Diplomacy

Is it just me. Or does the diplomacy board look scarily similar to 1914 mechanics wise.

France, Austria and the Balkans in particular.

@1Bean432:

Is it just me. Or does the diplomacy board look scarily similar to 1914 mechanics wise.

France, Austria and the Balkans in particular.

Conversely, it’s fair to say that 1914 looks like Diplomacy, because Diplomacy is much older. And it does indeed depict Europe before the Great War, so the similarity is to be expected.

Diplomacy is unlike any other boardgame - or at least, if there’s anything like it, they would have copied Diplomacy’s concept. 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. There are seven Great Powers (UK, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, Turkey) that are staring each other down in Europe in the early 1900’s. They have armies and fleets, and can typically annex a few smaller countries but will very soon face each other. Unlike A&A, movement is not consecutive, but simultaneous, by writing movement orders on a scrap of paper, and determining which move works and which one doesn’t when all orders are revealed.
But the most important part of the game are the ongoing and secret negotiations that happen in between, before the moves are written. You can see England and France in the kitchen, Germany and Austria on the balcony, Russia and Turkey down the hallway…. leaving Italy in the living room, nervously looking at the actual board and wondering why nobody’s talking to him. And of course there is no need to actually do anything you promised while negotiating. It’s a game of treachery and deceit while trying to maintain a reputation of honor and integrity.
Needless to say, Diplomacy requires some strength of character for everybody to remain on good terms……

Excellent description HerrKaleun.
I have always wanted to play again. First time was  years ago.
I would buy it, if I thought I had people to play it. You need a group.

I wanted to tell you to buy it Mallery, but could not really help in describing it.
Herr KaLeun has done a fine job.
Te us if you do and how it goes!

One thing I love about Diplomacy is there are no dice!  You take a territory but having more support for your attack then there is for defence.

If you have an army in territory ‘A’ and I have one in ‘B’.  I can try to enter ‘A’ from ‘B’ but in this case its a 1 on 1 so I bounce back to ‘B’

But if Joe supports army ‘B’ into ‘A’ with support of fleet unit in territory ‘C’ then army ‘B’ moves in and army ‘A’ moves out.

I think each turn is a season and once per year you determine how many units you can support based on how many territories you control that can support a unit.

Joe will show me how is unit supports my unit with a written order that he drops into the ‘hat’.  When I turn my back Joe sneaks out and talks to the owner of army ‘B’ and they decide to backstab me.  Joe writes new orders that indicate these supersede the older orders, places them in the Hat and moves on….back to me indicating he tricked owner of ‘B’ into thinking a backstab supporting him was going to occur but…

From what I recall everyone starts out with about 3-4 units.

You require a house where people can get out of sight and make deals without being obvious about it.

Would be a great game for a tournament day.

Diplomacy is a very fun game. You can play it for free on www.playdiplomacy.com against other players from all over the place.

My major problem with the game is that it is incredibly unrealistic to have players’ armies grow for each conquered supply center. It doesn’t make sense that you are able to support more troops in the field as you take over more territory. If anything, you are able to support less because people have to stay in the conquered territories and hold them.

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.

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.”

@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.

@1Bean432:

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:

• 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).

• Despite being an all day commitment, Diplomacy is an elimination game and some of your friends will be knocked out early.

• 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).

• There is a wonderful blend of strategy, diplomacy, and tactics; with much written on all three.

• 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.

• 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.

• This is one of my all time favourite board games - on par with A&A.  It’s a classic and will never die.

• $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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.)

@Gargantua:

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?

@barney:

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!

@Gargantua:

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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!”

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 …