tl;dr: Comment to this post if you want to play Diplomacy with me.
Shall we play Diplomacy from the Comfort of our Shelters? You can only look out the window wistfully and sip your tea for so many hours. Then it's time to Command a Great Army and Defeat Your Enemies by Conquering All of Europe the way no one managed to back in 1918. Why couldn't they? Were they dumb? Clearly! Look how much smarter you are than they!
You could be England! Rule Britannia!
You could be Germany! They did pretty well, but you could do so much better!
You could be Russia. Any bonehead could outperform Nicholas the second. He was a moron. You, on the other hand, are not!
You could be Austria-Hungary. They sucked so bad, their country doesn't exist anymore. They lost their whole country.
You could be Turkey. We still call it Turkey but it isn't what it once was. It used to be glorious. Did you know Istanbul was Constantinople? Why did Constantinople get the works? Because they were bad at war. But you, you are good at war! Be a better Turkey!
You could be Italy. Italy needs some love right now. Be the hero Italy didn't have. Defeat Europe for Italy!
You could be France. France is pretty cool. But I read The Guns of August a long time ago and all I remember was that the French were too cocksure about the whole war thing. You'd be a much smarter France. I know it.
So now I've convinced you with my Snappy Prose to play Diplomacy with me. "But," says you, "I don't know how to play!" Never fear, fellow aspiring European leader, there are Answers to all of your Questions.
Q: How do I play?
A: There's more to it than this, but in a nutshell: 1) talk to the other players about what you are all going to do on your turn (psst: you are allowed to lie). 2) submit to The Judge the orders to your Armies and Fleets to tell them how to move. 3) See what your Armies and Fleets were actually able to do after everyone's orders are processed. 4) Repeat until someone wins.
Step 1 is the fun part. The game is mostly Step 1.
That's it. I'll detail the game plan, the rules, and how this all gets done in the next post. But really, that's the game. It's fun. I know. I've played it before.
Q: Do I need to buy something?
A: Dear God No! Diplomacy is an old board game from the '50s that no one played because people in the '50s were too worried that their neighbors would think they were Communists and so they avoided things like discussing plans to move armies and fleets, writing down military orders in code, forming alliances against that guy who seems a little too square, you know what I mean?
And so the game was relegated to closets and basements where the nerdiest children of the '60s found it, blew the dust off the cover, and figured out the brilliance of the game.
It was these hardened nerds who, once the Internet emerged, shared their crazy closet-game knowledge with everyone under the unofficial but, I believe, legally valid concept of Abandonware. They scanned rulebooks and wrote software and started Websites and Clubs and disseminated the essence of Diplomacy across our Great Counter-Culture.
Then a dumb company called Avalon Hill bought it and tried to eradicate the God-given Freedom of the Game from the Internet with their "Copyright Claims" and "Cease And Desist Letters." So don't buy it. They don't need your money. Later, they got bought by Hasbro, so they can print all the Monopoly money they can eat.
I'll give you all links to maps, software, videos, etc. You won't need any of it, really, but it's there and it might help you win. And you do want to win. I can tell. Heck, you've read this far. So clearly you're invested.
Q: Okay fine. How long will this take?
A: I think we could make a 3-day per turn game. That gives everyone plenty of time to find a few minutes to email each other and a few minutes to write some orders. We could do something more intense, like a one turn per hour blitzkreig. Or something way less intense like one move per week. Honestly, we're going to be holed up for a couple months, so it all seems pretty do-able.
Q: Let's play. What next?
Comment below and once we have 7 players, I'll randomly assign countries and we're off to the races!
