[HN Gopher] Diplomacy: The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014)
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Diplomacy: The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014)
Author : ollieglass
Score : 75 points
Date : 2021-02-21 18:26 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (grantland.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (grantland.com)
| victorbojica wrote:
| This seems very similar to the Game of Thrones Board Game. Seems
| like it is heavily inspired from Diplomacy.
| Syzygies wrote:
| The way I recall this game, habitual players need fresh meat to
| pretend to befriend, then screw over.
|
| Perhaps this isn't how it's played at the top. Like Wall Street,
| you see other people making money through pure genius, so you cut
| ethical corners trying to do as well?
| morelisp wrote:
| Last Saturday and yesterday were the qualifying rounds for the
| top board of the first Diplomacy invitational championship. I
| don't play myself but if you have some familiarity with the rules
| the commentary is interesting.
|
| https://diplobn.com/dbn-invitational-2021-rules/
| jashper wrote:
| Had the pleasure of playing in it last weekend -- if you're
| interested in joining the virtual face-to-face community and
| playing some games, hit me up and I'll send you some info
| regus wrote:
| I've always wanted to play this, however a few things hold me
| back.
|
| Experience has thought me that it is very difficult to wrangle a
| lot of people to play complicated games. Simple party games are
| easy, but the moment you try to explain anything complicated to a
| large group all their eyes glaze over.
|
| Then there is the issue of the extreme play length. The people in
| my play group will complain if something takes an hour to play, I
| doubt they could handle 8 hours.
|
| The closet I have come to this is Sidereal Confluence which
| allows for up to 9 players and can takes up to 3 hours or more to
| play. Explaining that to such a large group was a nightmare.
|
| And finally there is the "take that!" aspect of this game that I
| find worrying. People like to say "don't get mad it's just a
| game!" But this isn't javascript we're taking about, these are
| real people with real feelings. I've been involved in games were
| people explode in anger or other times were people burst into
| tears, this is not fun.
|
| As the host of the game night it's my responsibility to make sure
| people have a good time, not to have them fight with each other
| and break up their friendships.
| tomgp wrote:
| When I've played it I've played it with my DnD group and
| playing it as roleplay can take the sting out of a lot of that.
| But yeah, it can be tough. Twilight Imperium can have a lot of
| the same diplomacy fun but feels less edgy -- the downside
| being it's quite a bit more complex.
| jsilence wrote:
| I second this sentiment. Played it once a long time ago
| computer supported with longer turns. Couple of days. Could not
| bear the betrayals even though it is 'only' a game. There are a
| lot of negotiations, talking and discussing with your friends
| and little game mechanics.
|
| I quit the game early. Not worth losing friends over.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I've played the game in a number of contexts.
|
| One of the things I noticed is that the longer the turn, the
| most intense the resulting game, to the point you can
| experience real life problems.
|
| Letting the game take more than a day seems cool but it often
| results in things getting out of hand.
| schoen wrote:
| Apparently this game is a much faster and simpler game that
| also makes people stressed out and mad at each other.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Long_Sucker
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| This is the kind of game you play in TableTop groups, not with
| some random friends at an arbitrary time.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I've played the game with a random acquaintances and hard
| time limits. That worked _better_ than formally getting all
| my friends together.
|
| Also, 4-5 people is really all you need for a fun game - or a
| game that spirals out of hand, with the fun level then being
| a matter of taste.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Reach out to me, I've designed a card based version that plays
| 3-6 and about 15 minutes per player. It is super solid but I'd
| always love more feedback.
| BucketsMcG wrote:
| We got a game of this going in work once. _Once_.
|
| We played in teams of two, so that at least one partner would
| have time to meet with the other players for negotiations. The
| moves took place last thing on a Friday, so you had all week to
| do your scheming. Then we'd all grab a beer and gather round the
| board to watch the skulduggery.
|
| About two thirds of the way through it came out that one team had
| bribed another _with actual cash money_ before the first turn had
| even been played. This news didn 't go down at all well (although
| I was quite relieved as we were taking a pounding and had
| resorted to employing Nixon's "madman theory" in an attempt to
| buy ourselves some breathing space).
|
| We decided we'd best abandon the game before we came to blows.
|
| 10/10 can't recommend enough.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I feel like the best way to play Diplomacy is in leagues of
| people who you only play Diplomacy with and never have to
| interact with otherwise.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| " _It came out that one team had bribed another with actual
| cash money_ "
|
| I play table top RPGs a lot and people talk about bleed,
| emotions from the game spilling out into real life. You can say
| this is "neither bad nor good" in the sense you don't want to
| maximize it absolutely but rather have it there but not so much
| is actually impacts your outside life seriously.
|
| There are a lot comparisons between social media and drugs
| floating around in HN. One might better call the phenomena
| "pathological engagement" Games like Diplomacy certainly show
| you need to be online at all, you just need the right kind of
| interface, generally involve selective reinforcement.
|
| _" We decided we'd best abandon the game before we came to
| blows. 10/10 can't recommend enough."_
|
| And thing about engagement levels, for drugs as well as all of
| these bleed inducing processes, seems to be that some portion
| of people value a greater level of this bleed and will push for
| it.
|
| Data points to consider
| beezle wrote:
| Have a friend that tried to get me interested in this but he
| played by mail (I'm guessing e-mail now). Zzzz!
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Play twilight imperium
| grawprog wrote:
| I'd heard of Diplomacy before but never really knew what it was,
| it just seemed like another one of those games i'd likely never
| find enough people to play.
|
| That was a fascinating read though. It sounds like a game i'd
| like to try at least once...though I don't think i'd want to play
| it with friends or family, a group of strangers would probably be
| more ideal.
|
| Also, i'm not sure which would be more appealing, in person or a
| mail/email game. I could see them both being entirely different
| experiences that probably require different kinds of persuasive
| skills to play and I can see why in person games probably get far
| more intense.
|
| The tournament play though seems especially brutal. Honestly, the
| idea of a tournament for that game almost seems a bit sadistic.
| There's no way it's not going to end up with people snapping.
|
| I'm honestly kind of surprised nobody's been killed or badly hurt
| at one of those. I've heard plenty of stories of people being
| killed for less.
|
| It's almost kind of hard to see Diplomacy as a game, it sounds
| more like an actual Diplomacy simulation than a game. If
| something like that started as a video game, it'd fall pretty
| clearly under the simulation category.
| jefftk wrote:
| My favorite way to play is one move a week, and getting together
| in person for half an hour before and after the moves. It's hard
| to set aside enough time to run the game straight through in one
| sitting, and as people keep getting kicked out it's awkward
| socially.
| cableshaft wrote:
| This game takes like 8-12 hours, but if you do it in person, it
| just FLIES by. I was too afraid to take a food break or even a
| bathroom break because I didn't want to be out of earshot of
| everyone else so they could scheme against me.
|
| We had 15 minutes for planning each turn, and that never seemed
| like enough. You want to talk to everyone, sometimes including
| one person, then again after that person leaves to talk to
| someone else and the third person tells you 'Actually I didn't
| mean what I told him. Screw that guy, let's do this instead.'
|
| And then that guy backstabs YOU instead, and you find out their
| quarrel was all a ruse for everyone else and they were actually
| just pretend trading supply centers back and forth, not actually
| fighting.
|
| It was overwhelming and I never knew who I could trust, with each
| turn just nailbiting seeing how it actually played out. But it
| was also one of the most exhilarating (yet exhausting) gaming
| experiences in my life.
|
| There's also websites for doing it online, and you send messages
| back and forth, and can set how long each turn takes (like a day
| or two maybe). It still works that way, but the experience isn't
| quite as overwhelming.
|
| Not bad for a 62 year old game.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _" This game takes like 8-12 hours"_
|
| I found the best Diplomacy framework is a hard 15 minutes/turn
| limit. After 15 minutes, your moves are down on paper or they
| don't happen. This yields a 4-5 hour game.
|
| By "best", I mean, "it's fun, it's intense and it's done". I
| see a lot of variations being described along with notes they
| became intolerably intense for people.
|
| Which is to say, this isn't a framework that needs help to be
| made more engaging. Keeping the excess-engagement genie
| sometimes in the bottle is more the challenge here.
| monocasa wrote:
| We played this in college, but with a couple twists. We had
| probably 30 people playing separated into the seven teams. Each
| week, we'd execute one round of orders on Friday evening followed
| by drinks.
|
| Really upped the intrigue as the time scales better matched real
| diplomacy. Plus the distinction of having to balance internal and
| external politics better matches real life diplomatic tradeoffs.
| "What you're saying makes sense, but I'm not sure I can sell that
| to our ruling council" was something you'd hear a lot. Teams also
| got really into their countries going so far as basically
| cosplaying at the end. There was also enough people playing that
| we were able to keep a regular cadence; it didn't really matter
| if even a whole team couldn't make it one Friday because they'd
| get a whole week to get their next orders in. The actual
| execution was more ceremony than where the main mechanics of the
| game occurred.
| michaelmior wrote:
| In grad school we did something fairly similar when a new
| faculty member suggested it as a team building exercise...I'm
| not sure how well it worked :)
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Diplomacy played in small groups with friends is a great way
| to end up with less friends.
|
| To win you basically have to lie to their faces. Still, it's
| a great game.
| dang wrote:
| If curious, past threads:
|
| _The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18159770 - Oct 2018 (71
| comments)
|
| _Backstabbr: A modern web interface for the classic board game
| Diplomacy_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8468378 - Oct
| 2014 (63 comments)
|
| _The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913183 - June 2014 (153
| comments)
|
| Others?
| thom wrote:
| Pretty sure my parents damaged, if not ended, several friendships
| over the years due to this monstrosity. Always found it alluring.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Is there a professional system for Diplo? Do people train by
| playing against AIs created by the top companies in the world?
| Has the game existed for thousands of years and has studied by
| endless generations of scholar, military generals and
| intellectuals of all walks of life?
|
| I doubt so. The game for alpha nerds is Go, in my opinion. It is
| an incredibly deep game that will always offer you life lessons
| at every stage of learning.
|
| Now, make no mistake. Diplo is a great game, but is it for alpha
| nerds in its current form? Not yet.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I wish I had known about this game in college. Getting 7 adults
| together for 8+ hours is nearly impossible now.
|
| I got to play this with 7 people exactly once. It was amazing.
| wes-k wrote:
| You can play it stretched out and remote. Make orders due every
| Wednesday and Saturday. Gives everyone ample time to talk and
| scheme with everybody.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| You really only need 5 people. I haven't played with seven very
| often and I didn't find it improved the play much, if at all.
|
| Just as much, if you set a hard 15 minute time limit, you get
| the play down to 4-5 hours (especially if you also say victory
| is preponderance on the board, not total elimination of all
| other players).
| Crye wrote:
| Checkout backstabbr. It's a web based version of the game and
| allows a lot more asynchronous playing. It also allows you to
| remain anonymous which helps with biases and super judicial
| alliances.
| qznc wrote:
| Does Backstabbr have variants? I like vdiplomacy because it
| has lots of variants: https://vdiplomacy.com/variants.php
|
| It uses the more old-school webdiplomacy interface but I'm
| fine with the dropboxes.
| wombatpm wrote:
| It's a great game to play with people you no longer want to be
| friends with
| snarf21 wrote:
| Reach out to me, I've designed a card based version that plays
| 3-6 and about 15 minutes per player. It is super solid but I'd
| always love more feedback.
| macintux wrote:
| I have played online a few times over the decades, and in person
| once. I think we gave up in person.
|
| I have spent many, many hours reading these archives[1].
| Recommended if you find the game interesting.
|
| [1] http://www.diplomacy-archive.com/home.htm
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The Diplomacy set I bought used, in elementary school, had a
| set of back issues of Diplomacy World with it. This was before
| even Dungeons and Dragons existed. I think the way pre-Internet
| fan-presses had similar qualities to the Internet is a
| fascinating study.
|
| And Diplomacy itself certainly was one precursor to the
| "addictive interface".
| phreeza wrote:
| I think Diplomacy is a super interesting domain for AI research,
| too. It has a lot of natural language (over a limited set of
| topics) as an important component, and multiple agents taking
| turns simultaneously, with fluctuating alliances.
| myko wrote:
| I first heard about this game on This American Life - they had an
| actual ambassador from the US help a novice play. I found it
| super interesting and now have a copy of the game but haven't
| played it yet (hoping to post-COVID)
|
| The episode, which I found fascinating, is this one:
| https://www.thisamericanlife.org/531/got-your-back
| morelisp wrote:
| The "novice" (not really) in the NPR article is the author of
| the Grantland article.
| mikelevins wrote:
| I've been part of a gaming group for about 45 years. The gmes we
| have focused on have varied over the years, and so has the lineup
| of players. For a while we played a lot of Diplomacy.
|
| For a couple of years, while we were playing a lot of Diplomacy,
| we played on some unusual maps. My first wife worked for the USGS
| Map Sales office, and she could sometimes bring home discarded
| maps. We tried several of them as Diplomacy boards, including
| world maps of both Mars and Venus.
|
| Mars wasn't that interesting, really. If you use its actual
| topography to decide where bodies of water go then you pretty
| much get one modest-sized polar ocean and several circular lakes
| in impact craters.
|
| Venus, though, has an interesting topography that worked great
| for Diplomacy.
|
| I might even have a couple of the hand-colored maps lying around
| the house (made in the middle 1980s).
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