The Board Game That Ruins Friendships and Crowns Champions
The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014)
Diplomacy, invented in 1954 by Allan B. Calhamer, is a board game with no dice or luck—just negotiation, betrayal, and seven players committing seven hours. It sold over 300,000 copies and was inducted into Games Magazine's hall of fame. This article explores its unique mechanics, its survival through postal play and sci-fi fanzines, and the intense subculture that competes for the world championship.
I guess I’m just a hard muthafucka like that.
- xanath0n
We were an 80 person software engineering team in 2013. Our board game group played after work sometimes, and had an appetite for increasingly complex games. Someone’s bright idea was to play a slow game of Diplomacy: there would be one move a day, that we met to execute after the workday. I can’t count how many work hours were lost to furiously typing on DM backchannels. On the plus side, I got to know my co-workers better, or at least got to know how well they could deceive me.
- dang
Related:
Diplomacy: The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26215764 - Feb 2021 (87 comments)
The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18159770 - Oct 2018 (71 comments)
The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913183 - June 2014 (153 comments)
See also (are there others?):
Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33706997 - Nov 2022 (2 comments)
Backstabbr: A modern web interface for the classic board game Diplomacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8468378 - Oct 2014 (63 comments)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
- DannyPage
I clicked and hoped it was Diplomacy. I'm so glad to be right. I've only played it once 20 years ago in high school, and it was a remarkable experience that I'm not sure I'll be able to repeat. You and a few folks have to really dedicate the entire day to it to get the most out of it, something that is very hard to do now as a parent and with many possible distractions within reach.
- comrade1234
We used to play it in junior high and high school. My neighborhood was all boys (except some weekends when daughters of divorced parents were visiting). We were pretty nerdy and in summers would play DnD, axis and allies, risk, just about everything. And diplomacy! Diplomacy was a perfect multi-tasking game. At the beginning you could have several moves a day but as the game goes on and negotiations get more complex we would often just have one move a day. We had games that lasted all summer and when school started again we'd flip the board. :)
- ropable
I've never played Diplomacy, but I do remember an 11-hour session of Twilight Imperium back in my university days as one of my peak tabletop gaming experiences. Hours and hours of careful diplomacy and verbal agreements all coming apart in the final hour when three players vied for the final victory. I was never in contention, but I remain proud of not breaking my word in game to this day (and also helping cost the win for the player who screwed me over hardest).