Chances Are You might not have heard of Diplomacy. A popular strategic boardgame invented in the '50s, despite a loyal audience among the cognoscenti, it's never really gained the kind of widespread appeal of your Risks, your Monopolys or your Hungry Hungry Hippos.
Play Diplomacy Software Links Humour Diplomacy Sets. Strategy & Tactics. General Negotiation Strategy Alliances Opening Strategy Mid-Game End-Game Stalemate Lines Richard Sharp's The Game of Diplomacy Articles by Allan B Calhamer War Theory Diplomacy Variants. Variant Articles. Face-to-Face Diplomacy. Tournament Scoring Con Reports.
- Diplomacy online in a nutshell. It's a multiplayer, web based implementation of the turn based strategy game Diplomacy by Avalon Hill, in which you have to try and conquer Europe. To win you have to be strategic and diplomatic, making deals and alliances with other players, and stabbing them in the back when it suits you best.
- Realpolitik is a cross-platform (Mac/Win32) viewer and adjudicator for the game Diplomacy, with a point-and-click interface, game history, and text and bitmap reports for GMs. It has over a dozen rule and map variants, and you can easily create your own. Set of Python modules designed for writing video games.
Diplomacy is one of those games that, due to its niche appeal, is likely to leave potential fans with limited access to fellow real-world players. Hence a computerised version would actually be a boon rather than a crippling waste of human endeavour.
Diplomacy Game Logo
For the most part, Paradox has done a bang-up job of getting this complicated arena of WWI-era European realpolitik onto your screen. The board is nicely presented in swish 3D, the visuals are crisp and well defined and the game's principle setup remains intact.
Diplomacy Gameplay
What doesn't quite work so well is the interface. Cumbersome, sometimes unnecessarily so, especially in the all-important diplomacy sections. Which is a pisser, given the game's fundamental reason for existing. It's not that it's bad, it's just that you can't help thinking there must have been a better way to present it.
Diplomacy Game Convoy Backstabbr
Never mind though. The online options are comprehensive enough to let you match up with players across the world (although mostly Europe - which adds a certain spice when you know the German forces encroaching your borders really are controlled by a German), which is really the main point about this version existing at all.
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