I’ve had a lot of time on my hands recently – far too much time, in fact. One of the outcomes of this was the start of a new project based on playing Diplomacy by email.
I was thinking how I haven’t played a game of Diplomacy by email for ages. In fact, I haven’t played by email very much. I found Diplomacy online through Playdiplomacy and that was it. The (almost) perfect solution to playing Dip.
PBEM Diplomacy came along years ago. It effectively ended PBM (Play-By-Mail) Dip, which was a lot slower for obvious reasons.
There are lots of people who play PBEM Diplomacy but I don’t believe there is a widely known PBEM Dip tournament or league. I could be wrong – it happens – but I’ve not heard of it.
So I came up with a number of PBEM projects:
- Initially I thought of the PBEM Diplomacy World Championship, a tournament that would run annually.
- Then I thought of what I’m calling the E-Diplomacy League (or EDL).
- I thought I might run a team event, similar to the now extinct (I think) Diplomacy World Cup, but I’d need to consider that more.
- And, of course, there are also possibilities for Gunboat events, too.
Why PBEM? Because I think it is a slightly different way to play. It has a history in the Hobby and is something I think a lot of people might be interested in. And it’s something that is missing from the Hobby right now, certainly for tournament and league events.
The question, then, would be how to organise it. I decided I’d do it by Forum, so I created a new forum for the events: E-DIPLOMACY. You register on the forum right now, although I’m still working on it.
I’m away from organising these events yet. In 2023 I’ll be running the EDL and the PBEM DWC. I’m going to come up with a couple of scoring systems for these events, which will be posted on the forum.
If you’re interested, take a look: E-DIPLOMACY.
THE DIPLOMATICON 