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Comment by kneebonian | Hacker News Reader

For those hearing of this game for the first time and think it sounds fun. Be warned, it is considered to be a game that will end friendships that have lasted for years, and monopoly is considered to be a game that causes less bad feelings.

An AI may be able to speak like a person but will never be able to hang onto that long burning simmering hatred from when Brad didn't support my army and instead flipped on me by supporting the f**ing Ottomans instead. I hope you choke on a cheesy pretzel Brad.

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I have heard this about various games (Risk and Settlers of Catan mostly). I don’t get it. The point of these games is to be a bastard. If everyone goes into it with the understanding that there will be double crosses, how could there be hurt feelings?

Monopoly is worse; it is just boring, I would dump my friends if they suggested monopoly not because I was hurt by their ruthless gameplay but for their terminally taste.

Two features that make Diplomacy particularly bad:

1. Length. An in-person game can last easily 12 hours, and is mentally exhausting. Getting 10 hours in and THEN getting screwed by your friend feels worse than a game with less time investment.

2. Design. It's difficult to survive the opening few hours without alliances, but only one player can win, so everyone is incentivized to defect at exactly the moment they think they can make greater gains by defecting than by cooperating. Being betrayed, even if you survive, forces a total rethink of strategy and ruins the next hour or two of gameplay.

> An in-person game can last easily 12 hours

How are you playing it? We've never had a game run over 4 hours.

New players and stretchable diplomacy period length :)

> stretchable diplomacy period length

Yuck. I can not stress enough how important a timer is to play Diplomacy in person.

I've generally heard of people playing over a weekend. So things like meals and sleeping sometimes happen during the negotiation turns.

I was a member of an enthusiastic friends-and-family gaming group through the early and middle 1980s. We spent a good chunk of that time on Diplomacy, then moved to modified Diplomacy on custom maps (my first wife worked for USGS Map Sales, and so we had good maps to work with in creating our own Diplomacy maps), and from there we graduated to Nomic.

If you think Diplomacy is long and exhausting, wait till you get a load of Nomic with a bunch of enthusiastic players.

This? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14451/nomic

> In the words of Nomic's author, Peter Suber: "Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed."

That’s the one. An intelligent and enthusiastic group of players can extend it indefinitely. It’s all lawyering and deal making, even more than Diplomacy, it can continue for hours and hours, and you dare not leave the room for a second, lest all your carefully worked out dealmaking be washed away in an instant.

Many people can't mentally context switch for game and aren't prepared for the behavior that is required of the game from those that can. It's an assault on their world view.

I would say Diplomacy specifically has features that make it cause hurt feelings almost intrinsically

1. It's a long game- after hours of play, getting doubled crossed unexpectedly sucks because of how much you have invested 2. The game almost purely relies on cooperation/other players. So double crossing someone really screws them- it almost certainly means I have no recource (luck, dice rolls, individual tactics). Getting double crossed feels like you got CRUSHED in such a complete way that I haven't felt in many other games

I have played a few times with a few social groups. Most were aware of the point of the game and enthusiastic going in, but even with that, people's feelings got hurt quite a bit.

I will say that Risk/Catan don't really cause the same feelings when we play. Diplomacy feels like a whole different level

Uniquely there isn't anything in the game, or on the board, to negotiate other than cooperation. You're not trading corn, or loaning money, or anything. Even "positioning" of pieces doesn't matter because you need allies to do anything, and you'll lose any position without allies; you can't build a fort or get a bonus by holding Indonesia. It's just 'please trust me' and 'please be trustworthy'.

In Risk, you're just fighting over limited resources. You largely wage these battles on your own. There is no real negotiation between players, other than an implicit, passing agreement when you don't provoke someone by attacking them.

Diplomacy, however, you can't manage any attacks by yourself. You will either depend on someone helping you with an attack/defense, or you will have to trust that someone doesn't attack you as you overcommit. You don't just verbally agree to these things, either.

Every turn, players commit to writing what they are doing and all the moves are resolved at once. So a player can go from imagined victory to catastrophic betrayal in the reading of a single order. This means that someone was just lying to their face for 15 minutes.

Some people just can't handle that.

Oddly, being branded as a backstabber just entices others to try to use that backstabber against what they see as a common enemy.

Best game ever. (I only behave like this in game, I swear!)

>There is no real negotiation between players, other than an implicit, passing agreement when you don't provoke someone by attacking them.

It depends how you play. I've seen people make treaties for all sorts of things for various durations, e.g. don't attack from Country X into Country Y and I won't attack across that border either.

Binding or non-binding treaties? Because in diplomacy everyone is always making non-binding treaties, promises and threats - and that's where the betrayal comes in. I have heard of some people using binding treaties in diplomacy (i.e. three turn ceasefire between France and Prussia) but that has always struck me as a terrible idea because you're shifting moves into the open and things get boring and cliquish.

I think I've played both ways (or at least played in a group where people didn't break treaties even if they could) but it's been years.

A "binding" treaty where the terms of the treaty are supposedly binding, but, like on the real world stage, the only penalties for breaking them is a lowered trust from all the other countries/players, sounds fine.

A binding treaty where if you break them someone will say "that's against the rules of the game, and the rest of us will stop playing if you don't comply" sounds terrible.

> someone will say "that's against the rules of the game, and the rest of us will stop playing if you don't comply" sounds terrible.

And yet, that’s how the USD is going to lose its reserve currency status in the next few decades, if not considerably sooner.

That’s an example of lowered trust, not of the other players leaving the planet (or persuading the US to do so).

Agreeing to a shared ledger system is absolutely a game. See Conway for details.

Fair enough, I was thinking of the game as ‘risk irl’ but if it’s just a game of Shared Ledger then they absolutely can/will leave.

Backstabbing in Risk or Catan is generally pretty obvious, though. It's more like, "Sorry, I need Australia." It's generally clear from the state of the game that it is headed there.

In Diplomacy, it's a matter of choosing which of your friends to backstab. In a three way dynamic, it's basically two friends deciding that if the three of you crash in the mountains, they are eating you first.

Dude the World War Over Australia.

Some knock-off editions in Chile actually link...like it's generally called Perú, and I've never seen a map with Antartica, and besides Chile by it's extreme geography causes cartographers serious typographic problems. There was a map recently, a basically honest Mercator projection that replaced every country's territory with its name. It worked great, except for a mysterious country called CHILE CHILE CHILE CHILE CHILE. Broke the nomenclature completely.

Depends. I had many great risk games where trough game actions I made people believe I had a different objective to what I had, only to pivot at 3/4 of the game and win because my goals where undefended. It requires a bit of luck with cards and a well executed strategic tempo to play the combinations when the other sides are weak and cannot immediately do a combination back, but still.

> The point of these games is to be a bastard.

I guess you never play poker because you don't like to bluff. Or you've never faked a pass in basketball before taking a shot. Or you and the catcher like to announce when you're going to throw a curveball.

I’m not sure why you’d guess that, stringing somebody along for hours in Risk and then backstabbing them at the crucial moment seems to at least match your suggestions in terms of duplicity, and is the height of glorious bastarddom.

IMHO, Risk is one of the few board games worth playing specifically because it's so engaging. Most of my friends who are "into boardgames" tell me that Risk is a terrible game because it starts fights. But the games they want to play bore me to tears. (I can't even read the manual for Settlers of Catan without dying of boredom, but from what you say maybe I should give it another try.)

I'm definitely one of those "into boardgames" people so take this all with a grain of salt :p -

Risk is definitely a great game and imo people who are into games and don't want to play are saying that because it's 1. long & 2. they've already played it enough to have mostly figured out the strategy

Diplomacy is very good and like risk it has very simple rules, grand stakes of world domination, and actual direct conflict.

Unlike risk, there's small numbers of units, no luck, and you need an ally, ideally multiple allies, to accomplish anything.

If you're looking to get into it I can reccomend text-based turn-a-day style play with strangers on webdiplomacy.com

I can only stomach a game of it every year or two because it's legitimately heartbreaking when someone you've spent two months working with every single day stabs you in the back causing you to not lose the game outright but be a crippled angry husk for the next month, and then lose. Tried it with friends once and it was just too much, even with anonymous strangers it hurts.

Anyways sorry for the ramble :) go risk, and go diplomacy <3

>be a crippled angry husk for the next month, and then lose.

Do people resign in diplomacy? Or do you stick around to try to punish the player who backstabbed you?

It depends on the players, but for how the game is structured you still have a good chance of "winning" (finishing alive with in a draw) even if you're way underpowered, as long as you're friendly and provide some value

It's also bad form to resign even if you have no hope and will be finished off in the next few turns, because it will inevitably favour one of your opponents not to have to worry about you at all.

"Bad form"? In diplomacy? Isn't weak players acting as kingmakers the core of what you should worry about as a player with a shot at victory?

Yes, and it's totally kosher to say "if you stab me on this turn I will order 'all units hold' until the end of the game" - equivalent to resigning.

But it's not OK to irrevocably commit to that decision, by, say, leaving the room and driving home.

I think this is true even in groups that take quite a liberal approach to gamesmanship and what might be cheating in other games: intentionally submitting illegal orders, peeking at other players' orders, etc. I don't know how to reconcile this logically other than by saying the game only works when all players are trying to win. Some would go further and say the game only works when most or all players are trying for a solo victory, since if you can be certain several players are happy with a 3 or 4-way draw that will always be the outcome.

From what I’ve seen, the main complaint from board game enthusiasts about Risk is that the dice rolling is too random (I don’t really agree with this, the whole point of the game is to control your level of risk, there it is right in the name, so if your plan hinges on good rolls it is just a bad plan. But I digress).

I think most people who are really into board games must have a general ability to separate in game behavior from normal behavior.

Actually I think there is a different phenomenon with Risk, for many years it was one of the few board games with any aspect of strategy or conflict that would be played by people who weren’t totally into board games (I mean excluding the super serious games like Chess and friends). So there are some people out there who aren’t really into boardgames generally (some of whom don’t have the requisite ability to detach their ego from a game), but are “into” Risk specifically and can get uncomfortably intense about it.

Catan is pretty good IMO. There’s a general disagreement I think between rules-purists and people who want to play fast-and-loose with the rules. The problem is that technically you always have to exchange cards to trade — so, technically it is allowable to extort people with your soldiers and the robber, but you have to at least set up a sham trade for it which adds some annoying friction; it is more fun if you say “giving cards away for free is fine” and allow an economy of extortion to flourish. And anyway if somebody doesn’t say “I’ll give you a sheep if you go get me a beer” is it really Catan? If you played it with some rules sticklers, give it another try IMO.

Risk was a preferred game both while I was in school and for some time afterwards in our ski house, etc. It definitely appealed to people who weren't broadly into board games--and certainly not hardcore war games.

I always liked it. There are some potentially annoying dynamics like how cards dominate so much in the end game and basically force you to go for it at some point.

I've played Catan on a tablet. It's OK but I seem to keep coming back most to Carcassonne for that general class of game.

Risk's much improved by goal-oriented or score-based gameplay variants, which tend to feature as the standard ruleset in newer versions and derivatives (Risk 2210, SPQRisiko, et c) for good reason. Conquer-the-world takes too long for a game that tends to eliminate half its players early on.

I can't stand Risk because Risk rewards inactivity. It is almost never optimal in Risk to attack another player (although limited skirmishes are fine), because even a successful assault will badly damage your own forces leaving you vulnerable. The way to win Risk is to convince other players to attack each other and then clean up in the aftermath. This is ok for players that are new to the game because they'll actually attack each other (they don't know any better). But experienced players will almost never attack, resulting in a stalemate.

This is meta dependent, too, though. If you are not attacking and also not sending the right signals to the board, you might be quickly carved up by the other players jockeying for 12 territories.

If you like risk you should try Kemet and Scythe. I find the combat of Kemet much better and the overall mechanics of Scythe much more rewarding. Scythe is probably too mechanically heavy for your style (it almost always requires a playthrough before you get it and has a more involved rulebook) but I mention it just because it is by far the best dudes-on-a-map game I have ever played, primarily because of how it does a fantastic job capturing the prisoners dilemma of investing in guns vs butter for your nation.

For what it's worth, personally I think Catan and Risk are both very mediocre games, especially for their popularity.

I think the main factors are

- Unlike with Risk, Catan or Monopoly, if you lose a game of Diplomacy you can’t blame bad luck, as there is zero luck involved. The only ones you can blame are the other players and yourself.

- because it’s multi-player, you can easily get beaten by players that, in your opinion, played weaker than you (“I was doing great until they decided to all go against me”)

- There’s no way to really play the game without investing serious attention.

> there is zero luck involved

I consider decision making under uncertainty well within the purview of luck. There's no luck in tennis, but do I scramble back to the middle of the court, or do I bet my opponent will wrong foot me?

This is true, there is emergent chance from being a simultaneous moves game, and from being a game with more than 2 players. You can totally win or lose from luck in Diplomacy.

Settlers of Catan is in many respects not a very good game, because many of its mechanics are zero or negative-sum, with a heavy helping of RNG.

This creates a lot of opportunities for kingmaking and spiteful plays from people who are not able to win, but are able to make sure that you lose. And the worst part is that you're often forced into these situations through no fault of your own.

Diplomacy allows for all of the same plays, but as the player, you have way more agency about both getting into, and getting out of them. It makes the adversarial alliance-and-dealmaking part first and foremost.

I didn’t generally experience that. From what I saw, generally everyone gangs up on the person in the lead, if they are getting close to victory (this seems like a fair and obvious thing to do). So, part of the game is hiding how close you are until nobody can stop you. Hiding your strength is part of pretty much every strategy game with more than 2 players…

Is it a perfect game? No. But it is pretty good. And let’s not give Risk and Catan the Seinfeld treatment — sure there are better games… made in response to their perceived deficiencies!

Diplomacy is quite a bit different because you 100% win by being the nicest asshole. Past a small mechanical threshold, there really is no way to make it up in strategy or luck, it is only the interpersonal relationships and convincing that wins games. That, coupled with the fact that the game takes a long time and encourages a lot of communication, means the recipe to get invested and blur the boundary between game actions and lies people told you to your face and got you to trust them, can be very unlike risk. Finding out your friends can lie and manipulate you can be like finding out Santa clause isn't real.

What!? Santa Clause isn't real?

Whoops haha. It is the best Tim Allen movie though.

You may be surprised that some people play board games assuming some kind of "fair play" or "play with fun in mind" rule is implicit. They may get very pissed off if you "ruin" a game by taking every single advantage you can according to the rules.

[EDIT] Risk and Catan also have what are sometimes regarded as straight-up design flaws that can cause "zombie players" who stick around for most/all of the game but, very early on, no longer have any chance of winning. In both cases pretty much the only entertaining thing left to do is to be a prick to other players and try to play "kingmaker" by causing the second-place player to overtake the first-place one. Often, in Catan, if you're that badly screwed you don't really even have a way to do that much. This leaves the zombie player having a pretty bad time just about no matter what, and can leave other players upset if the zombie player stopped playing to win and started playing just to mess with other players. Risk, especially played in the (really, really not great, as much as I liked it when I was 10 years old) world-conquest mode, also has a problem with very long games and early player elimination, in addition to sometimes generating hopelessly-screwed-but-not-technically-out-yet players.

I've had the inverse happen to me, not playing optimally upsetting someone. Playing the DC superhero deck-building game at a card shop with some friends and a stranger asked to join, he already knew how to play.

Well I didn't stop another player from getting one of the final Power Ring cards and he flipped the F!&%$ out. "How could you not block her! She's guaranteed to win on her next turn now! You suck at this game!" Bro, I'm just trying to power up my batman. It's not a very competitive game.

Needless to say we asked him not to join in our next round, "that's fine, I don't want to play with a bunch of noobs."

> Well I didn't stop another player from getting one of the final Power Ring cards and he flipped the F!&%$ out. "How could you not block her! She's guaranteed to win on her next turn now! You suck at this game!" Bro, I'm just trying to power up my batman. It's not a very competitive game.

Ohhhhh yeah, there's "expert" players who hate when others don't play "correctly". You even see it in poker with pros getting really mad when someone wins with an "incorrect" play (among actual pros this can be a sign of cheating, but some of them still get mad when non-pros do it).

Some of these like to try to "puppet" other players into doing the right thing, and my god, just... please don't. A helpful pointer or three after a play or after the game is great. The odd "uh oh, if so-and-so gets X on their next turn, it's all over!" said to no one in particular can be OK in many games. Telling people what to do while they're playing, more than very occasionally, is awful though.

I do kinda get it, it can be frustrating when you play with someone who gives the game to another player who shouldn't have won on that turn if the other'd made the obviously-correct play, but that's just part of playing a game with a mixed-skill set of players and you gotta roll with it.

Different players have different mental "lines that shouldn't be crossed". I play Civ 6 cloud games with friends from college who now live around the world. (No turn timer, you get a Steam notification when it's your turn). Sometimes someone will spend literal weeks on a turn trying to make agreements for war declarations or for world-congress votes.

The time that crossed the line: Poland wanted to declare war on Greece, no one else wanted to get involved on either side, and it was a pretty even match between them.

A friend not involved in this game was visiting family in the same city as the Greece-player, so we knew he'd be dropping by to visit him too. Poland-player told the "neutral" friend: if Greece-player shows you his civ game, take a picture of the screen when he's not looking and message it to Poland-player.

Well he did it, Poland declared war, and his knowledge of the position of troops lead to him winning the war.

"How did you know I didn't have any troops in my southern cities?" And Poland told him how he knew. It didn't end the friendship but there was about a month of not talking to any of us. When he cooled down there was a long meeting over whether that was cheating or "All is fair in Love and Civ". We could never come to a real agreement, 3 in favor of cheating, 3 in favor of dastardly but legal. But we now have an explicit rule of no screen sharing of any kind.

I mean that’s clearly cheating, not worth blowing up a relationship over but still annoying.

Clearly cheating? I would call it classic espionage

We played a live-action version of Diplomacy in my high school mock UN club.

Each person was part of a team and had a role. I was the Chancellor of Germany.

If an assassin from another team was able to get alone with me, without any of my countrymen, and show me a card saying she was an assassin, the Chancellor of Germany would be killed during the weekly meeting and, not having a Chancellor, not get to make any moves on the board for that week's turn. They would instead be distracted by determining the new Chancellor. If the assassin had been caught, her country's treachery would be revealed, cementing any of their opponents in alliance.

It was an awfully fun thing to be doing on the side, between classes and during free periods, but it'd be wildly impractical in an environment with less proximity!

Our mock UN group was weirder than I realized at the time. Our faculty advisor requires that we each speak in one of the 6 languages of the UN likely to be spoken by whatever country we were representing, and he'd simultranslate into English. Somehow it didn't occur to me at the time to ask why a suburban physics teacher was fluent in those six languages.

I disagree that it's cheating (I was in the "all is fair" camp). These games of ours extend outside the boundaries of the executable, and that was agreed upon before starting. The only hard rule we ever established (before this incident) was that you couldn't make deals across different games. We tend to have several cloud-games active at once, so nothing like "I'll give you wine in the 4 player game if you give me ivory in the 6 player game".

Is all really fair? Would it be OK to install a virus on a player’s computer to see their screen for example?

Well not anymore that we have a no screen sharing rule in place, but before that yes it would be. It would have to be a virus you made and not something actively malicious in other ways. And you'd want to build in some detection that they're running Civ 6, as stealing their credit cards or spying on their private browsing would be unrelated to civ and crossing a real line. They could just as well do that to me. Unspoken rules also dictate you tell the truth when they ask "How did you know?". That would probably lead to another group meeting about no viruses. The disbelief of "you really did THAT?!" Is part of the fun. But there's no real harm done. Getting a friend to take a picture of your screen is conniving, but it's not harmful outside of the game world.

The hard part would be tricking them into installing something you've sent them, since we all live more than 500 miles from each other.

Interesting. I don’t think I’d enjoy that. It seems like it would give an advantage to people who would are most willing to push the boundaries of what exactly is considered fair play. I prefer a vigorous competition with obvious in/out of game boundaries. But, of course, that’s just me. I’m certainly not here to tell you and your friends not to enjoy things!

It might not be the immediate end of a friendship but if someone’s willing to cheat in a game like this, it’s a strong signal that they’re untrustworthy in general and a potential threat. You might occasionally keep an acquaintance like this but at the very least you’d know to sandbox them and watch your step.

"All is fair in Love and Civ" is a common variant of the default rules. It introduces the "your box has been pwned" victory/loss condition.

Is this “all’s fair” stance an actual accepted thing? If so, what are the limits on it, can I assassinate someone? Start an actual war to cause a player to resign? Blow up their planet? Clearly there’s a tacit assumption of some boundary around the game.

It's not something you should do with random people, but we've all been best friends for over 10 years now, we usually know each others' boundaries. And the tv show "The League" was something we all had in mind as inspiration when starting this.

I hope it isn't a real thing! I was being facetious.

Yea, it's one thing to drop a SORRY card on your wife. It's another to lie to her for 2 solid hours and then stab her in the back in the end, expected or not.

I'm with bee_rider, the point of the games is what you just said, so why so surprised?

To be good you really have to build someone's trust and then break it. That's the thing-- people think well if we all go in not trusting each other, who is going to be mad? To be good at that game is to be able to get a friend or a stranger to really trust you.

I agree with the gp and the other responders that however much other games might seem like they involve "being a bastard", Diplomacy is entirely another level. Describing exactly how is the challenge.

Let me try: The games' mechanic mean that everyone is just fighting for territory, those who intelligently cooperate will defeat others. So in this situation, the most effective strategy is cooperating intelligently early in the game and betraying your allies mid-game. The insidious thing about the situation is that if you're playing among friends, the natural way to cooperate to leverage the trust you already have with your friends. And so what any winner does is be themselves, use the rapport they have with their to get cooperation but be just a little less trustworthy than their friends expect. That is where the tendency to break friendships appears.

I don't play those games much, because they tend to spill out into the next game/real world. It's not that someone will feel betrayed and have hurt feelings, it's that it's a perfectly sensible strategy to have the next game in mind, or to involve existing real-world relationships. I prefer games that are over when they're over.

That said, when I have played such games, because my group wanted to play them, I've had a policy of just not lying or making promises. I may say things like "that doesn't seem like it would benefit me does it, because then B will surely just toss me out of the lifeboat next turn", and of course NOT speak up when someone makes a wrong assumption to my benefit. It feels like I've won more than my fair share of those games still.

If you want all these things and exponential growth, check out Neptune's pride: https://np.ironhelmet.com/ for basically "diplomacy in space with a few extra dimensions". I haven't played in a few years (it was great at the beginning of the pandemic), but it was a lot of "fun" in the same way that diplomacy is "fun". Except with a space theme and a lot of anxiety waking up at 2am hoping your fleet arrives at an empty star system and doesn't get immediately obliterated.

Fair warning: I played and won my first round of NP when I discovered it ~11 years ago. It required unreasonable amounts of being willing to let the game take over my life at arbitrary hours for a couple of weeks, and a couple of strategic betrayals. I don't regret it, but it was a major commitment as far as games go.

The last time we played this at the company, we lost maybe two weeks of productivity over the game period. I needed to run polyphasic sleep with 2 h naps throughout but my secret alliance got to the end game strongest and then it was a vicious little fight, and one of us took it.

IMO a better game is subterfuge, because it allows you to schedule commands into the future, which means you don't have to wake up at ungodly hours of the night to execute a command.

"Oh yeah, I really enjoyed Diplomacy. It was weird though because I did punch my very good friend in the face because of it." - My coworker.

I think some (not all) of that factor is that, being a 3+ player game, it makes explicit some friendship group dynamics that were previously implicit, and potentially not known to all the involved parties.

Ugh, people bringing in outside-the-game relationships to the game itself will ruin Diplomacy. "Tom and Jim never betray each other, and if one is in a position to sacrifice themselves to give the other the win, they always will" is how you get a group to never ever let Diplomacy hit the table after the first couple times. Plus a bunch of other games.

Folks who play like that are game-group poison. Hell, they can even make RPGs a lot less fun with that crap.

I feel the same about people who favor their romantic partners.

Maybe when they're new to the game or a new relationship, go a little easy. Ok.

But any longer and that's lame.

Yeah, I considered putting it in my post but ultimately cut it, but it is indeed often romantic couples who have this problem. Not always, but often it's couples. I think good-natured competition is typically a part of an ordinary friendship, even a very close one (Impro's take on status-games, and friendship being largely defined as a relationship in which you can play such games safely and without "real" stakes, probably factors into this) is probably why this happens less often with friends. Though, certain friend pairs, if you get them together in a group of people they don't know, they'll do this too.

I was going more for the “Bob is going to blargh, he always blarghs when he gets flustered like when he blarghed at the thinger last year” sort of dynamic that people don't necessarily otherwise talk about. Nobody becomes a completely blank slate when they sit down, and some tendencies are something you might take advantage of in a game, where you would compensate and allow for it in real life. And those tendencies might be something the other party is sensitive about, but because it never came up otherwise…

There was an amazing profile of the Diplomacy competitive scene: https://grantland.com/features/diplomacy-the-board-game-of-t...

Although I find the fallout has been rather overstated. I'm certain it can end badly for unsuspecting participants - but I've played lots of Diplomacy (and even hosted games with a cash pot for the winners) and it has never ended in fallout. Just make sure everyone knows what they are getting into.

It's a really, really fun game that more people should try at least once.

Agreed that Diplomacy is tremendous fun, as long as you have 7+ hours to spare and a house with lots of separate rooms for private conversations to take place in. But the important thing to keep in mind is that the only way to win the game is by first making alliances with other players by promising you would never betray them, and then second by strategically betraying your allies before they can betray you. If everyone goes into the game knowing that betrayal is the point of the game and that they will be stone-cold lied to by their dearest friends, then there's no hard feelings. But if you're a brand new player and this metagame isn't properly expressed to you, then it's natural for fallout to ensue.

> 7+ hours to spare

It only takes this long if you don't use a round timer and you don't allow shared victories. Even with new players we usually wrap up the game in 4-5 hours (people will start getting eliminated around hour 2 - so usually we have a "loser room" with other games and stuff to do).

You can also do it online with a turn a day (I ran an office Diplomacy League this way).

It's worth noting that you can play the game completely openly and honestly. We have had complete victories where the winner never once backstabbed anyone (he was just a very shrewd negotiator). It's just pretty rare because the more honest you are all game, the more reward you will get for a well placed backstab.

Also, my advice, have a cash pot. Even if it's just $20 a player. You'll only get players who are actually competitive. Also, weirdly, fewer hard feelings - I guess knowing you got betrayed for money stings less than knowing you got betrayed for fun.

Do you allow negotiation over how the pot is split for shared victories? Like can a weak player help the leader win in exchange for a small cut of the winnings?

Exactly.

Usually I set it up like "The pot is $350. The game is over as soon as all remaining players can unanimously agree on how to split it up."

It also adds much more drama to the end game. If you are down to a small couple of territories and basically out of the game, you might still have a lot of power to negotiate your way into the winner's circle.

Are there games similar to Diplomacy that you can play in 1-1.5 hours, over discord video chat?

There are a lot of negotiation/tactical games (Game of Thrones board game comes to mind), but they all can be equally long and none have the simplicity of Diplomacy.

IMHO, the fun of Diplomacy is sneaking in little side conversations and hiding in a corner to tell a secret. In person, it's very fun. A better approximation online would be to play asynchronously (like a turn a day) via a website.

In high school our math department had a long-running match in the teacher’s lounge with one move per day. Many times I remember my calculus teacher coming into class after the lunchtime move SEETHING.

Diplomacy is a perfect game to play one move per day among a group of friends/coworkers. Sadly I never managed to find enough people to get in board and commit to playing a weeks/months-long game

We did it once with a group of coworkers in the same open office room, it was great.

Then I moved to another team in another room and thought I could continue the game as before... Immediately backstabbed by everybody. Bastards.

There are variant maps for fewer players, like this one for 3: https://www.playdiplomacy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=57439

We did this in grad school and even played a one-more-per-week game. Fun, but man did we spend a lot of time negotiating...

The world champion seems to say that the best Diplomacy involves honesty and cooperation. Is he eliding that point toward the end where you use that honesty and cooperation to flip and really screw someone? Or is there more to Diplomacy than just "convince people you're cooperating until the very best time to betray them"?

Anecdotally from prior play, most diplomacy wins have two broad forms:

1. A second place player has fallen behind in a low or no hard betrayal alliance and is no longer capable of a meaningful backstab, and has decided they don’t plan to backstab their partner because through their ongoing cooperation they’re the second biggest player and you’ve had a good game together. They work to cement your win, because picking the winner is often as fun as winning is.

2. Two main players and their side henchmen who are no longer serious contenders are forced into teaming to prevent the other side of the board’s leader alliance from running away with the win. There’s been a massive amount of betrayals and the table is about to have the crucial fight that will collapse one or the others’ line in defense. One disgruntled player who is on the dividing line of both alliances picks the winning coalition by lashing out against the closest player that screwed them over hardest, ruining that side’s coordination. The winning coalition breaks through, then the biggest coalition’s leader backstabs and eats its subordinates for the win.

In both cases, honesty and cooperation primarily decide the winner - either because other players have deemed you “deserving of the win” or “designated winner by dint of having successfully avoided leaving one or more key players disgruntled enough to tip against you”

You _always_ need cooperation in these wins, but you don’t always per se need to backstab people to win. Insofar as you do, those backstabs come in many flavors and often don’t feel stabby, stuff like “I’m just consistently benefiting a little more from our mutual arrangement than you are” or “I have no plan to personally screw you over, but I’m pretty sure Gary is going to do it for me and I’m not gonna stop him.”

> I’m just consistently benefiting a little more from our mutual arrangement than you are

Sounds like Go.

And the most stressful way to play Diplomacy is “one turn per day.” You’ll obsess about it all evening long, then get up and immediately focus on it again!

> Be warned, it is considered to be a game that will end friendships that have lasted for years, and monopoly is considered to be a game that causes less bad feelings.

Well, there is also Machiavelli… ;-)

*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavelli_(board_game)

"Be warned, it is considered to be a game that will end friendships that have lasted for years"

I really don't get why people take this game so personally... it's only a game!

Diplomacy has nothing on the screaming matches I’ve seen and experienced with Chinatown. And you can get there in a fraction of the time required for Diplomacy

I only played one game, and this is accurate.

> An AI may be able to speak like a person but will never be able to hang onto that long burning simmering hatred

Ever heard of Rocco's Basilisk? I am telling you, AIs can hold grudges.

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