 So this weekend, this past weekend, we invited a number of people over to play a board game from 1959. Mm-hmm. Board game called Diplomacy, a game... Incredibly famous game, I'd always known it existed. I would argue it is not famous but infamous. It is both. Much like Illuminati. It is a game that many people... It's not obscure. Will refer to as the friend breaker that I think most gamers have heard of but few have actually ever played. It's a game that people talk about playing. They talk about that friend who played it. Maybe they saw a game of it at their local gaming con. I have known maybe ten people in my life, including the five people from this weekend, who have actually played a game of Diplomacy to conclusion. Yeah, I've never actually played Diplomacy before but I knew, you know, I had known that it was a game that existed. Uh... I had played once and I didn't finish that game at our way. I knew generally what it was about but I didn't actually know the rules specifically until very recently. So... Like months ago. The internet said that the game takes about four hours to play. Wikipedia says the game takes at minimum four hours to play. Alright. And the box... What does the box say? Does not say. Alright, that's weird. The box usually gives a time estimate. This is a game from 1959. Heh heh heh. I- it's- right now it's put out by Wizards of the Coast. Used to be Avalon Hill. It was designed by Alan B. Calhamer. I don't know anything about him and I'm not gonna talk about the history of the game. Diplomacy... Is a game that you've gotta really be committed to if you wanna play. Diplomacy is an ass old game with ass old rules. Yeah, it is clearly- you know, it is not elegantly. I mean, some things about it are clever, right? Uh, but mostly the game is not elegant. It has many flaws. The rules have many gotchas and erratas. And it is not a smooth production and by any means. Now it seemed simple until the second round of the game when immediately everyone just made moves that created this circular clusterfuck that took us like 20 minutes to unravel only to determine that the end result was nothing. Well, we think it was nothing. I still can't get it clarified. I wanna play again by mail, but- I wanna play again by computer- Before we talk about how diplomacy works, it's- on the surface level, it is a simulation of a World War I-esque conflict, like a Franco-Prussian war, some- something in that era. Yeah, and all the players are basically, you know, leaders of country- Of great powers. Dictators. Great powers. So, you know, Britain, France, Austria, Turkey, Russia, turns out none of my friends know what the fucking Russian flag looks like except me. I do now. Yeah, you do now. Everyone does now. Everyone- I was like, alright, you think you know all the old flags, right? What's this one? France? Nope. Come on, it's red, white, and blue! Doesn't anyone know that the white is in the middle to symbolize that the royalty was splitting the nation in two? No, well, I do now, but yeah, my problem was that it's like, you know, from- you know, most of my life, it's just- The Russian flag was not a sickle. The Soviet flag was the flag that was- Yes, the Soviet flag, the Soviet union- I know, because God- I knew that the Soviet flag was not the Russian flag, but it's just I rarely saw the Russian flag. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And nobody knew Austria or Italy or anything, it was kind of amazing. Yeah, I used to know flags more than I know them now, actually, if you believe me. But the game is actually a very apt simulation of the diplomacy surrounding World War One, because we played for five hours and 28 minutes, and at the end of that time, it was a five-way draw. Yep. And everyone was dissatisfied with the result, and basically saying, if we played more rounds, I would have invaded X, leading directly into World War Two. Alright, so basically, the way the game works, and the thing that's clever about it, right, is that everyone has units, and every unit is worth exactly one. It's not like risk where you can get a number as game, like, ah-ha, I've got 40, attacking your five, I win. It's- you got one. You can have at most one unit per space, and no army has a power different from one. Yeah. So, if I attack Scott in Silesia, and he's in Silesia, it's one on one. I bounce back, nothing happens. Yep. No one gets defeated, no one gets destroyed, nothing. Now, what he could do is he could attack with two, which would then eject me, but it doesn't kill me. It just makes me retreat to a different open country nearby. The only way I would die is if there was no open country nearby, and I was trapped, then I would die. And the thing is, you start the game with only, what, three units, and Russia gets four. Russia gets four, so you have barely any units. And you control supply centers in your home country, and if you control one at the end, you know, you, to every other turn, you'll get units so that you, or lose units so that you have a number of units equal to the number of supply centers you control, but said reinforcements can only come out of where you originally started. So even if I control 17 of those fuckers, I can only get new units in my home country. Yeah, it's pretty, basically the game makes it such that unless you're already dominating, like unless I've already taken someone over, and now I've got two countries worth of guys, my ability, my ability to influence the game just based on my own decisions of where I'm gonna move my units and what orders I'm gonna give them is basically nil. You can't do anything on your own because you have so few units and they're all equally powerful to everyone else's units. You can't do anything. So you can't win the game just by sitting there making decisions like you do in every other board game. So here's where the game departs radically from what most people expect from a war game because it is really a negotiation game, a diplomacy game, hence the title diplomacy. One, everybody has, you have 15 minutes between every turn to talk. Go walk away, talk to your friends somewhere else. You can do whatever you want. Go out on the balcony, go into the bathroom, go outside, SMS someone, doesn't matter. At the end of that time, before the end of that time, you have to have written down the orders for all your moves and put them in the hat. Or box or whatever. The orders are all revealed and done simultaneously after the fact. Now, secondary to this, there are no binding agreements in the game. The game is a non-cooperative game. You can make all the agreements in the world, but nothing binds you to them. You can write up treaties, you can pretend to have a UN, you can do all sorts of stuff. We did form a League of Nations and had two meetings in the context of the game to decide the future of Europe after the inevitable horrid stalemate until I eventually betrayed my allies, Russia and Turkey. Yeah, asshole. You deserved it. Completely ineffectual, Turkey. I wasn't going to ineffectual. You were completely ineffectual. I wasn't ineffectual. I was very good. No, you weren't. You were terrible. But the other big thing about the game, aside from what I just told you, is that the only way to really get anywhere is to coordinate your moves very exactly. Yes, for example, let's say I want to attack Rem here, right? And I'm attacking him from Constantinople to, you know, Budapest, right? And that's the move I'm going to make. And I need some help from my buddy in Russia. My buddy in Russia wants to support my attack on Budapest. He has to have a unit adjacent to the place Scott is going to attack. And he has to script, not attack, but support. And then the unit he is supporting and where it is going. So on his sheet, in order for him to actually help me win and attack Rem and hurt Rem, he has to write on his sheet, unit in whatever place he's in, supports attack from Constantinople to Budapest. That's he has to write that, which means he needs to know that I am going to make an attack from Constantinople to Budapest. Which means I need to tell him that. And he needs to, so now I'm giving him information. That means I need to not lie to him and he needs to actually be faithful with our alliance and go through with it. He already talked to me and said, look, I'm really on your side. Let's eliminate everyone else. Let's figure out. Yeah, let's figure out where is Scott's either going to attack in this place or that place. I'll pretend I'm going to help him. We'll figure out which one of those two places is, then we'll know to support the defense of that place. No, forget that. I'll support the attack. I'll support an attack to cut off the support and dislodged supporting unit, thus causing the attack to bounce back and messing up all your plans. We have to coordinate all that in the span of the 15 minutes. And if you do that to cut off the support, it'll make it look like that Russia did it was trying to help me. And it's complicated. If I'm trying to coordinate this with my ally and my allies trying to fake out Scott. I mean, you only got 15 minutes and if I go off to talk to him on the balcony all secret like Scott's going to know something's up. Yeah, you can just look around the room and you know, you've got all the stuff that's meta in other games, right? Like, oh, I see how you're holding your cards. That means you, that stuff is meta in most games in diplomacy that is the game. At one point I wrote down, I will betray Scott this turn and I put it in the hat and I was going to hand the hat to the people I needed to communicate this to who were, you know, were supposedly on the opposite alliance and that was the best way I could come up with to not let Scott and Richard know that I was about to betray the everliving fuck out of them. Yeah. One time people tried to attempt to hide the hat. That was, that was clever. That was clever and hilarious. Yeah, it didn't work. I mean, the rules are if you just, if you're not back you don't put your orders in all your units hold they just sit there. Yeah, I mean, my orders were complete but by the time ran out and just because the hat wasn't there that doesn't, that doesn't mean that, you know, you can't just like punch the guy. Like, yeah, that was the thing I was thinking. I was like, why don't we just punch people and tie people down and it's like, well, the thing is if you do that then the game really is just doesn't, it's not diplomacy more just boxing. It's who is the fifth strongest man on Europe Island. Yes, you sort of have to be like, all right, nobody can break real laws while playing the game because otherwise it just breaks down and there's no point. You know, you're not going to, you can't lock someone in a room or knock someone unconscious or drug someone. Because the final important aspect of the game is that at any time, any, all the players know there's two aspects aspect number one is anytime any player can quit. Yeah, you can quit which is something we talked about in our panel. Losing should be fun. It's within the rules. You can games have an ability for a player who's not having fun to just leave. You can just leave if it's too much for you. If you're, if you're tired of it, maybe you got hosed and you're ineffectual and no one likes you anymore and you don't have it in you to try to make someone. You know, it's like, I'm not powerful enough so no one even wants my help, right? And there's really nothing I can do to help them. And I'm so weak that I can't be effectual on my own. I might as well quit. You can quit gracefully. The game allows for it. But you don't want to because the only way to end the game is either one person has to control 18 supply centers. You start with three. That is basically impossible. Unless other people just let you or if you have an ally, you roll and you keep playing for a long time, you could eventually get there. But the instruction book even says the official instruction book says if you win that way, you are playing it wrong. Or you're playing it right and all your friends are stupid. That's possible. So the way to end the game really is a vote among all players who have any number of military units still on the board. Even if you have one unit left on the board, you get the same number of votes as everyone else. On a unanimous vote, you end the game and everyone who voted shares the draw. Everyone who did not vote because they were not on the board loses. So even if you've got one unit left and some other guy has 17, another guy has seven. Basically everyone has 17 or less and you have one and you all vote. You win just as much as those guys with 17. Now we were playing, you understand, for the championship belt, which is a thing now in the crew dating back to the time of the vision and the bamboo. That's correct. And we ended up taking a picture of all five of us holding the belt. And what really happened was five and a half hours into the game, you know, we come down to an alliance of three and an alliance of two and the alliance of two was doing really well, but they couldn't, they didn't have the momentum to push through and beat the alliance of three, even though they had a huge advantage. Due to early game stuff. Yeah. Well, we actually, you know, operation invade Italy, probably would have succeeded in significantly damaging the, uh, the alliance of two. If you hadn't betrayed me on that vital turn, but you could have waited one more turn and we both would have been invaded. Italy was going very well. You realize that France's operation invade Austria was about to begin and had I followed through to I would have taken Italy and lost Austria, thus losing my ability to make new units. That's fine and dandy by Turkey. Yeah. And then you would have lost an ally and you would have been done. No, cause down it, once I, once we had Italy, we could have then retaken Austria on the next turn. I don't think you could have. You were thinking too short term. Also, I was pretty much the most powerful person in my triple alliance because of the nature of the game. I had significant power. I just couldn't extend my power. But I had more units in a more centralized place and a more secure border. The only real threat to me was France. I had all I've actually had more units than you at many points in the game. My problem was early on in the geography of Turkey made it extremely difficult to exert my force over great distance. You know what? Early on in the game, when you had more units than me, that's what I was allied with you. Yeah. And I was okay with that. Notice how soon as I had more units than you betrayal. Yeah, jerk. Part of it was that Russia was doing the best possible thing. It just turned out that Russia and England were very expertly countering each other. Yeah. And they're basically at a stalemate. Meanwhile, Turkey was at a stalemate coming around Greece and I was at the stalemate. France was incredibly too strong and me and Rim had to team up to even hold him back. And we were starting to make a little bit of progress pushing him back. But it was so slow. And in the process of doing so, we almost took Italy if we had one more turn. But in order to take that Italy, Rim was going to leave his Austria open. And you realize that the double alliance, the allies, had been constantly offering me great benefits to turn over power to them and join their alliance. Yeah. But basically that was another problem, right? Is that, you know, England and France teamed up a hundred percent had absolutely no betrayal. As they, as is the smart thing to do in this game. Yeah. They were a complete lock together. Absolutely. Never betrayed each other. They left their backs open to each other and not once did they attack each other. Indifatigable. Now, you know why I betrayed you? Because remember two rounds before that we had our brilliant plan. It was our last ditch. I had that one army that was going to try to scootle under the bottom of Europe and pop out behind him and just conquer like all of Africa. And it didn't work. Yeah. That didn't work. Yeah. So then I betrayed you. Yeah. But they, the two of them were an equal counterbalance for the three of us. So I decided that if I joined them, we could roll you and then the game would end and the three of us would share victory. Uh-huh. Here's where the fundamental problem with the game of diplomacy, the two, two fundamental problems. Three. A fanatical devotion to the... Comfy chair. Problem the one. At minimum, not at minimum, at maximum, every turn takes 15 minutes plus resolving. So about 20 minutes total. Yep. Say I had joined them in their alliance and is three on two, the three strongest players against the two weakest players. Victory is assured. But it was going to take us about four to five turns to actually get into a position to eliminate Turkey and then Russia, which would then you could have voted unanimously for a three way victory, which would have been preferable to a five way victory. So five turns to take out Turkey, two more to finish off Russia. Seven turns times 20 minutes because Scott and Richard, Russia and Turkey being intelligent rather than quitting if their utility is to share victory would wait 14 minutes and 59 seconds every round to turn in their orders of support, support hold. Yeah, exactly. And it would have been incredibly difficult because of the geography involved for you to actually break those support holds. No, it would have been pretty easy because there weren't enough adjacent territories. Yeah, there were. You'd have to take them pretty much one or two at a time. Yep. So you can take like five in a big sweep no matter how close the problem. War wearing is simulated brilliantly in this game. War wearing is actually happens because at five and a half hours we were actually literally wary of the war extremely. The people who are winning voted to share victory with Scott because it wasn't worth another two or three hours of our lives to destroy him. I mean, it would have been worth it if it was going to be like, you know, someone who was close to scoring an individual victory on their own might have been worth it to spend another hour to eliminate all remaining four players could have. But to get basically two fifths more victory divided amongst three people. So two fifths divided. So two eighths an extra court 25% of I don't know is not a lot of extra victory that you're getting. But at the same time, this is part of the reason why I think the game is in many ways brilliant. It just by us playing played out almost exactly the way World War one played. Absolutely. It fought to a stalemate. Eventually everybody gave up. There was there were some nominal winners and nominal losers, but every single nation thought in their minds if I just had the chance to continue the war, I would totally win. Well, World War two is coming up soon. Don't worry. Yep. This is a sequel. So the other thing that is second problem with the game. Yep. The rules suck are just it took us about a turn to run into very difficult to resolve situations and in the instruction book. They have all these different examples of things that can happen that might cause, you know, conflicts where you won't know what to do. And it tells you what to do. If they happen, the thing that happened immediately was not in those rules. And I was like, what the fuck? There are so many possible orad is here and ways to handle weird situations. How did we so quickly in our first game on the second turn get a weird situation that is not in the book? What the fuck? And we didn't know what to do. So we just sort of, you know, sort of figured we should, you know, let it be a standstill because it's sort of made sense. And it probably that may have been very well, the correct thing to do in that situation. But I can't be a hundred percent sure. And that drives me crazy in a board game where I am trying to figure out the rules and I don't have a solid answer. But it's an asterisk on the whole thing. It's like, oh, oh my God. But to be fair, every gamer should play. If you're a board gamer, you should play diplomacy. You've got to know if you can find people who play with you have got to get friends to play, get a full seven people schedule a day and be like, we're playing this motherfucking game. Now, a lot of people say it's like the friend killer. Someone won't be friends with you blah, blah, blah. And in a way that is, you know, at first, you know, before I played the game, I was like, all right, you know, anyone who thinks that obviously is such a shallow person. I mean, you say the same thing about Illuminati. Yeah, exactly. You know, I thought it was like, okay, you say it as a joke, you know, but it's like I was playing the game. It was, you know, at times I was a little bit grumbly. It's just like, uh, you know, just that was actually like, I think you felt a little betrayed because no one saw my betrayal coming, which I did point out actually during that turn while, you know, I noticed that that was one turn where you had not let me see any part of your order sheet. And also you were sort of looking around and poking and not saying much. So I was like, I was guessing. I'm like, oh, is he going to betray right now? So when you did, I wasn't at all surprised. I was just sort of like, oh, he did. Yep. Had to happen, but it wasn't that, you know, I was grumbly before then. I just because the game makes you feel grumbly because you're so ineffective all the time that it's not that, you know, it just France and Britain were terribly effective. They were, but I was, we weren't. So it just, the game can put you in an unpleasant mood very easily. I would, I would, I would do think though, it's only a friend killer if you're really not friends to begin with. Yep. And you're really immature and sad. Another thing about the particular game that we played is we only had five people because someone didn't make it. Two ponies didn't show up. So one of the ponies really should have come. You would have had a good time. Yeah. So there are two basically when you don't have, we have six people, right? Only what Germany, Italy's empty. Italy, if you play six players, Italy is neutral and all of its units I think that would have been, that would have been okay. But the major problem was that Germany and Italy were both neutral with a five player game. Would have been fine. Except what happened was the unit, the unified alliance of France and Britain went straight East and just destroyed Italy and Germany and swept them. But meanwhile, Russia and Austria rim, right? They went straight for you. They went straight for me in the bottom right corner, which made it much easier for France and England to come straight to the right unopposed. And there wasn't anything pushing back on them because nobody was playing as Germany or Italy. As a result in over the first two turns, they got significantly more power. No, they got their power. They didn't actually take Germany or Italy in that time. They took it away later. They got all their power from taking Africa and Spain. Yeah, which were completely empty and no one was able to stop them. Maybe some pony had been able to get a fleet out there. How was I supposed to get a fleet out there? I had to use my fleets to defend against you and Russia. You, I went down to get my fleet out there and your jackass attacks from behind kept me from getting out. You might your attack, my attacks from behind because if you had just left your back unopened, I wouldn't have taken it because I'm all honest and not evil. But I need until the third turn, to have my access out to the Adriatic Sea. And this is the thing, the geography of the game is real geography, real geography, which makes it incredibly difficult and painful quite often, you know, and a lot of games geography is often convenient. It's like, all right, you got geography is very convenient. If you're Britain, but no, think of a game like Vinci, right? And Vinci, the geography is often extremely convenient. It rarely causes you trouble, right? It's always like, you know, some is better than others, but it's like, there's a mountain there when you need it to be a mountain. And there's, you know, there's always a good spot, right? In diplomacy, there's only one spot and it's awful all the time. I don't think it's that bad. I think it's just more realistic. It is. It's incredibly realistic. Geography is awful, which is, you know, the other games have maps where the geography is, you know, designed for a game and is not awful. So at least in our game, somewhat ironically, Italy and Germany were partitioned by the greater powers. Hmm. I just found that kind of beautiful in a way. It was really fun as exhausting as it was. It was really fun. And I do want to play it again. I think I would only play. I want to play what has to be seven. It has to be seven. I can't play with the five. That's not going to happen again. I want to play it at least one more time. Also, we do think it's fairest to choose your starting countries randomly, but I really did not like being Turkey. I would have rather have been Turkey than Austria. You probably also would not like to be Austria. I would much rather seven player game. I would love to be Austrian. I would. I would much rather be because I was Germany and Italy and we just go all out. That's possible. I would like to be France or Russia if I had it. I wanted to be Russia or Britain to be honest. Because Britain I might I might I wouldn't mind. You know, we could do this. I do sort of feel though that like Britain is just the opposite Turkey on the. Here's how we do it. Everybody writes down the country they want to be secretly. We reveal them. If no one else wrote the country you wanted, you get it. And then for the people who contend, we set up a system where they can't get the one they wanted. So anyone who wrote down a country that someone else wrote down, they have to write down another country. They can't be the one they just wrote down two seconds ago. Yep. And then we have to have an exception for it comes down to two people coin. Yeah. Yeah, I think that would work pretty well actually. But if it comes down to two people, that means it's two free countries unless they both want the same one, which is maybe unlikely. Who knows? But yeah, definitely I would only play again with seven people. So what I'm going to do one, probably so there aren't all these easy pickings in the worst part. I think what made it more frustrating or is that being turkey? All the easy pickings were not adjacent to me. They were if you'd gotten a fleet out. No, I had to. I would have had to go through you to get to Italy or to knees. That's not. I'm not talking about the easy pickings that were just empty land. I'm talking about the easy pickings of Italy and Germany. They were not that easy, but they weren't you. You were adjacent to them and I couldn't get there. Yeah. And you know what? I didn't have the strength to attack them. Well, France and UK sure did. Yeah, later after they'd already conquered the entire Western world. Yeah. Anyway, well, anyway, yeah. But I think what I'm going to do is I posted a link to the that online diplomacy that looks pretty good. So after I sort out a bunch of Geek Nights work I have to do, I'm going to start up a seven player play by Internet game with like 48 hours for turns or something like something ludicrous. It'll be a long term game where everyone who wants to play can play idly. I think that'll work better than what's that other game we played. Neptune's pride. Oh, yeah. Neptune's pride was a lot of how often do you check it? And it was a lot of numbers. God Johnson always would brilliantly attack people at like three in the morning. Yeah. I mean, that is the one thing about diplomacy, right? Is other games, you know, give you the option to ally or, you know, make deals and things like that, right? And or trade and, you know, like risk or, you know, show guns, samurai swords, show guns. Well, remember, there's two kinds of games. There are cooperative games where deals are a part of the game like Dune. Yeah. And those are not that realistic from a war standpoint. They're only realistic if you're doing like a commerce simulation. But non-cooperative games like risk where there's no way to make a binding deal are more fun and more realistic from certain perspectives. But at the same time, because it's a game and not the real world, everyone's going to get their ass betrayed in the end. Well, the thing with Rick, the thing is, right? So Dune has binding deals, right? Which means that you use the in-game mechanics to enforce your alliances. It is a cooperative game. You don't need to diplomacy. You don't need to actually do real diplomacy stuff, right? You don't need to because it's in the game. The worm comes up, you can ally with someone and you're good. Yeah, it's not really. You know, if you can prove that what you're doing is what you did. Yes. At the same time, risk, while you can make deals free form and risk the same way you do in diplomacy and they're non-binding, you can enforce. Basically, there's a numbers game in risk that beats, that totally dominates any deals that you make. So it doesn't merely matter what deals you make in risk because numbers win. I got 10 friggin' units here. You got one that doesn't, deals don't matter because I can win just with the game mechanics. I don't need to win with dealing. Well, more importantly, it means that if I want to enforce deals, I have to one, be a shrewd diplomat and two, have the ability to enforce the deals or punish people who renege on the deals within the context of the game. Yes. Like if I make a deal with Scott, like we are now a double alliance, we're going to do X and Scott betrays me. I have little choice but to punish him with my own units or convince the rest of the world to help me like sanction him. Yeah, but in diplomacy, right? Because every all units are equals, you can't win with the game mechanics alone and the deals are non-binding. You actually have to legitimately actually convince people in the real world for real in order to make any progress, which few other games have that. Or you have to not convince them but can but have trick them into thinking that you have convinced that you have to convince them when really you know they're going to betray you and you betray them. Basically, by any means necessary, you need to get them to write orders on their order sheet that are the orders that you want them to write on their order sheet, no matter what that means is. And I also know several times multiple people cocked up complicated orders, which is actually pretty accurate to real warfare, especially in that era. Yeah, Napoleon tells me to go somewhere and that's the wrong place. Well, I'm the wrong place at the same, you know, it's it reminds me a lot of traders of Genoa now just called Genoa, which is a game where you can trade anything for anything. You know, there's a lot of games that have trading like Settlers, you know, encoded in the rules. But in trades of Genoa, you can trade anything for anything using any means you want. You can make futures markets. You can you can come up with any scheme you want and do it, which is, you know, sort of like diplomacy where you can diplomacy in any way you want. And there's not too many games that actually pull that off very well. So diplomacy. Yep. It's it's a game that you should play, especially if you have an interest in game theory, World War One diplomacy. Yeah, it's a very it's a very important game. Historically, you shouldn't. I don't know how if you should, you know, invest a whole bunch of your life into it, but you should definitely play it once or twice, learn about it, know the rules as much as they can be known. Some people do. Some people get way into it. Some people do get way to tournaments, but you know, it's important to know, you know, the way that, you know, Star Wars is important for a film person to know. This has been Geek Nights with Rim and Scott special. Thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music. Kat Lee for Web Design and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion news and more. Remember Geek Nights is not one but four different shows. Sci-Tech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience, but unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.