You never forget your first game.
Well, actually, I have. But, to balance this epic failure on my behalf, I can safely say I have never forgotten my early experiences of playing Diplomacy.
Face-to-face Diplomacy is a hard thing to get into. There may be some people out there who haven’t even tried to play it but, well, as anyone knows who has tried to get seven people together to play Diplomacy face-to-face, it’s a feat in itself. There weren’t enough people in my friends group that were interested so, inevitably, the game came out on the odd family games night.
Board games were something we loved to play as a family. Me, my brother, my mum and dad and, often, my mum’s sister and her husband were also involved. My aunt and uncle visited once every other month; they lived a hundred or so miles away and stayed with us one month, and with my great aunt on the other. The problem was that this made just six players so, if Diplomacy won out in the face of tough opposition – we had a sizable collection of other games to play, including Treasure of the Pharaohs, Alarm, Poleconomy, Game of Life, Totopoly, and Supremacy – we were always playing with one player down. And, honestly, my mum and my aunt didn’t get the game. If there was ever a bigger pair of Carebears, I’ve never met them! “Honestly, mum, I’m not going to attack you.”
“Oh, OK, then.”
Stab.
I remember one Christmas when my mum’s other sister was visiting. This was like magic! Seven – that’s SEVEN – players! Woohoo! Except it took so long to go over the rules anew (and, because we played so infrequently, whenever it was played we had to go over them again) that we played for about two hours only.
But I’d been bitten. You see, as unlikely as it seems, I’m something of a history geek. I know, me, a geek! Who’d’a thought it? And Diplomacy was a game about history! So I began looking for other games that were similar. Britannia, Kingmaker, History of the World… Great games. We also bought Game of Nations, Campaign and Carcassonne. Not specifically history games but strategy games nonetheless.
One day, when I was ‘old enough to know better’, I was in a toy and game shop and I came across Diplomacy again. I thought back to the game I had. Everything was fine with the game itself. Well, almost; I’d originally been provided with two sets of Russian units and no German set so I’d resorted to painting one set of lilac shells and fleets black using enamel paint. The box that the game came in, though, was by now suffering from what vendors call ‘slight foxing’ – it was falling apart. My brother and I had played a lot of 2-player Dip. So, well, why not get a new one? Without really knowing it, I’d bought a second Diplomacy set.
Unbeknown to me, inside that box was a piece of treasure.
My Diplomacy sets were published in the UK by Gibsons. They contained the board that a lot of people call ‘gaudy’ – brightly coloured and a little in your face. For me, that board was perfect, though. The powers were clearly demarcated. I love that board. In fact, the only complaint I have about the game Gibsons sell is that it only contains sixteen units, eight fleets and eight armies, for each power. If you run out, they advise, use units from an eliminated power. *sigh*
This was the same set, just newer. Russia was a slightly lighter shade of purple. Austria-Hungary a slightly browner shade of red. But everything else was very recognisable.
The ‘treasure’, though, was a flyer. This flyer was nothing special in the way it was presented but it was going to open me up to something amazing.
It was written by someone called Danny Collman, whoever he was. It gave information about a different way to play Diplomacy – by post, of all things! I’d never imagined something like this! Games – DIPLOMACY! – could be played by sending letters!?! It mentioned that he was going to run a ‘zine’ (a what?) for new players to Postal Diplomacy. I was in.
First published in the zine “34” #1, August 2023.
POSTS IN THIS SERIES
- Beginnings
- Into the Hobbiverse
- Play Diplomacy Online!
THE DIPLOMATICON 
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