Sweet, Sweet Diplomacy

Over Thanksgiving I was staying at my friend Kyle's house in New Hampshire, and one of the nights during the week or so I was living on his couch his older brother invited us to one of his friend's houses to play something called Diplomacy. I'd never heard of the game before, but he described it as "Risk on crack" (still my favorite way to describe the Diplomacy experience), so Kyle and I happily obliged him. We sat down at the board, picked out powers (France, England, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, or Turkey), and after all of the assembled players voted to declare an end to the game -seven nerve wracking hours later- I was absolutely addicted.

The premise behind Diplomacy is that there's no luck, only skill. There aren't any dice to roll, and to force a unit to retreat (or destroy it if it has nowhere else to go) you have to overpower it. Thus diplomacy with other players, which plays a minor role at best in a game of Risk, is the driving force of Diplomacy, as nobody would be able to make any reasonable headway trying to play on their own.

But of course, as in real life, there is no such thing as a binding agreement between players, and so one must always be on the lookout for a potential stab in the back. In the game in New Hampshire Kyle and I were playing Germany, and had teamed up with England to take out France, which was being played by a far more experienced and exceptionally deceitful player. I introduced the ultimately poisonous idea to Kyle when we came to a deadlock with France that 1) England is the most powerful country on the map, and 2) once we were done with France he was going to come after us. After a turn or two without any progress being made we decided to turn against England. What I didn't expect, though, was a DOUBLE back stab on the behalf of France after a few turns of wailing on England. By the time the game ended Kyle and I were running for our lives.

There are a handful of sites that organize games by email, and earlier in the week I got into a game. I'm playing France this time around. So far I seem to have an agreement worked out with England, who I understand is a much more experienced player. Given his experience and the fact that people seem to lose all sense of honor and trust while playing Diplomacy, I don't really trust him yet. We've got a DMZ set up in the English Channel, which will keep us separate until he moves onto the mainland, I intend to keep it for the time being. I haven't heard back from Germany yet, although at this point I've had much more correspondence with England, so I think a potential alliance with Germany is pretty much out of the question by this point. Italy has agreed to leave me alone so long as I leave him alone, and I'm too far away from the other powers to be negotiating with them just yet.

Turkey, however, contacted me yesterday with an offer to share information we pick up from the other countries. England revealed in earlier correspondence that Italy had contacted him as well with a similar request, so I'm guessing Turkey's trying to set up an intelligence network, himself being the prime beneficiary of said intelligence. I shared a little information with him regarding Italy, although I really, really want to use his own intelligence against him later in the game. I contacted Russia and Austria with this plan, and both agreed that this would be a good option to keep in the backs of our minds incase Turkey becomes a problem.

I am such a nerd...
A map of the game (everyone still in their starting positions).