Diplomacy

First released in 1959, Allan B. Calhamer’s Diplomacy is a game that straddles the board game and war game formats, and whose emphasis on negotiation provided fertile ground for nascent role-players. In Diplomacy, players are European nations in World War I, fighting for territory; because all players' armies are fundamentally equal in strength, effective play requires recruiting allies, learning what rivals are planning, and misleading them about one's own actions. As such, between each round of this game is a period of freeform negotiation (30 minutes the first time, fifteen every subsequent) wherein the players can discuss and make whatever plans they want.

Consequently, a full game of Diplomacy easily takes up a day or more! My plan for fitting it into a class involved creating a single, sufficiently tangled scenario, and giving my students one full round (a half hour) to explore it.

Prep:

• Several days before class, give students access to the Diplomacy quick-start rules available on Renegade Game Studios' website. You can let students know to ignore any rules that relate to "fleets," as your game won't feature any.

Running:

• Answer any rules questions, split into groups of 4-5 (with 4, Italy will sit out), and hand out a copy of the scenario sheet to every individual player. Make sure every player has a piece of paper to write their commands down on.
• Let players know that their goal is to end the game with as many Supply Depots (the dots on the map) as possible.
• Give players half an hour to negotiate and plan their moves. Let them know that they can leave the classroom to have secret meetings (but that listening in on others' secret meetings is explicitly allowed by the rules). I like to give warnings at the 15 minute mark, the 5 minute mark, and when there is only 1 minute remaining.
• Have one player from each group volunteer to be in charge of collecting and executing orders. Be around to answer questions. (See "Resolving Orders," below.
• When every group has resolved their orders, give each player five minutes to write an in-character Press Statement from their nation at the end of the battle. Then, go around and have everyone read their press statement.

Discussion:

• A good starting question is, "How does this fit under the banner of role-play?"
• Diplomacy became a popular "play-by-mail" game in the 1960s, before the internet. This necessitated each game have a facilitator player who could receive orders from the other players by mail, resolve them, and mail out the results. According to Jon Peterson's book, The Elusive Shift (2022), this role is the modern origin of the tabletop term "gamesmaster."
• This format led to the creation of "dipzines," physical zines containing game reports, often featuring in-character "propaganda" from players. The Internet Archive contains a collection of these; it might be worth it to look through one as a wind-down activity from the game.
• Diplomacy's open-ended format provided a perfect staging ground for players who were interested in role-play before modern tabletop role-playing games existed. See: Slobbovia. In fact, among Diplomacy's play-by-mail players were Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, the co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons. From Peterson's The Elusive Shift:

Propaganda began as player-authored Diplomacy broadcasts distributedthrough game newsletters, nominally a means of intimidating or confusing rivals with public statements, but in practice propaganda let each gamer fictionalize the game world in his or her own way....The propaganda narratives sometimes digressed from the intended setting of the game and ventured into whatever subjects the players found interesting, injecting a strand of fiction that could be tangential at best to game events....Both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the authors of D&D, were veteran postal Diplomacy players.

Resolving Orders:

(My abbreviated notes.)

Each unit has 1 strength on its own.

Support orders are successful if:

• Supporting province is adjacent to the province they’re supporting in.
• If supporting an attacker, the attacker wrote down the same move the supporter wrote down.
• Supporting province isn’t being attacked.

A successful support order adds 1 strength to an attacker or defender.

• Whoever has the most strength moving into (or defending) a province is successful, and moves (or stays) there.
• Armies with the same strength trying to move into the same place fail, and keep their original positions.
• If an army moves into a province as the previous occupier moves away, they just get to do so.

Rules that are written wrong JUST DON’T HAPPEN.