorious survivors of the war are the biggest pieces left on the chessboard, and thus constitute the biggest potential threats to each other.
It should also be remembered, however, that the partnerships which existed during WWII (on both the Allied and Axis sides) changed frequently, with interesting results. For example:
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At the beginning of June 1940, Britain (specifically the British Expeditionary Force) was standing alongside the French army, trying to fight off a German invasion of France. One month later, at the beginning of July 1940, Britain (specifically the Royal Navy) was shelling French warships in the port of Mers el Kebir, killing over a thousand French servicemen.
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In November 1936, Nazi Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was aimed primarily against the USSR. In August 1939, Germany reversed its position and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop (a.k.a. Nazi-Soviet) Pact with the USSR, which technically made the two countries allies. By the fall of 1940, Berlin and Moscow were even seriously contemplating an agreement under which the Soviet Union would join the Axis powers. In June 1941, Germany reversed its position one more time and invaded the USSR.
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In 1938 and 1939, Japan and the USSR were involved is a couple of short-lived but nasty wars with each other on the borders of Mongolia and Manchuria. In April 1941, however, the two countries signed a neutrality pact and left each other pretty much alone from that point forward, even though by December 1941 Japan was part of the Axis coalition that was fighting the Allied coalition of which Russia was part. Fast-forwarding to August 1945, we find Russia declaring war on Japan and invading Manchuria and the Kurile Islands.
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In June 1943, Italy was an Axis coalition partner with a Fascist government. Soon thereafter, Mussolini was thrown out of power and Italy surrendered to the Allies, to which the Germans responded by occupying northern Italy and attacking the Italian fleet off Sardinia, sinking one of its modern battleships in the process.
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Chiang’s Chinese Nationalists and Mao’s Chinese Communists, who were technically both fighting the Japanese as comrades in arms, saw WWII as a temporary interruption of their civil war with each other and never lost sight of their goal to re-start it as soon as the Japanese had been defeated.
This all just goes to illustrate the old principle that nations (particularly powerful nations) have interests rather than friends and enemies, and that when their interests change friends can quickly become enemies and vice-versa. Folks here who’ve seen the movie The Right Stuff may recall the amusing scene (set in 1947, I think) where a military officer stops a reporter from phoning to his paper the exciting news that the sound barrier has been broken. When the reporter asks why, the officer answers that they don’t want the Russians to find out about this. The reporter replies in puzzlement, “But the Russians are our allies!”
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As always an interesting and informative reply Marc.
Of course the US & UK are also allies of convenience, the conviction element always doubted and believed in equal measure. But they did achieve a remarkable degree of strategic co-ordination in WW2, despite significant frustrations on both sides. As Churchill said - the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is fighting a war without allies!
Roosevelt’s belief that he could work with Stalin lead to Churchill’s discomfort. For example over the question of how many Germans should be executed.
Further the US were less keen on the survival of the British Empire than the UK - no surprise there!
Perhaps then Gargantua’s idea should be expanded to include both overlapping and separate victory objectives for each and every power? Mmmm …
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@Private:
Further the US were less keen on the survival of the British Empire than the UK - no surprise there!
I would even go so far as to say that the US would have been quite happy to see the British Empire dismantled, if for no other reason that at the time it had a tariff system that gave preferential treatment to British / Imperial / Commonwealth goods. The Americans much prefered the concept of open markets, and disliked what they saw as British protectionism. The Anglo-American tension on this issue can been seen in the fourth point of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which stated “Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.” Most of this point reflected the American position, but the “with due respect for their existing obligations” part reflected Churchill’s wish to include a “notwithstanding clause” that would (in his interpretation) let the system of Imperial tariffs continue unchanged.
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@CWO:
@Private:
Further the US were less keen on the survival of the British Empire than the UK - no surprise there!
I would even go so far as to say that the US would have been quite happy to see the British Empire dismantled, if for no other reason that at the time it had a tariff system that gave preferential treatment to British / Imperial / Commonwealth goods.�� �� The Americans much prefered the concept of open markets, and disliked what they saw as British protectionism.�� �� The Anglo-American tension on this issue can been seen in the fourth point of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which stated "Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity."�� �� Most of this point reflected the American position, but the “with due respect for their existing obligations” part reflected Churchill’s wish to include a “notwithstanding clause” that would (in his interpretation) let the system of Imperial tariffs continue unchanged.
I know we are way off topic, but I thought you’d find the following interesting Marc - especially the final sentence:
On May 10, 1982, Henry A. Kissinger mounted the podium at Chatham House, the London home of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, to deliver the keynote address for the bicentenary celebration of the Office of the British Foreign Secretary. Kissinger boasted of his loyalty to the British Foreign Office on all crucial matters of postwar policy matters in dispute between the United States and Britain. The crux of his disagreement with his own nominal country, the United States, he told his audience, was the basic dispute in policy and philosophy between
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, reflecting our different histories.'' Roosevelt, Kissinger stated, had condemned Churchill as beingneedlessly obsessed with power politics, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too colonialist in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little interested in building the fundamentally new international order towards which American idealism had always tended.‘’
It is Churchill who was right, and Roosevelt, who was wrong, in these matters, said Kissinger.While the majority of Kissinger’s elite audience was keenly aware of the bitter dispute between Roosevelt and Churchill, a different history has been made available to the average American: a mass of lies and half-truths about a so-called ``special relationship’’ between Britain and the United States, based on common ideals, supposedly supported by both Churchill and Roosevelt, and intended to last into the next millennium. This rewriting of history began almost immediately with FDR’s untimely death in April 1945, and has continued to this day.
Thus, what was perhaps the defining battle that shaped the course of current history remains unknown to most Americans. It is important that this story now truthfully be told, especially as a young American President has taken the steps to walk away from Britain and the ``special relationship.‘’
The historical evidence shows that Roosevelt entered into the military alliance with Britain with only one purpose in mind: the defeat of an enemy. The historical evidence also shows that Franklin Roosevelt was committed to dismantling the British Empire–and all other empires–and to replacing them with sovereign nation-states, modelled on the American constitutional republic, in which each citizen would be given, through access to modern scientific education and Western culture, the opportunity to create a better life for himself and his posterity.
It is this view of man, in the tradition of Western Judeo-Christian civilization, that places a value in each sovereign human individual, that the oligarch Churchill bitterly opposed, and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt espoused.
In 1946, as the history of the period was already being rewritten, FDR’s son, Elliot, published a short book, titled As He Saw It. With pungency and force, using first-hand acccounts, Elliot told the truth about his father’s bitter fights with Churchill, leading the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to state in a contemporary review that the book’s central thesis was that Roosevelt saw Great Britain and its imperial system as a far greater adversary to the United States than Russia.
Here’s a link to the full article if you want it:
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