Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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