Canto LXIX

And we're back for another round! Today I want to talk a little about my favorite game in the whole world, Diplomacy. Next year is the 50th anniversary of the game, and a new board is suppose to be released, which is good since it's out-of-print right now. But the other news in the Diplomatic world is that there's now a Facebook application that lets you play games. This was really cool and exciting at first, but I must say that it's not as great as it sounds. I'll go over what I don't like first:

1) There are several key rules that are screwed up. First and foremost is that you can't support a convoy, i.e. you can't support a naval invasion a la D-Day. This is really crippling for England, since they're are going to have an impossible time getting past the stalemate lines fast enough. The program also doesn't recognize the difference between friend and foe units when adjudicating, so you can self-dislodge. There was a painful moment in my game where I was using that fact to defend a space only to be forced to retreat from my own units! Also, disbands are handled at the same time as builds, which really messes things up. I need to know what's on my borders before I know what I should build. Anyway, there are probably more issues as well that I just haven't run into yet. Very frustrating.

2) The game I'm playing in right now, I'm not close to any of the other players (either proximity or on a personal level except for one), so it's hard to conduct, you know, diplomacy. There's a forum for sending messages and stuff, but it's woefully underused. This game is ultimately about negotiating and finding ways to interact with your friends and enemies to advance your own interests.

Those are my two big points. But I'm glad that there's a new forum for people to get introduced to this game. It's a lot of fun, and the more the merrier. But hopefully someone can work on this and make a better application.

With that said, I want to set up a play-by-e-mail (PBEM) game, that is run on one of the automated judge servers. The downside is that you need someone to be the Game Master who can't actually play. I've enlisted Stephanie for this, and she's (somewhat reluctantly) agreed to do this and promises not to divulge any secrets to me. So I'm looking for 6 other people who aren't in much physical contact with each other (i.e. in different cities so you can't conspire over a board together whenever you want) to start up a game. I think it will be moves every 3 days, adjustments over 1 day. Also, I would like to see high-volume emailing and negotiating. So don't say yes if you're going to check your email once a day and maybe get back to someone. 3 days is enough time to send out 1 or 2 emails a day for negotiating. I'm sure we're all good enough typists. Anyway, if you're interested you can post a comment telling me so, or just email me. Once I get 6 more, I'll email out and set this thing up.