Diplomacy

I've been interested in diplomacy since i first saw it on the shelves at the wizards of the coast store. I thought it would be cool then just because of the cover but after looking up what it was I became interested in it because of sources which said that it was Henry Kissinger's favorite game. I've always said that I would go out and get a board or find one on eBay but considering that it took two years for me to get a Go board despite my interest I imagine that getting a Diplomacy set is still somehow far off.

Last year, maybe two years ago I found a website where they host online games and you can play with a bunch of players for free. So I started playing. I only played five or so games last time I did it. There are two things I like very much about diplomacy which drive me to play more and understand the mechanics of the game. The game is completely abstract and devoid of any form of chance. Also the game is just as much about relationships as the physical movement of pieces on the table. Looking at it like this one could view the game as a blend between more abstract games like Go and Role-Playing games. Where most of the game is played in communication and only a small portion of it is demonstrated on the board.

I really have a lack of games in my life right now so I'm going to start this game up again. I spent the better part of last night just reading strategy about the game, I guess you could say that I got pretty distracted from the other things I was working on. The game is a military strategy game where 7 players loosely play the powers of the first world war, England, Germany, France, Russia, Austria, Italy, and Turkey. The size of armies is base only on the number of certain "supply center" territories that any given power controls. All of the countries start with 3 except Russia which starts four. There are only so many of these supply territories which are not already controlled by a power at the beginning of the game so after the initial "expansion" period in the first round or so it becomes a zero-sum game for control of the board.

The key to what makes this game well designed is the balance of power and the balance of theaters. The balance of power is such that no one country could dominate the board in the early stages of the game without help from another. The early-mid game requires that players cooperate to some degree in order to position themselves for a later period of the game. This brief creation of self interest is what drives the game. Making alliances in many other games is difficult because there seems to be very little self interest involved. Like risk for example. One would only make an alliance with a player on the other side of the board, or with a power that touches only along the continent borders. Diplomacy is designed such that alliance is a survival mechanism until one power gains a degree of hegemony. That's the other aspect of the game which is interesting because at a certain point some power becomes hegemonic and his game becomes more strategic than diplomatic but the game is still interesting unlike risk because his hegemony is threatened by the fact that it becomes part of the self interest of everyone else to stop his growth.

The other part of the game is the plurality of theaters within a small space. Strategic articles always talk about the game as if it is two over lapping hemispheres. There is a northern and southern theater, these are mostly defined by bodies of water. The northern theater focused around the Baltic and Scandinavian states and involves the powers of England, France, Germany, and Russia. The southern theater around the Mediterranean and Balkan states involves Italy, Austria, Turkey, and Russia. Russia is in the unique and difficult position of being forced to play in both the north and the south theaters. There is also another natural division East and West. This is a very subtle difference because the only difference between them is that Germany and Italy are able to span the eastern and western theaters and that the East-West divide tends to evolve later in the game because it has no natural neutral supply centers at the beginning of the game. Italy cannot easily gain western supply centers without angering france and germany cannot easily enter into the east without upsetting russia or austria. These early supply centers are then used as bargaining chips in order to set up the alliances which will dominate the early part of the game. So it is set up so that these natural triangles between powers cause them to ally.