The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds
When I was at my last gig we had a very active board game community and Diplomacy was eventually brought out. We played twice while I was there and it sowed an unbelievable amount of enmity and discord. It was incredibly fun.
The first time we played a majority of the players had never played before. We got through one "year" a week, with Spring and Autumn troop movements due by the end of the day on Tuesday and Thursday respectively. Then we'd resolve conflicts and submit build or retreat orders. Then we'd plot.
It was really fun but I think it was too fun - I think office productivity seriously suffered for it. Especially considering the amount of time we spent thinking/scheming/talking versus the scarce minutes in the evening actually "playing" the game. Still an amazingly well balanced game once you understand the subtleties. I fared extremely poorly by treating it like Risk and being far too aggressive. On my second playthrough I became much more docile and cooperative, and was thoroughly stabbed in the back for being so trusting.
Back in 2009 I was playing a game with Brian Ecton. My Germany was on the decline -- I'd played the preceding game with the Austrian player and the tournament director erred and put us next to each other again. It was my turn to read the orders and Brian stepped out for a smoke. When I got to Brian's England, I intentionally misread his orders and put his army into disarray. He was a bit cross when he returned to the table.
http://www.world-diplomacy-database.com/php/results/tourname...
The Resistance is a great bluffing and lying game. I don't think it's enough to lose friends because each game doesn't last very long (roughly 20 min.), so it gives other people a chance to exact revenge or screw other people over in future rounds. However, the length of each game can go up dramatically with arguing and bickering, thus the possibility of ruined friendships.
I'd argue that Diplomacy is only a game for "nerds" in a rather peculiar sense. The people who are really good at it are those that are capable of lying/acting convincingly. Face to face, that's quite difficult and falls outside of the skill set of the classic nerd. Online games are another matter. Here, I think long range analysis combined with good writing skills matter more, although the social elements are still in play.
Playing weekly or semi-weekly is the way to go for Diplomacy. Setting aside a full day for it and getting a full complement is too tough.
We played a game of this in the Google NY office this way. It was glorious for a bit -- intrigue upon intrigue upon intrigue. A week between turns really gives you a ton of time to stew over your plans. It got pretty serious; I remember having to call a cubemate (who wasn't part of the game) after I'd left the office and ask him to destroy a planning map I'd realized I'd accidentally left out.
Alas, the whole thing ended in acrimony. One guy who was getting trounced announced he was quitting the game -- in which case his pieces just passively stand their ground and are slowly overtaken -- but then changed his mind and submitted moves the next round after all. Another player called that out as bullshit (and let's be honest, it was kind of bullshit, but it was a friendly game and the rest of us were prepared to let it slide.) It turned into an irate shouting match in the office and the group abandoning the game halfway through. I believe there are still people in the Google NY office that avoid each other in hallways on account of that game.
In my second-to-last year at University, eight others and me implemented Diplomacy as a "scalable web service" in Erlang. The game is hilariously brutal; I've vowed to never play it with my girlfriend. I played it on the web for a while after, but stopped playing, the complete lack of empathy in this game was too much ;) Maybe I should try it again some time.
You can find some documentation here, we were the "Erlang Solutions" project:
https://www.it.uu.se/edu/course/homepage/projektDV/ht11
The code is on github: https://github.com/treacheroustalks/Treacherous-Talks
I never played but want too. If you live near SF and want to give diplomacy a go with a few fellow hackers that don't know each other this Friday evening (the 20th), email me (address in bio) first come first serve - I'll host an event in our office (right off 16th Bart station in Mission). Once we get a small group we can coordinate logistics over email.
What an excellent article. I think this needs a documentary, in the style of Wordplay[1] and King of Kong[2].
We played this a lot when I was younger. The biggest challenge for us was patience. The friend who was the best at it ultimately wound up a tenured political science faculty member in the DC area. Go figure.
I learned a lot of my people skills from Diplomacy. It also helped me work out a number of trust issues.
Before someone gets worried about the first statement, it does not mean that I am the kind of person who will betray someone - in fact, all my friends will testify that I am unreasonably loyal even under difficult circumstances. What it does mean is that after playing Diplomacy, I became much more self-aware about what I was doing to build friendships and/or relationships, and what others were doing, and also much more flexible at considering things from other people's point of view and therefore constructing deals that actually work for all parties.
For a really long running game that is guaranteed to lose you friends, try Riskopoly ( http://www.gilwood.org/riskopoly.htm ).
I describe it as Risk with a military-industrial complex.
The ultimate test of endurance is probably The Campaign For North Africa game with a listed play time of 1200 Hours with 10 people.
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/the-campaign-for-nor...
Very interesting.
But I hate this kind of writing.
It's way to long and runs in circles to many times for my taste.
I have to put in a plug for Scott Nesin's http://gamesbyemail.com, which has an implementation of Diplomacy, as well as several other great games.
Nice!
Has anyone here played War on Terror http://www.waronterrortheboardgame.com/? Think Risk, but with an Axis of Evil, Terrorists, and a balaclava (not baclava, unfortunately) included in the game pack.
It was also branded criminal by the police - couldn't ask for better promotion: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/war-on-terror-boa...
I am always looking for people to play Diplomacy and none of my friends are interested. I think I need new friends.
We never got into it at my office, but there's another game that offers similar tactics and is playable online, called Neptune's Pride[0]. It offers similar amounts of negotiation (and backstabbing), and we found that the game grew so contentious that people legitimately lost trust with each other in the office. Could be that we're just a sensitive bunch, but it was surely an interesting dynamic change.
So, here's a crazy idea: create an AI to play as one of the players in the web/mobile version of the game. It's a modified Turing test.
We play Diplomacy at our office and I jokingly refer to it as "team building". All said everyone has a pretty good time and can recognize it's a game. We play one move a day and games typically last around a month. I have been certainly been hurt by broken alliances, but I think it's a great character building experience to go trough.
All is fair in diplomacy.
Diplomacy. It's interesting that the movement (and support) mechanics are easy, it's the social aspects that are hard.
I played quite a bit in college with my friends. The most fun game I ever had was when I allied with the group's worst backstabber for the entire game and we won. The suspense every turn was awesome and the disbelief at the end was even better.
Here are the maps from the silliest game of diplomacy I ever played: http://www.jefftk.com/p/dip-space-nine
There are many rule variants, but Star Trek is just too much.
I used to play about 10 years ago via email with a small group of rotating players. It was always a frustrating, but enjoyable experience. Maybe I'll play again someday.
I played Diplomacy once. I ended up foiling a veteran player's plan to screw me over at the end, leading to a two-way tie between us. It was great!
This sounds fascinating and the kind of game I'd get a rush from. Is there a popular forum to find other face to face players?
I played one game of Diplomacy by email.
In preparation for that I read everything I found about (advanced) strategy, all the possibilities that are open to the different countries and so on.
In the end I was probably the only English player who never managed to leave his island...
After that I was so terribly frustrated that I never tried another game.
Oh man this game looks right up my alley, any idea how a man on the otherside of the world could play? I don't like the idea of playing by email or mail and I also don't want to ruin any of my friendships
I love Diplomacy and have played it forever, in person, by email, even as kid by snail mail. There is a great variant called 1900 by Baron VonPowell that is actually better. But it is my all time favorite game.
If you want a video game that engenders the same kind of backstabbing, tension and mistrust, you might want to give Defcon a go. It's nerve-wracking.
Played many years of it with friends... The before D&D claim is dubious on the basis of pooularity.
I've been a big friend of Avalon Hill titles over the years.
I have never played this, it sounds great.
If you are playing over email and one person becomes unresponsive, what is the standard thing to do?
Each year for the past 3-5 years me and my friends have been getting together for a weekend to play a few years of WWII. The game that we have been mostly playing is Columbia Games' Eastfront II, which covers the eastern war with Germany and Soviet Russia. It's basically a hex-based map with different terrains, rivers, weather changes, HQ-driven troop mobilization and combat - the rules are abstract but not overly so to uphold an enjoyable immersion. The game also employs fog of war with thick wooden standing unit pieces, which certainly adds to the excitement.
The game is advertised for 2 players, but we went ahead and modded the rules for 6 players + a referee. We made both sides consist of 3 field commanders plus a supreme commander. We looked at the map and divided it into 3 parts: the north, the middle and the south. For each part of the map, a German field commander and a Soviet counterpart would sit against each other and hold command of their own area. They saw only units that moved on their map. We decided that each 4 turns (a turn was a fortnight) the field commanders could all go have a meeting with their supreme commander, discuss strategy and synchronize information. We usually set these meetings to last for about 10-15 minutes.
The role of the supreme commander was to dole out repair points plus reinforcements and to send messages to their field commanders. Each turn the supreme commander could send a message to all of his subordinates, and each turn all of his field commanders could send one message to their supreme commander and one message to their fellow field commander. A message could be intercepted with a possibility of 1/6. Intercepting the message meant that the referee would toss a die and if it turned out one, he would take it to the enemy supreme commander without the sender knowing about it until the next meeting.
As an addition, the supreme commander had a map, but he had nothing in it except his own unit, which was good for moving singular units, sending paratroops and air strikes. The supreme commander would also get all the dead units brought out to him when units started dying. You would definitely know things were bad when infantry that were at the edge of Moscow 3 turns ago (or so you recall...) were handed to you by the referee!
Last year we upped the ante and tried out EuroFront II by Columbia Games. It was an epic attempt to play the final year of the war with the whole map of Europe, the winner being the one who holds the most Victory Cities (historically notable European cities) in their supply network by May 1945. With over a dozen players we anticipated problems in our message delivery system, which mainly consisted of a two guys gathering a bunch of papers from players and throwing dice for each message per turn per player side.
We opted for an easier solution and I set out to build a simple messaging system. It was a horrible PHP Slim-based Bootstrap webapp, with business rules written in postgresql functions and code structure being an implementation of pasta. I suspected it would be a maintaining nightmare (and it sure was!), but it worked without a problem during that weekend. Everyone loved it, including our refs' feet.
This year the game is Eastfront II and the messaging is modified for two player sides. We will also allow messages to pass through to their original recipient even if they are captured. With this we will experiment whether the turns will become more interesting for the players whose messages are always captured.
Based on this horrid ad-hoc prototype of mine, I'm currently working on building a more generic, a rule-based messaging system for our guys. Definitely more maintainable this time, promise.
Ps. For what it's worth, the ultimate alpha nerd war game seems to be The Campaign for North Africa. I will invite you to read the description of the game as described in Board Game Geek [0].
[0] http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/the-campaign-for-nor...
In my second-to-last year at University, eight others and me implemented Diplomacy as a "scalable web service" in Erlang. The game is hilariously brutal; I've vowed to never play it with my girlfriend. I played it on the web for a while after, but stopped playing, the complete lack of empathy in this game was too much ;) Maybe I should try it again some time.
You can find some documentation here, we were the "Erlang Solutions" project:
https://www.it.uu.se/edu/course/homepage/projektDV/ht11
The code is on github: https://github.com/treacheroustalks/Treacherous-Talks
don't promote shit titled like this in Hackr News
Hmm I thought it would have been BattleTech.
I would argue that its a geek game, not a nerd game.
Either way I have wasted dozens of hours playing, and it taught me how tedious other people can be.
Why would you play Diplomacy if you can play Twilight Imperium 3, A Game of Thrones the Board Game or War of the Ring instead?
Pretty sure us "alpha-nerds" would rather battle it out in fantasy/scifi settings than with boring old "real world" troops (Here I Stand is excellent if you want that). All of those games are also a lot better imo.
Always thought Diplomacy was pretty meh :)