Malarame
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Has anyone here ever heard of the boardgame Diplomacy? There\'s a big group of us in my school that play it all the time. I was just wondering if there were any Dip fans here.

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Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
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zex20913
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Nope, never heard of it. What\'s it like?

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ErikH2000
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Malarame wrote:
Has anyone here ever heard of the boardgame Diplomacy? There\'s a big group of us in my school that play it all the time. I was just wondering if there were any Dip fans here.

Man, I\'ve had that game forever and never found anyone to play it with. Just met lots of people that have fond Diplomacy memories but aren\'t into it anymore. The problem might be that one game takes so long. You have to get a group of fairly dedicated people together to play. Or the problem might be that I don\'t hang out with gamers enough.

To this day, after buying the thing, reading the rules, and making several attempts to interest people, I have yet to play one game. My deluxe version of Diplomacy with wooden pieces sits on a shelf, sad as the Velveteen Rabbit.

My next attempt to get into a new paper/board/non-computer game is going to be Deep7\'s Red Dwarf RPG. My girlfriend is an intense Red Dwarf fan and her friend Todd produced the game. She might like it, so there is a tiny chance for me to spend time playing an RPG without alienating Brittany.

-Erik

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Malarame
Level: Master Delver
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Wow, you\'ve never even played a single game? Along with face-to-face games that I play with my friends, we also play email games (right now I\'m Italy in an email game). If you want, next time we start up an email game, you can play too. You\'d have to do all your diploming via email or instant messenger though.

zex20913 wrote:
Nope, never heard of it. What\'s it like?

Diplomacy is a board game where 7 people play 7 Europeon nations and try to, well, kill everyone else. If you\'ve ever played Risk, Diplomacy is a similar in some senses, but nothing is left to chance. It is, without a doubt, the greatest board game ever. If you want to learn more about it, go to http://www.diplomacy-archive.com .

____________________________
Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
-Groucho Marx

Sokko
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Goes on for ages? Sounds a lot like Anacreon: Reconstruction 4021 (just Anacreon for short). It\'s an ancient DOS game written in Pascal I believe, and it\'s set in the future. You have an empire, and you must expand it by conquering worlds and opponents, managing resources, and building starships. It\'s really complicated and the manual/tutorial is a mile long, but it\'s great once you get used to it. Sometimes it\'s annoying because to fit a lot of information on the same screen (the programmer didn\'t seem to like the concept of multiple pages), a million one-, two-, or three-letter abbreviations are used, and it gets hard to remember what stands for what. That aside, it\'s great for bringing out that Machiavellian side of your personality, if you have a lot of time to spare. There is multiplayer, by way of turn-based hot-seat on one computer (although I think there\'s a way to do multiplayer over the internet by using MS Netmeeting). My favorite part is that pretty much all status and questions are stated/asked by your loyal and humble servant whose name is never mentioned, and it\'s fun to be called \"sir\" or \"your highness\" all the time.

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Malarame
Level: Master Delver
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I\'ve played Anacreon, and Dip is nothing like it. I would explaing all the rules, but it\'d be much easier to just point you to the website I posted in an earlier post.

And the games take a long time, but not ages. A face-to-face game could take around 6 or 7 hours, depending on the rules you use.

____________________________
Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
-Groucho Marx

Scott
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Nothing like building up an alliance then stabbing them in the back hehe. I used to play diplomacy a bit and we even set up an email game at work too.

zex20913
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I went to that site, and read the rules. It seems like it would take some getting used to, but also a lot of fun. Talk to me about that next email game...I\'ll probably have to go buy the board though...oh, well. It sounds intriguing enough.

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Scott
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Unfortunately our email games ended when I left that job in 1993 haven\'t played one since. And you really would need the board to play.

I know that compuserve used to have email games going. There is probably something out there on the internet. The interesting things about email games is that it allows many varients like fog of war.

Found a site that looks promising
www.diplom.org

[Edited by Scott on 03-07-2003 at 07:06 AM GMT]

[Edited by Scott on 03-07-2003 at 07:06 AM GMT]

Malarame
Level: Master Delver
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You don\'t need the board to play. Only one of my friends owns a board. Instead, we all use a program called RealPolitik. You can input all the orders and it\'ll even adjudicate for you. The website for it is http://realpolitik.sourceforge.net/ .

I was thinking, if there are enough people interested, we could set up an email game between the people on the forum. We\'d need seven people to play. I would want to play, but if seven people are interested I would sit out. I\'d also be willing to adjudicate. The way it\'d work is that I\'d tell everyone when orders for the next turn are due, and you have until then to email me your orders. After the orders are locked, I would adjudicate and send everyone back the results of the turn. I\'m pretty experienced at adjudicating since I\'m usually the one who does that in the games I play with my friends. So I guess the question is, who\'s interested? First seven people to respond saying they want to play will get in the game. If you want to play, say so and also put your email address in the body of the message. I\'ll email everyone playing once we get enough people.

Of course, this all hinges on the assumption that there are seven people on the forum who\'d want to play.

____________________________
Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
-Groucho Marx

zex20913
Level: Smitemaster

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I\'ll play. I\'m assuming the sourceforge thing lets you see the board? Otherwise it\'d be EXTREMELY difficult. Oh yeah...email:zex20913@yahoo.com

[Edited by zex20913 on 03-07-2003 at 09:07 AM GMT]

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Malarame
Level: Master Delver
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Zex, RealPolitik is a program that shows you the board and lets you move pieces around. Go download it since you\'ll need it to play. I think it comes with instructions for how to use it, but if not I\'ll email you with what all the different things do.

____________________________
Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
-Groucho Marx