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.
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!)
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.
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.
And yet, that’s how the USD is going to lose its reserve currency status in the next few decades, if not considerably sooner.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
How are you playing it? We've never had a game run over 4 hours.
Yuck. I can not stress enough how important a timer is to play Diplomacy in person.
If you think Diplomacy is long and exhausting, wait till you get a load of Nomic with a bunch of enthusiastic players.
> 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."
[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.
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."
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.
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
Do people resign in diplomacy? Or do you stick around to try to punish the player who backstabbed you?
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.
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.
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.
For what it's worth, personally I think Catan and Risk are both very mediocre games, especially for their popularity.