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It’s been a while… and longer than I expected.

There’re reasons it’s taken me a while to get back to writing this blog. I had a bit of an inspiration following buying a hard copy of Richard Sharp’s “The Game of Diplomacy“. And, when I’m writing about Diplomacy, I need that inspiration.

What was it?

Well, I thought it would be a nice thing to do to write an updated version of the book. After all, Sharp wrote the book in the 1970s and the Hobby looks very different these days. We’re even in a different age of Diplomacy.

When “The Game of Diplomacy” was written, Diplomacy was played face-to-face and by mail… and that was it. It was before the internet was opened up, before email, before websites, before computers as phones.

While the game has changed very little in the nearly fifty years since Sharp’s book was published, and the way people play the game has barely changed, the format in which it is played has evolved greatly. Email, websites, apps, virtual face-to-face… none of these could have been envisaged by Sharp.

The Hobby has also grown. While Postal Diplomacy increased the number of players involved in playing the game, websites and apps have increased the number of people who have access to the game incrementally. There are new players coming to Diplomacy every day.

So, I started writing the book… and it’s going well. In fairness, it’s taking some time. I started in June 2025; it’s now October and I’m only at chapter three, which is the equivalent of the third chapter in Sharp’s book. And I’m on page 79… before editing.

I’m actually enjoying writing the book, too. Which might sound silly: if I wasn’t enjoying it, I wouldn’t be doing it, would I? But, occasionally – with me, at least – these things can become a bit of a trial. Not this time, though.

But I’m also aware how much I like writing this blog and, although “Across the Whole Board” (the name of the book, pirated from the title of an article written by Allan B Calhamer^*) is taking up most of my free time, I wanted to come back to this blog.

So here I am.

I was part way through a series of posts, called “Diplomacy Animals” and I will complete this series. But I wanted to fire things up again by revisiting a series I have started previously. And here’s the introductory post… which I’m writing after this post, so I’ll need to add the link later.

Anyway, if this is the first time you’ve read anything from this blog, it’ll be fresh. I’m going to go back and remove the posts I’ve written on alliances before (oops, spoiler alert!) so that this is the first time anyone will come across them. And I wanted to avoid mixing the series.

So, here we go again, indeed. I hope you enjoy what follows.

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* Calhamer’s article is very different from what I’m writing about!