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Diplomacy is a board game based roughly on the political
situation in Europe at the start of the twentieth century. The board is
divided up into provinces for the seven powers of Austria, England,
France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Turkey. The players start off with
a number of units (fleets and armies), equivalent to the number of
supply centres they control, and try to control over half the centres
on the board (18 of the 34), when they are declared the winner.
The game is designed so that any one player can not do
this alone but has to negotiate with other players to ally against the
others. All players take their moves simultaneously (by submitting
orders for their units, eg writing them down). These factors mean
players will initially ally trying to destroy an opponent whilst
ensuring their ally does not get too big to be a threat. A major tactic
is "backstabbing", where one player will promise to move in a
set way, but will actually order a different set of moves. This is
usually when he wants to stab an ally to take his supply centres. The
game is a very good way to release those deceitful and megalomanic
urges that are unwelcome in the real world.
The game started forming in the mid 1950's, being
published by the author Allan Calhamer in 1958, and then by different
games companies until its current owner Avalon Hill. Soon after its
initial release it was seen as a game that could very easily be played
postally, since all orders were simultaneous. So the 1960's and onwards
saw the development of postal play and amateur magazines dedicated to
postal play. The 1990's have opened up a new medium for playing
Diplomacy, that of the Internet and email. There is adjudication
software sitting on several machines, often referred to as
"judges" that allow people world wide to play the game by
registering players, processing orders, adjudicating, and emailing the
results to the players in a game. For more information see my diplomacy page.
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