I first heard about Diplomacy via This American Life. The reporter talks about how he played the game and eventually went on to hire an actual diplomat to help him play at the World Championships. It's a great story in itself and I recommend it to anybody who wants to learn more about the game.
In my opinion Diplomacy is a game well suited for correspondence gameplay. Not only is it difficult to get all the players to commit the necessary time on a day everyone is available, but it is also much more fun since you can plan your moves more freely. We've even gotten used to planning moves with one another using Evernote throughout the week.
Some friends and I have been playing this way for a few years now, and hands down it is a better experience than using any of the cumbersome boards and having to manually adjudicate everything.
Submit one move every Tuesday, it's now a tradition.
We used to play in 14 hour marathons on the weekend. Thirty minutes per turn. A couple things about playing Diplomacy in person (compared to online and compared to other games):
Seeing other people walk off together to talk to each other.
Seeing others explode upon being backstabbed.
Sometimes we played with more than seven players, putting more than one person on the same team, giving them a diplomatic manpower advantage.
The drama and tension in person just can't quite be replaced. Although the anticipation of a move when you're playing correspondence is absolutely exquisite. Burning someone in a 3 month old game is its own wonderful experience.
Well, this looks fun. I'd like to play and I like the idea of playing with turns every week or so, but nobody I know would really be bothered with this.
Where would someone find a committed group to play with?
We started a game of Diplomacy in the office. 7 developers, 7 players, 1 day per turn. We use Backstabbr to keep track of the game and have it drawn up on a whiteboard - it's been a lot of fun and increased moral a decent bit.
It's 1907, no one trusts each other anymore and everyone hates everyone.
How do "increased moral" and "no one trusts each other" go together? I almost always leave a game of Diplomacy feeling really upset, but maybe that's just an indication that I don't have a good ability to separate in-game relationships from reality?
Backstabbing is a natural and expected part of the game. Anyone who's played more than once knows that you cannot expect to go through a whole game without being stabbed.
Most of the strategy revolves around predicting when, not if, your ally of convenience will backstab you, and how long you can afford to trust them before you'll need to stab first.
It's nice to see these things popping up. I've used similar web interfaces before and they're great. Diplomacy is best played with the full complement of 7 players, and 7 is an awkward number of people to get together for a game that can last up to 3 hours, but see 1-2 people eliminated in the first hour.
For what it's worth: The namespace for Diplomacy sites is pretty homogenous. (PlayDiplomacy, WebDiplomacy, etc.) We were originally PlayDiplomacyOnline, but that didn't solve the homogenous problem and was easy to get confused with other sites. One of the big things we were trying to do was bring some Web 2.0 sensibility to the game, so a cheeky name seemed in order.
We didn't consider the impact it would have on new or potential players but it doesn't seem to have scared many newbies away; in fact we get regular feedback that our site was easier for new folks to get into. Personally, I think knowing that backstabbing is a core part of the game going in helps soften the blow when it first happens.
What form of the convoy rules is this using? (Diplomacy's convoy rules are (or were) ambiguous in corner cases, something that multiple versions of the official natural-language rules failed to resolve fully.)
I've been looking for a way to learn Diplomacy for some time now - the controls feel a bit cumbersome but after just using the sandbox for an hour or so, I have a far better introduction than I've gotten from just reading primers. Nice work.
I wonder about the legal aspect of this, since Diplomacy is a fairly modern game. Do they have permission from the creator of Diplomacy? Or is it fully legal to take a board game and make a web version of it?
It is our understanding that there's kind of an unspoken agreement between the game copyright owners (Hasbro, who purchased Avalon Hill) and website developers that they are unlikely to interfere so long as you're not using any of their art or instruction text directly and so long as you're clear that your version is "inspired" by the original and provide attribution. This is the reason that every site you visit has their own handwritten version of the rules, for example.
In our case, we really do encourage people to go buy a copy of the board game, preferably from your local nerd shop. There's a lot to recommend playing Diplomacy online (I believe it was the second game playable by mail published after chess), but there is something special about playing in person and having all the physical materials.
It's legal so long as you change the name, and don't use the same graphics.
I made a website for a fork of UNO years ago called "Hot Death UNO" and was sent a cease and desist from Mattel for it. I changed the name and the look of the cards and poof, no more problem.
That's a question I'm clearly interested in! I just moved to another country and am working on a website to play my favourite board games with my family and was wondering if I could publish it on github or if I should keep this private as I don't have the rights for the board game.
If you want to play Diplomacy, but want a more balanced experience, that has all powers of the board interact, I can only recommend Baron Powell's excellent 1900 map variant.
The problem with this implementation is you can sign up for a game that is every 15 minutes, or every hour. Then it doesn't start for X number of hours until it gets seven people.
So you can say at 3pm you wnat to be in a game. It can start at 3 am, and by the time you realize you are in a game you have already lost. With seven people, probably many in different time zones, I haven't yet seen a turn of my game where at least two people didn't move.
I am in my first game on backstabbr and am enjoying it very much.
I love the sandboxing feature on backstabbr, but I so so wish it was faster. I would pay good money for a native Windows or iPad client that loaded the current game state and was strictly a fast sandboxing tool. Sandboxing is so heavily "what if" where you want to explore maybe a dozen paths quickly that the tool becomes frustrating when it can't keep up with your ideas.
Hi, I'm a dev on Backstabbr. At present the only way to access anything is to login, and the only logins we use are Google accounts. We have talked about making a demo Sandbox available to guests, but I'm not sure when we'll get around to that.
So, reading up a little on the premise, has anybody ever tried running a game of Diplomacy where each territory has spectator "citizens" that the players have to answer to, ie. holding a press conference between each turn to give a "State of the Union" address, laying out what the current party line is on alliances and axes (and having to spin stabs to not come off as evil)?
Hi, I'm a dev on Backstabbr and can help answer that question. Backstabbr was written in Python and is hosted on Google App Engine. The web interface uses Django and relies pretty heavily on Bootstrap 3. (At some point we'd like to migrate from Django to Jinja2, but that probably won't float to the top of our list anytime in the near future.)
I just want to say I've been playing for the past week and the first actual order resolution will be happening in a few minutes. I'm very excited and the platform has been fun to play with so far. I love the sandboxes.
I find the fork http://www.vdiplomacy.com/ much better, mostly because there much more variants. The classic map has various weaknesses (e.g. army instead of fleet in Rome).
vDip also has a click-on-the-map interface, although I prefer the drop-down variant.
[+] [-] memonkey|11 years ago|reply
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/531/g...
[+] [-] jnem|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RevRal|11 years ago|reply
Some friends and I have been playing this way for a few years now, and hands down it is a better experience than using any of the cumbersome boards and having to manually adjudicate everything.
Submit one move every Tuesday, it's now a tradition.
[+] [-] LanceH|11 years ago|reply
Seeing other people walk off together to talk to each other. Seeing others explode upon being backstabbed. Sometimes we played with more than seven players, putting more than one person on the same team, giving them a diplomatic manpower advantage.
The drama and tension in person just can't quite be replaced. Although the anticipation of a move when you're playing correspondence is absolutely exquisite. Burning someone in a 3 month old game is its own wonderful experience.
[+] [-] imdsm|11 years ago|reply
Where would someone find a committed group to play with?
[+] [-] sparkman55|11 years ago|reply
http://grantland.com/features/diplomacy-the-board-game-of-th...
[+] [-] spudfkc|11 years ago|reply
It's 1907, no one trusts each other anymore and everyone hates everyone.
[+] [-] willismichael|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimlottc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] na85|11 years ago|reply
Most of the strategy revolves around predicting when, not if, your ally of convenience will backstab you, and how long you can afford to trust them before you'll need to stab first.
It's nice to see these things popping up. I've used similar web interfaces before and they're great. Diplomacy is best played with the full complement of 7 players, and 7 is an awkward number of people to get together for a game that can last up to 3 hours, but see 1-2 people eliminated in the first hour.
[+] [-] safetymonkey|11 years ago|reply
We didn't consider the impact it would have on new or potential players but it doesn't seem to have scared many newbies away; in fact we get regular feedback that our site was easier for new folks to get into. Personally, I think knowing that backstabbing is a core part of the game going in helps soften the blow when it first happens.
[+] [-] leoc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] safetymonkey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acafourek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3t4|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] safetymonkey|11 years ago|reply
In our case, we really do encourage people to go buy a copy of the board game, preferably from your local nerd shop. There's a lot to recommend playing Diplomacy online (I believe it was the second game playable by mail published after chess), but there is something special about playing in person and having all the physical materials.
[+] [-] inanutshellus|11 years ago|reply
I made a website for a fork of UNO years ago called "Hot Death UNO" and was sent a cease and desist from Mattel for it. I changed the name and the look of the cards and poof, no more problem.
[+] [-] koopajah|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melicerte|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgeecollins|11 years ago|reply
So you can say at 3pm you wnat to be in a game. It can start at 3 am, and by the time you realize you are in a game you have already lost. With seven people, probably many in different time zones, I haven't yet seen a turn of my game where at least two people didn't move.
Cool site though.
[+] [-] patja|11 years ago|reply
I love the sandboxing feature on backstabbr, but I so so wish it was faster. I would pay good money for a native Windows or iPad client that loaded the current game state and was strictly a fast sandboxing tool. Sandboxing is so heavily "what if" where you want to explore maybe a dozen paths quickly that the tool becomes frustrating when it can't keep up with your ideas.
[+] [-] rurounijones|11 years ago|reply
Or some other way to sign in that does not require Google?
[+] [-] safetymonkey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|11 years ago|reply
http://www.vdiplomacy.com/board.php?gameID=20995 password: backstabbr
It is the classic map with a twist: it starts with a build phase, so you can choose between armies and fleets.
[+] [-] argc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] safetymonkey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jboggan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hhaamm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hhaamm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanyc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|11 years ago|reply
vDip also has a click-on-the-map interface, although I prefer the drop-down variant.