From the now sadly departed Grantland:
Before Risk, before Dungeons & Dragons, before Magic: The Gathering, there was Diplomacy. One writer enters international competition to play the world-conquering game that redefines what it means to be a geek (and a person).
It was the summer of 1909. I was on the south coast of Spain. I remember it well because the season was almost over. Peace was within reach, I felt. There had been a vote to end the war, and the English had told me to support it. But the vote needed to be unanimous to pass, and it failed. The Russian, the Italian, they thought the English voted against it and that I had been lied to. Why should I believe them? The English and I had worked together against all of them for years now. Of course they’d want to sow distrust between us. Now time was ticking. I desperately wanted peace. I wasn’t sure my country would survive another couple of years, with or without England’s help. There wouldn’t be another vote until after the fall.....MUCH MORE
“Will you support my army in Spain this fall?” I asked.
“Nah. That ain’t happenin’,” the Englishman replied. A wave of dread came over me. He intended to betray me.
“How could you do this to me? After everything I’ve done for you.”
“I guess I’m just a hard muthafucka like that.”
And with that he walked away, leaving me standing in the hallway, mouth agape. He rejoined the other players at the board, who all stared at me, fury in their eyes. We told you so.
For the past eight hours I had been in the basement of a dorm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, playing a board game called Diplomacy along with six other men. Each of us was vying against 80 other people to be crowned the world champion of Diplomacy at the end of the weekend here at Dixiecon.1 One of those men, Brian Ecton, a high school math teacher from Prince George’s County, Maryland, with hair like Katt Williams and a mouth to match, approached me right at the start, sizing me up as a beginner and offering an alliance. He explained exactly how it would work and said we’d share a draw at the end. I had no reason not to agree.
For the next several hours each of the other players would take turns dragging me aside to explain to me how Brian was manipulating me, how he was going to betray me, how I should betray him first and work with them against Brian. I dismissed them all. After all, who’s to say they wouldn’t betray me as well? I was outmatched in this game. Safer to pick a player and stick with him come what may, I thought. But here I stood, on the verge of elimination, and the other players were pissed. According to them, I could have avoided this if I had listened to them hours ago.
“Don’t you realize that some of us traveled a very long distance to win this tournament?” a player from France said to me with disgust. “And because you won’t stab2 this guy, you’re going to die and bring all of us down with you.”...
...There are two things that make Diplomacy so unique and challenging. The first is that, unlike in most board games, players don’t take turns moving. Everyone writes down their moves and puts them in a box. The moves are then read aloud, every piece on the board moving simultaneously. The second is that prior to each move the players are given time to negotiate with each other, as a group or privately. The result is something like a cross between Risk, poker, and Survivor — with no dice or cards or cameras. There’s no element of luck. The only variable factor in the game is each player’s ability to convince others to do what they want. The core game mechanic, then, is negotiation. This is both what draws and repels people to Diplomacy in equal force; because when it comes to those negotiations, anything goes. And anything usually does....
