[rafd]

For anyone interested in a slightly lighter Diplomacy, I recommend checking out Game of Thrones the board game. Like Diplomacy, it can be played with no randomness, but the way orders work is much less tedious. It ties in nicely with the themes from the books. It is still pretty intense, so more for the Risk crowd than the Catan crowd.

[alasdair_]

I really like GoT but the main game is quite imbalanced. Here are the stats for thronemaster (online version of the game) after tens of thousands of full games: https://www.thronemaster.net/?goto=statistics&sub=games&type...

As you can see, some houses are 3X more likely to win than some others.

It IS a fantastic game however, it just needs a few house rules to balance it.

For another truly exceptional game with even more treachery than Diplomacy, may I suggest Dune (1979 with a reprint last year)? It has my favorite power of all time in a game: before the game starts, the Bene Gesserit write down the name of a player and a turn. If that player wins on that turn, the Bene Gesserit win instead.

[s17n]

I don't think that anybody's ever complained about "the way the orders work" in diplomacy being "tedious"? Do you just mean that the game is faster?