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  • The Beautiful Game: 1. A Unique Strategy Game

    When the Great and Good ABC invented Diplomacy, he created a game that was completely unlike anything in the war-gaming or strategy-gaming world to that point. Even today, there is nothing quite like Diplomacy. At the time, strategy games tended to be 2-player games. There’s nothing wrong with 2-player games, of course, but Diplomacy was…

  • The Beautiful Game: Introduction

    I’m not talking about the board. The image above shows, in my opinion, the most beautiful board design available (and, possibly, the best pieces – it’s just a shame that the pieces are slightly too big for the board!). I do love the original European version of the board, though, enough to have mounted it…

  • Dealing with Bovine Faecal Matter

    In a game like Diplomacy, where the real play takes place off-the-board, and you’re dealing with people whose objective is to persuade you that you’re going to be better off doing this rather than that, there’s a lot of bovine faecal matter flying around. How can you spot it? How do you deal with it?…

  • The Grantland Discussions: A Storm of Daggers

    Diplomacy is designed to encourage betrayal, there’s no getting away from that. The game is meant to be played by people who communicate; who can forge alliances; who can maintain those alliances long enough to get close to the winning line and then, when that line’s in sight, who are prepared to stab their ally…

  • The Grantland Discussions: A Dance with Diversity

    In the previous post in this series, I looked at how one Dippyist, Dave Maletsky, felt new players were not finding their way into the Hobby. I think, if we look at the Hobby as a whole, it’s easy to see that it really isn’t very diverse at all. David Hill’s article about the World…