Diplomacy Games

Modern Diplomacy and Sopwith

In this episode the guys kick off a pub crawl and dive deep into the variants Modern Diplomacy and Sopwith, while also talking other Diplomacy stuff.

• • Kaner talks about a recent Fog of War game he's finished (Blind War + Less Draw) that he's animated - and won!  Kaner rambles off a few players' names much to Amby's amusement.  (0 mins 57 seconds)

• Kaner acknowledges he had a bit of a hollow victory with many disbands much to his advantage. He discusses while under the "fog of war" he got many surprises along the way as he explored the map (3 mins 0 seconds)

Modern Diplomacy 2 variant

• This is one of the few variants on both webDiplomacy and vDiplomacy (5 mins 40 seconds)
• Kaner takes Amby off on a tangent by asking whether he's going to the face-to-face PoppyCon tournament in Melbourne, Australia in December (6 mins 40 seconds)
• The guys outline the gameboard and context of this variant set in 1994 created by Vincent Mous and adapted for webDiplomacy and vDiplomacy by Carey Jensen and Oli. This game has ten players and you need 33 supply centres to win. It allows building new units in any open supply centre  (8 mins 10 seconds)
• Kaner starts talking about a Modern game he's playing at the moment as Egypt and is getting totally destroyed in (9 mins 35 seconds)
• Then we get onto a Modern game recently played by Amby over at webDiplomacy where he was part of a draw - see "Real Debate for All 2" (10 mins 30 seconds)
• This was a public press only game which complicated communication with its subtlety. Kaner says he finds public press as a bit of a nightmare.  Amby talks a little about how with a 10 player game in public press it was a fair number of messages to read, but was manageable (11 mins)
• He outlines his strategy for making a strong alliance with Germany. Which wasn't very smart with Germany frequently NMRing (lingo for new players = No Moves Received). Compounding this Amby decided to not stab Germany despite the reoccurring NMRs.  (13 mins 30 seconds)
• As a result France and England took over a lot of Germany. Amby ended up then becoming buddies with France, who was getting carved up by England (15 mins 55 seconds)
• England was being played by Dagabs0 who is one of the best players over at webDiplomacy, ranked 14th from a total of over 13,000 players. Not surprisingly he was on top of his game. However Turkey was the superior player on the board for this game, forming a "tighter than a monkey's arse" alliance with Ukraine, even though later on Turkey was eating Ukraine's SC's up (16 mins 45 seconds)
• Amby, playing as Poland, describes how he got into a fight early on with Russia after forming an alliance with Germany. Russia got smashed quickly by Poland, Ukraine and Turkey. Amby says - after some entertaining pronunciation attempts - how he offered Murmansk to England (18 mins)
• Kaner asks about what Egypt was up to at the time as he was "doing a Kaner" dying. Amby explains how while Egypt was doing well at the start, however the Turkey-Ukraine alliance gave Turkey the opportunity to move south, wiping out Egypt.
• Italy had a really bad start with France attacking him from the game's opening, while England similarly attacked Spain and took him out quickly (19 mins)
• Amby explains how it probably wasn't the best move to stab England by taking Murmansk and sending a bullshit excuse to him. But despite this Dagabs0 came back with a beautifully constructed diplomatic response (20 mins 30 seconds)
• As a result Amby was at war with Ukraine and now England and at this time Germany started NMRing. Not looking good for Amby, so he tried making peace with Ukraine by ceasing military operations against him. But of course that didn't happen with Ukraine continuing to fight. (21 mins 15 seconds)
• Meanwhile with everyone fighting each other Turkey was "gobbling" up the board. This caused Amby, England and France to push Ukraine hard to break ranks with Turkey (22 mins 40 seconds)
• The guys get into their second - or maybe third - pronunciation fight for the evening while talking about the Russian language's use of the Cyrillic alphabet before Kaner shows his ignorance of Italian thanks to Dean Martin's classic song about a moray eel (25 mins)
• Back to the game, England who had been a long term adversary of Amby's and France, made peace so the three of them could contain Turkey and his Ukrainian vassal state. This quickly made an impact and Turkey put in for the draw, finishing up the game  (26 mins 15 seconds)
• Amby goes on to explain how the different scoring systems between vDiplomacy and webDiplomacy impact their rankings. At vDiplomacy rankings are impacted based on how you played vis-a-vis other higher ranked players eg a player ranked 100th who manages to get a player ranked 10th to draw, is going to get a greater rankings boost while the player who is 10th may slip in their rank  (27 mins 30 seconds)
• But at webDip it doesn't work that way with the Sum of Squares scoring system where depending on the number of supply centres you finish with and the number of supply centres in a game are squared and some magical math equation comes into play to determine your score and ranking (28 mins)
• The guys debate how at vDip a draw works on points in a Winner Take All versus Points Per Supply Centre (PPSC) game. Amby mentions how WTA is now the default at webDiplomacy, however he prefers PPSC as it allows for greater negotiation opportunities. Mind you throughout the whole conversation - and probably due to the drinking - the guys continually refer to PPSC as PPCS. Idiots (29 mins 15 seconds)
• This spurs on a discussion about the value of rankings. Kaner doesn't see their purpose, while Amby disagrees and laments on the good old days when he was once top of the vDip rankings (31 mins)
• Wrapping up their discussion on Modern, Amby mentions how he received an End of Game statement from Dagabs0, giving his perspective on their game:  (32 mins 30 seconds)

"As I've played more Diplomacy over the years (including dabbling in the original board game 20 years ago when I was in high school ), I've come to enjoy gunboat games the most out of any set of rules. I'm not sure if I share others opinions that it's the "purest" form of the game, although I certainly understand that point of view. For me, it's the idea that there are more possible diverse outcomes in a gunboat game than in a normal messaging game.

When I discovered the webDip site 3 years ago, I began playing mostly normal classic games, but I discovered that most of my games resulted in similar outcomes, with either France or Germany almost always becoming the early behemoth, and the other players having to chase him down and force him into a draw. Those 2 nations seem to have been too powerfully unbalanced in their designs; just as Egypt and Rome were too weakly unbalanced in their Ancient designs; and similarly to many nations being unbalanced both ways in the World & America variants. So although I still very much enjoy the ancient variant due to the benefit of the ultra aggressive gameplay strategy (which is my preferred style), those factors led me to the Modern variant becoming my favorite.

In my opinion, the benefits of the Modern variant are that it has harnessed the happy median between certain aspects of the different variants - namely game size. 10 players (compared to the 5/7 or 17) allows for a fair amount of aggressive early gameplay, but also usually punishes players who refuse to choose any early allies. The factor of being able to build anywhere also adds a unique & fun aspect to Modern games.

In the recently completed game 'Real debate for all 2', I was Britain (a much more enjoyable nation than the Classic English counterpart). This contest was a Public Messaging Only game. I've found that the gameplay using these unique messaging rules equates much more to a gunboat game than a normal messaging game, especially among more experienced players - simply because most allied agreements & moves that can be safely conveyed publicly can also (eventually) be conveyed in a gunboat.

This specific game was enjoyable all the way through except for the fact that the (many) German players only had the decency to enter orders half the time. Indeed, there were 2 different CDs and over a dozen NMRs in that nation alone. Among the early alliances, the immediate French/German partnership was the main one that jumped out to me (due to the personal regional significance). As Britain, I did not feel the need to seek out any early allies, so I chose to remain a lone wolf. I was slowly conquering Spain and had a foothold in Scandinavia as well (hat tip to you for having crippled Russia). It was a nice gesture for you to originally offer me Murmansk, and I quickly accepted, since I felt it was high time to have an ally. I was very much enjoying my battle against a strong French/German wall, and that extra build was just what I felt I needed to gain an advantage against them. As the game progressed, I felt comfortable in leaving Murmansk unoccupied & moving 2 full spaces away from it.

Then, just as I was about to finally break through into Germany, I was dismayed to see you retake Murmansk without alerting me. Since I was already sailing through Scandinavia en route to Germany, I decided to turn a portion of my naval strength east to mount an attack against Poland in the Baltics. We quickly formed a stalemate on that front; but by that stage in the game, there were only 4 1/2 legitimate players left: Turkey (along with his protectorate nation - Ukraine), France, and the 2 of us. Turkey was quickly passing 20 SCs, and even as I was finally breaking into France, I realized that my previous chance of beating Turkey to the solo was impossible. France pointed out that the only thing I would accomplish by continuing to wipe him out would be to give Turkey (who had taken all of Italy, and was attacking France from the southeast) an easier solo. He was in desperate straits, but also quite right, so I immediately ceased my hostility against him and you, and the 3 of us made peace to turn our combined efforts against Turkey/Ukraine. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I've always personally had the habit of trying to master a certain strategy game/puzzle (and often even one specific aspect of said game) before moving onto the next game or activity. So I think that's the only reason that I haven't gotten around to exploring the vDip variants yet; but I certainly plan to in the near future."

Sopwith

Kaner and Amby kick off their pub crawl by moving from Brew to John Mills Himself. JMH pride themselves on their locavore menu with all drinks produced within 250 kilometers, except for their Tasmanian whiskeys (40 mins 25 seconds)

After a discussion on drinks Kaner moves the conversation onto the Sopwith variant:

• Sopwith is a game of six players with each of the players taking on the persona of a World War 1 fighter pilot. The game is played on a hexagonal board. Grey cells represent clouds that randomly move. You can fly into them, but as you lose 1 of your 16 health points each time you fly into a cloud it's generally not recommended unless you're about to get shot. You also start the game with a full amount of ammunition (43 mins)
• Each turn takes place over three moves (instead of the usual 2 in Diplomacy). You begin at your airport with the taking in your first turn you.  When flying your orders can move ahead, turn left (turning your plane to point a direction), slip left (banks you left but you don't change the direction you're facing), turn right, slip right and an Immelman turn which can only be made by aces... more on this later. If you want to make sense of this there's a good graphic explaining it here (44 mins)
• You PM the Game Master your three moves, as does everyone else. The GM then hand adjudicates the game and updates a  visual of this in photo editing software which is then shared with players. It is not currently a game that you can play online although four games have been facilitated on vDiplomacy's Wiki (although the Wiki is not up at the moment) (45 mins 20 seconds)
• Kaner goes on to discuss one of the more recent games which he GMed. The players included  Guros, bozo, Sandgoose, DoubleCaps, Blockstone and raro (apologies if we got any names wrong!) To allow for messaging between players a standard Diplomacy game was created so players could communicate with each other in the usual Diplomacy style (47 mins 10 seconds)

• Being fighter pilots you can fire to attack other player's planes. You can fire straight, fire left and fire right. Depending on the distance between players the amount of damage varies - the closer you are the greater the damage eg if immediately adjacent one hex you do 3 damage, two hexes its only 2 damage and if three hexes away it is only 1 damage. (47 mins 45 seconds)
• Kaner also encouraged players to send in short sentences which Kaner would edit into the layer image. This allows for classic fighter pilot commentary when you're being followed by a fighter (48 mins 30 seconds)
• During the game Kaner encouraged the players to take on the persona of famous fighter pilots (51 mins 30 seconds)
• Players can land back on their landing strip to regain health points, but can be shot in the ground. Once you've run out of points you literally blow up in an explosion (much to Amby's amusement after a few drinks) and you're out of the game (52 mins)
• If a player approaches the edge of the board they need to turn. If you don't you fly off the board and die. If you NMR you just move forward three steps (53 mins 20 seconds)
• In each turn you can fire three times. This can be once in each of the three moves or could even be three times in just one of your three moves that turn (54 mins)
• Kaner describes how when he was kicking around the idea of Sopwith at vDiplomacy that Oli was open to the idea of coding it up to run on php. But then he got busy and it didn't happen (55 mins 15 seconds)
• Kaner discusses how he thinks it'd be a great game to have run next year for people interested (57 mins)
• Amby feels now that Kaner's explained it and shown it (see Youtube video below) it now makes sense to him and not just crazy shit (57 mins 30 seconds)
• Finally Kaner comes back to Aces - after each game you get a certain number of points. If a few of these games were played by a single player who gets high points they could become an Ace, allowing them to perform the Immelman turn, flipping around to go the opposite way  (58 mins 20 seconds)
• Kaner first found Sopwith back in the old Diplomacy 2000 days where it was run alongside email Diplomacy games (58 mins 50 seconds)
• If players are interested in a game they should PM Kaner on webDiplomacy or vDiplomacy (handle for both is kaner406) (59 mins 40 seconds)

Venue: Pub crawl - Brew then John Mills Himself, Brisbane

Drinks of choice:

• Kaner - Irish Black Lager by Black Hops Brewery from the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
• Amby - Girraween Estate Cabernet Sauvignon from the Granite Belt, Queensland, Australia

Don't forget if you're enjoying the podcast please hop onto iTunes and give us a rating and a review so we can get the Diplomacy message out.

If you have any suggestions on what you'd like to see covered in an upcoming podcast, or something you'd like to see regularly covered, please contact us or leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Thanks to Dan Philip for his rockin' intro to the Diplomacy Games podcast.

2012 WebDiplomacy World Cup Championship interview

The guys after quibbling about what episode this is, start talking about how Kaner’s new hipster beard is a clever ploy based on Diplomacy principles to get his wife to allow him to keep his moustache.

For any new listeners, Kaner and Amby get together and record these in a bar for a bit of atmosphere. So power on past our usual chit-chat as it doesn’t take long to get into Diplomacy talk:

• Kaner gives an update on the Bourse game that has now started (see podcast episode 3 about the Bourse variant) and how he’s finding his GM role really interesting. Amby explains how he’s making the same mistakes again. (3 mins 20 seconds)
• Amby then goes on to talk about a Who Controls America game to coincide with the 2016 election. According to the game result, its actually the Republicans, Corporate America and the Underworld who really control America. (6 mins 30 seconds)
• This gets Kaner talking about the election discussions in the webDip forum. (7 mins 45 seconds)
• Amby discusses how he feels he’s in too many games at the moment, but it’s nothing compared to the effort Kaner’s had to put in to GM the Bourse game (10 mins 45 seconds)
• The guys then start discussing various strategies players can employ in speculating on Bourse currencies (13 minutes 20 seconds)
• Amby mentions that while he tried getting a Google Translate game up on vDiplomacy with so many special rules games happening, no one seems to be signing up. Kaner suggests giving it a crack on webDip before Amby reminds him it probably wouldn’t have a good chance due to the 2016 webDip World Cup starting up (16 mins 30 seconds)
• Speaking of which Amby announces he’s participating in this under Team Eurovision - listen to find out why that name! (16 mins 50 seconds)

2012 WebDiplomacy World Cup Championship interview

• Kaner brings up how Amby’s technology failed in recording the 2012 webDip World Cup championship, but Amby came up with an alternative anyway (18 mins 10 seconds)
• Kaner says he plans to put the interview up on Youtube and put some images into it to make it easier to understand (21 mins 30 seconds)
• Amby then kicks off his interview with Goldfinger0303 (Austria), JECE (Russia) and Leif Syverson (Germany) (24 mins 35 seconds):
• What kept these guys going for 104 game years (26 mins 15 seconds)
• JECE explains what the previous record was (27 mins 50 seconds)
• Leif and JECE discuss the impact of Italy leaving the game (31 mins 30 seconds)
• Leif discusses his approach to dominating the board as Germany in the 1940’s (32 minutes 50 seconds)
• The guys then go onto discuss the change in dynamic with TheHangedMan coming in as the Italian replacement (34 minutes 20 seconds)
• Leif and Goldfinger discuss their victory conditions (38 mins 40 seconds)
• The guys discuss how the tournament worked (40 mins 30 seconds)
• We go on to discuss the 2016 webDiplomacy World Cup and how it varies to the 2012 tournament  (43 mins 10 seconds)
• To what extent the guys stopped playing other games during the championship (47 mins 30 seconds)
• What strategies the guys employed in the championship final (48 minutes)
• The impact of Leif’s NMR and real life (50 mins 45 seconds)
• Lessons on communicating in a public press game… and how the guys broke the messaging system of webDip! (51 mins 45 seconds)
• Final thoughts from the three players (53 mins 05 seconds)
• We return back to Kaner and Amby and what our hosts took away from the interview (1 hour 1 min 20 seconds)
• How Russia’s strategy to balance the stalemate line blew away Kaner and Amby, and how you can apply that thinking to other Diplomacy variant boards (1 hour 4 mins)
• The guys encourage you to drop by the shownotes for Episode 5 and leave your comments (1 hour 6 mins 30 seconds)

Useful info:

Kaner's Youtube video of the game animated season after season:

And don't forget to also check out (as mentioned in the interview) captainmeme's incredible analysis of the highs and lows of each player's game.

Note: due to the various technical constraints (and user error by Amby) the interview was recorded in Mono rather than Stereo. And because we’re such cheap bastards and edit this on freeware, the whole track had to be stepped down to Mono. So apologies if it doesn’t sound as good as our other episodes.

Venue: Brew, Brisbane

Drinks of choice:

• Kaner - Four Pines Pale Ale from Sydney, Australia
• Amby - Don Ramon Tempranillo from Campo De Borja, Spain

Don't forget if you're enjoying the podcast please hop onto iTunes and give us a rating and a review so we can get the Diplomacy message out.

If you have any suggestions on what you'd like to see covered in an upcoming podcast, or something you'd like to see regularly covered, please contact us or leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Thanks to Dan Philip for his rockin' intro to the Diplomacy Games podcast.

World War IV & Google Translate Diplomacy

This episode was recorded back-to-back with episode 3's discussion of Rinascimento and Bourse. As a result we'd already had a number of drinks. And then we drank some more. So in this episode apologies in advance as the guys get a bit pissy while discussing the wonderful world of Diplomacy. This probably explains why Amby gets rather excited when he discovers from Kaner the "Finished" button within each variant's page. Kaner reciprocates saying he learnt about the archived maps from within any game from Amby.

World War IV - the mother of all variants

Kaner and Amby get into this amazing map that makes this variant one with both the most players (35 or 36 depending on the version you play), and due to the number of territories and SC's its also often one of the longest maps to play:

• Hats off to Tom Mulledy for creating the variant for the original 35 player variant and Tom Reinecker for the 36 player World War IV (version 6.2) variant.
• Amby kicks things off talking about how "drool-worthy" the map is. But yet hates the game: because he never wins. Amby laments amongst the 3 different versions he's played 6 or 7 games but has only survived once. Every other time he gets eliminated.
• Kaner points out with the number of players understandably your odds of winning fall dramatically and your chances of getting shafted go through the roof.
• Kaner finds the original 35 player map very "empty", especially in the middle east. WWIV v6.2 is now overwhelmingly the most popular iteration. Even better Kaner's World War IV Sea lanes version.
• That said, they both agree that when you start a WWIV game, you always feel, "This is it... I'm going to conquer the world!"
• Kaner explains why there's the two versions between the WWIV map. Tom (User ID Tomahaha) contacted the then vDip mods about the site using an older version. Kaner then helped out with porting that map across to vDiplomacy.
• The guys talk about the technical aspects of how the games come together on the site with two maps: a true map (with no more than 256 territories) and then a separate layer with the names and SCs on it.  But with the size of WWIV there's an additional map to help run the variant, which is really fiddly.
• Amby digresses about how the Regatta's toilets disappointed him. During a quick comfort break between recordings he noticed that it didn't have a mirrored wall for releaving yourself, as reported by the BBC on the internet. Amby thinks this could be a result of a more recent renovation done since the 2011 Brisbane flood (confirmed in this article - scroll to the bottom for the wacky picture of how the urinal used to look/work!)
• With dunny talk out of the way, Kaner brings up the common problem in both WWIV maps of sea-based territories forming strong stalemate lines that prevented solo wins.
• Kaner discusses his ideas of creating "overseer" zones at the heart of an original large sea territory, and then splitting the remainder of a sea territory into smaller sea territories. These overseer zones allow for fast navigation, but also play a critical part in supporting activity around them. These changes eliminate the issue in the past of too many strong sea-based stalemate lines. This is obviously good if you get sick of games with stalemate lines, but will drive you nuts if you love creating good strong stalemate lines.
• The guys discuss though that these changes appear to have had an impact on more sea based powers like Oceania, exposing them to greater naval threats.
• Kaner then gives his strategy about the importance of building continental strength quickly and then turning your attention to projecting naval power into the sea lanes. Amby shares his experience of doing the opposite: concentrating strongly on land-based strength but in doing so leaving himself open to naval attack, and ultimately elimination. So pay attention to Kaner's suggested strategy!
• That said Kaner goes on to say though that while strategy is an important component, fundamentally your relationships with players tends to be the determining factor.
• Kaner gets into the sexy talk and discusses how winning a WWIV map would be like ten orgasms at once.
• In WWIV the scale of the map lends itself to more than just an opening game, mid-game and end-game, with multiple opening games and mid-games.
• Kaner recommends in the early game to create a couple of local alliances in your continental block.
• When it comes to continental blocks the guys note that Africa and South America either quickly get their shit together, or totally fall apart. North America usually gets its act together quickly, Asia becomes a knife fight and in Europe one player usually quickly dominates.
• Finally the guys reflect that once you've played WWIV there's no way you can ever again play the World Diplomacy IX variant on webDiplomacy.

Google Translate Diplomacy - when you feel like an entertaining game of Diplomacy

Next after yet some more drinks the guys move onto Google Translate Diplomacy.

• Amby mentions how with his recent efforts to learn Spanish on Duolingo, he created a forum post looking for people wanting to play a game only played in Spanish with four other players putting up their hand.
• Amby discusses how when you're learning a language you can obviously only call upon the words you've learnt, without quickly having to cheat and turn to Google Translate for help.
• The game called Juego en español (literally "Game in Spanish") saw ScubaSteve play fantastically, a good showing by Gunmaster G-9 and surprisingly Dr. Recommended getting knocked out early and gnomius later being eliminated.  Amby felt some players were very competent in Spanish, or hid it well. The only downside he felt as someone with very basic Spanish skills was the amount of time taken to read messages and formulate responses.
• But it got Amby reflecting on the time vDiplomacy created a Google Translate variant and game for Diplomacy, intuitively called "The language of the country immediately after the", although Kaner wanted to call it "The Meat Commission" as we discuss in the podcast.
• Mapu originally suggested the idea. When discussing it originally in the forum there were a number of ideas thrown around for how this could work eg start in your language and then translate 4 or 5 times, through to Kaner's suggestion to use something like Akuna's Bad Translator (note: this service has changed since the original competition and is no longer offered).
• The forum discussion then went on and ended up agreeing that you'd start with your own native language, translate it into one of three obscure languages that were within pre-World War 1 player's borders or nearby (eg France couldn't use French but could use Basque, Breton or Arabic - due to their colonies, England couldn't use English but could use Welsh, Irish or Hindi - again due to colonies, Russia could use Mongolian, Belorussian or Finish etc). Then you would translate this into an agreed totally different language such as Chinese traditional or Hebrew which would then be posted to players.
• Some of the choice postings came out after a number of translations - major major language warning!
• Amby acknowledges that he and Kaner were aiming to have a fun entertaining game although some players were playing it straight down the line.
• Amby goes on to say that he'd often check translation options between the three languages to see what worked best; either keeping it as clear as possible or as entertaining depending on what you wanted to achieve.
• Kaner suggests his brilliant idea on having a Google Translate meets Extreme Personalities game, and seeing player's interest in the forum. Likewise seeing from the forum whether players want to follow the same translation process used in the initial game, or do a 34 translation version
• Amby brings up how the game often felt like the Youtube video by CDZA using Google Translate to twist the lyrics of the "Fresh Prince from Bel-Air" theme song.
• The guys acknowledge that while they still haven't yet had our webDiplomacy 2012 championship winners on for an interview, hopefully it'll happen soon. Then maybe we'll look at the Extreme Personalities in an upcoming variant.
• Kaner also says he'd like to cover off the Sopwith variant very soon. So stay tuned!

Venue: Regatta Hotel, Brisbane

Drinks of choice:

• Kaner - Yenda Hell from New South Wales, Australia
• Amby - The Stag Shiraz by St Hubert's from Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia

Don't forget if you're enjoying the podcast please hop onto iTunes and give us a rating and a review so we can get the Diplomacy message out.

If you have any suggestions on what you'd like to see covered in an upcoming podcast, or something you'd like to see regularly covered, please contact us or leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Thanks to Dan Philip for his rockin' intro to the Diplomacy Games podcast.

The Italian Renaissance variant Rinascimento & Bourse, a game inside a game

In episode 3 we look at the Italian Renaissance variant Rinascimento. What's great about it, what's bad about it, and how based on recent Forum talk it can be improved. Then its onto a game inside a game (how very enigmatic), with the variant Bourse.

Venue: Regatta Hotel, Brisbane

Drinks of choice:

• Kaner - Dogbolter Dark Ale Reserve, Matilda Bay Brewing, Australia
• Amby - Punter's Corner Cabernet Sauvignon from the Coonawarra, South Australia

The guys discuss their history with the Regatta Hotel, with Amby once working in the drive-through bottleshop that no longer exists and Kaner regularly playing Backgammon there (who knew he played something other than Diplomacy!)

The Italian Renaissance variant - Rinascimento

Kaner and Amby both love this variant created by Emmanuele Ravaioli (Tadar es Darden). Here's what they have to say about this fun filled jaunt through the Italian countryside:

• Kaner talks about how Emmanuele got him into variant creation in the early days of vDiplomacy. Kaner discusses how he talked to Shep and Butterhead when they were playing games of Chaos and Octopus about the idea of combining the two together. After posting their thoughts in the forum Tadar offered to give him a hand, creating Kaner's first variant Chaoctopi. Kaner briefly talks about how this variant played on the Classic map works and the rule changes it spawned for many other variants.
• Amby brings us back to Rinascimento, talking about how he loves the look of the map and its historical setting. Kaner enjoys some of the weird rules such as Benevento's army not being able to move, the French and Turkish players starting with units but no SC's. Amby joins in with how access across the spine of Italy is often limited by mountain passes.
• And the guys forget to totally mention that to win not only do you need to reach 33 SC's but one of them must by the capital Rome. Nice work there.
• Kaner talks about how in his experience the Papal States get sandwiched, and why his favourite country to play is Geneva with its options on land and sea and how you can work with the nearby city-state players, middle and larger powers.  Amby reflects on his one-time surprising win as Turkey.
• Rinascimento is often recognised as one of the most unbalanced maps with mega players Venice, Naples and the Papal States, mid-size players Milan, Savoy and Firenze and micro players Sienna, Pisa, Ferrara, Turkey and France. It means smaller players really need to work hard in negotiating and working with other players to survive.
• Kaner reminds Amby how the points scoring system for Rinascimento is different to most other games to help make things fair eg a small player who survives can get a better share of the pot than a large player who scrapes home with the SCs they began with.
• How whoever draws the Papal States can never help themselves, behaving like the Pope.
• The guys discuss recent discussions in the vDiplomacy forum about creating variations to the Rinascimento variant. Decima Legio has created a number of images showing how this could work. The three ideas that seem to be getting traction are:
  • Combining lesser states into more powerful states to balance things (although not historically accurate)
  • Breaking up some of the bigger states and introducing other players such as the Barbary pirates, the Spanish, etc.
  • Creating a chaos style version with everyone only having a single SC.
• Amby shares ancient discussions with Emmanuele on why France was included on the current map.
• Of course, for any changes to happen the new development site mentioned by Captainmeme in the last episode needs to get up and running first.
• Amby wraps it up with an entertaining twist on the colour scheme of the "Rinascimento" logo in the top right of the map, and shout outs to TheatreVarus' forum thread to start the conversation on improving it, Gopher27's take on diplomacy vs tactics and great suggestions from ScubaSteve, Hirnsaege, Ruffhaus and Ingebot.

A variant inside a variant - Bourse Diplomacy

Next after topping up drinks, we jump into Bourse - a game that can be played just by the players on the map, or them and anyone wanting to play via the forum, or even people just in the forum:

• Invented by Don Miller in the seventies, it essentially has two simultaneous games running: one on the map, the other offboard .
• In the offboard game every player starts with 1000 units of currency for each of the countries on the map. So if the Bourse was being played on the Classic board each player would start with 1000 French Francs, 1000 British Pounds, 1000 German Marks, etc. At the start of the game every currency is worth the same as every other unit (all equal to $1). From there you can buy and sell currency units. You can never sell more than 500 units of any one currency each turn, but you can buy as much as you want. Obviously you need to create a cash reserve through selling currency to then buy more units of another (or multiple currencies).
• Each sale of 100 units of a currency depreciates the value of that currency by 1 cent eg in the first turn if there's a net over all sell off of 500 pounds (France, Germany and Austria sell 500 pounds each [-$1500], Turkey and Russia buy 500 pounds each [+$1000] and Britain and Italy don't buy/sell pounds at all, the over all effect is a sell off of 500 pounds), the pound's value is reduced the following turn by 5 cents, down to $0.95.
• The same works in reverse in appreciating currency value.
• Changes to unit values are based on buy/sell orders in sets of 100 eg an overall net purchase of 300 Francs would appreciate that currency next turn by 3 cents to $1.03. But if the overall purchase was 299 Francs it would only increase in value by 2 cents.
• Critically when buying/selling you're not only betting on the currency, but on the currency's longevity on the board eg if Italy is eliminated and you hold 2000 Lira, their value drops to nothing ($0).
• This tends to see people investing in countries who are doing well on the board. But Kaner explains on top of what decisions you're making, everyone else is assessing the situation. He gives the example of Russia doing very well and as a result people buying up Roubles, while at the same time Germany is getting hammered by France people will be inclined to sell the Mark. This understandably drives up the value of the Rouble while the Mark's value drops substantially.
• Amby builds on this idea by adding a degree of deception. France in the above set of circumstances may decide to privately make peace with Germany and put in buy orders for Marks. This way France picks up the Mark at a bargain basement price, while taking the bet that making peace with Germany will see it recover and survive to the end of the game for a great return on its currency value.
• Kaner explains that in the original Bourse, players of the Bourse don't play on the board. That way the shenanigans above don't happen. But with so many map variants at vDiplomacy with lots of players, Bourse is usually played with just the onboard players. The example the guys talk about is the game Boursed 901 played on the Known World map.
• At the end of the game, every 100 units of currency you own is multiplied by the number of supply centres that country has.  Then you add these figures up and whoever has the highest figure wins.  Kaner is reminded how he in fact won Boursed 901 in the currency part of the game and second on the board.
• Kaner also clears up Amby's question on whether a player eliminated on the board can continue playing in the currency game; they can... and can go on to win that aspect of the game.
• Amby talks about his gameplay in Boursed 901, trying to manipulating currencies but finding that other players - particularly Kaner - were one step ahead and manipulated currencies better. Amby explains how a strategy of spreading your portfolio risk generally won't get you ahead in the game.
• Kaner flags how he's so jeered up about Bourse that he'll propose a new game on the vDip forum. The more players interested the bigger the map will be played.
• Amby and Kaner also discuss how many games are too many games to be committed to.
• Amby gives a shout out to G-Man who experienced all sorts of technical problems trying to comment on the Known World 901 game discussed in Episode 1. The guys reflect on how their enthusiasm and passion is making the podcast happen, despite their piss poor technical skills.
• Finally the guys discuss how feedback to date on recording in a pub has been surprisingly positive... listeners feel like they're catching up with mates over a few drinks. So I guess we'll keep our alcohol and bar themed tour for each episode!

If you have any suggestions on what you'd like to see covered in an upcoming podcast, or something you'd like to see regularly covered, please contact us or leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Thanks to Dan Philip for his rockin' intro to the Diplomacy Games podcast.

Fog of War, Mods and new development talk

In this episode we check out the Fog of War variant of Classic, talk about the role of Mods and what to bring to their attention and conclude with new development server talk that may get variants up and running again for the Dip community! 

Apologies up front on how the ambiance gets louder and louder as more people arrive in the pub! If this pisses you off too much a) go have a drink or two yourself or b) let us know to go somewhere quieter!

How do Moderators (Mods) work?

Both Kaner and Amby have been Mods in the past for vDip, they discuss their prior experience and how it varies between vDip and webDip:

• vDiplomacy - link is in the top right. You can only see posts you have raised with the Mods
• It's the place to bring up concerns about multi-accounting with fake accounts or suspected meta-gaming. Amby discusses how he suspected this occurred in a game and how he raised this with the Mods
• Kaner discusses contacting the Mods where there are technical problems, where a player feels another player has crossed the line with their language
• The guys also digress blocking players, and why you'd do this - if they were obnoxious, or a player seems to CD too often, doesn't communicate well. You can block players by going into their profile page and clicking the smiley face, turning it into an unhappy face (the same functionality doesn't exist in webDip, only vDip)
• webDiplomacy - you contact the Mods differently.  Go to Help and then email the mods. With a larger number of members on webDip, the moderators there tend to respond faster
• Kaner talks about how webDip is starting to add new variants before Amby shoots him down. webDiplomacy focuses far more on Classic games with around 80-90% of all games played on the server being the standard classic game.

Variant focus - Fog of War

We then turn our attention to the Fog of War variant on vDiplomacy:

• In this variant you can only see the territories immediately adjacent to your supply centres and your units. The show notes include an animated GIF showing how things would look as a game evolves as Turkey
• As you can't see where all the other players are, and what they're doing (only the ones immediately around you) it presents a significant challenge.
• This can be complicated further with a Gunboat game (no-press). Kaner talks about the subtle ways you can still send out subtle messages about working together and highlights the importance of checking the large map rather the standard small map. The supports don't render 100% correctly on the small map, but they do on the large map.
• The guys also talk about how in standard press games how you can lie and manipulate players with information - right or wrong - about areas of the map others can't see.
• Kaner talks about two recent Fog-of-War games he's recently played in - Cold Blooded Fog and Pompey . Kaner talks about how his loss as Germany was more a result of absolutely terrible game play rather than the map's fog-of-war element. But as Russia he had greater success getting a draw despite challenges of:
  • subtle overtures to Germany being ignored (no checking of the large map again!)
  • "partnering" with Turkey by sacrificing his southern front... whilst Turkey ignored this and kept eating him up
  • efforts to make this message stronger by attacking Italy... only for Turkey to keep ignoring it!
  • eventually getting French support with a Barents fleet support of St Petersburg to create a stalemate line, forcing Turkey to draw despite only being one supply centre short of a win - and Kaner only having 4 SC's himself
• In addition to playing Fog of War in classic, we talk about how it can also be played in the variants 1066 and Rat Wars (and why the technology behind coding Fog maps tends to limit the number of variants that use it)

New development server talk

Finally we talk about variant development and news from CaptainMeme (vDip mod and regular on webDip) that while the vDip Lab is pretty much dead, a new test server for development is being slowly created in the background. This is some really cool news that could see new variants created again that won't crash vDip. The guys talk about how this could impact on new variants, including suggestions on webDip on air support, Classic with neutral armies, Kaner's Mongolian variant and Amby's ideas on making a massive Cold War variant.

In conclusion we tempt you again about having some of the main players from the webDiplomacy 2012 championship game being in episode 3.

If you have any suggestions on what you'd like to see covered in an upcoming podcast, or something you'd like to see regularly covered, please contact us or leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Venue: The Gresham Hotel, Brisbane

Drinks of choice:

• Kaner - Four Pines Stout from Four Pines Brewing, Australia (although Kaner did call it "Ten Pints" in the podcast)
• Amby - Massolino Barbera d'Alba from Piedmont, Italy and The Gresham Shiraz from Western Australia

Thanks to Dan Philip for his rockin' intro to the Diplomacy Games podcast.

Introducing the Diplomacy Games podcast, hosts and the variant Known World 901

Welcome to Diplomacy Games! In episode 1 we introduce the podcast and hosts Kaner and Amby and why we play Diplomacy online. Then we jump into discussing in detail the Diplomacy variant Known World 901.

But for starters, a little about ourselves - Kaner and Amby. We discuss our background and experience with playing Diplomacy. We get into the early days of playing, from face-to-face to rather embarrassing first ever opening moves when playing online. We also explain why the podcast is recorded over a few drinks in a bar.

Next up we give a bit of a high level overview of the type of things each of our episodes may cover, including:

• A "deep dive" into a variant
• Features/how stuff works on webDiplomacy and vDiplomacy
• Anything new that's happened on the  websites
• Any threads of contention in the threads
• Interviews

We go deep into the variant Known World 901 by David E. Cohen, and on-boarded to vDiplomacy by Kaner. We cover:

• How at a 15 player variant it fills the gap between large 10 player games and massive 34+ player games
• How Amby loves its historical nature and learns some history, all while continuously mispronounces players' country names
• The really cool transform option for changing armies to fleets and vice versa. Kaner talks about why he did this to improve gameplay
• We then look at an example of the map in the game Vae Victis . Here Amby made it into a 6 player draw despite only having 4 supply centres. What strategies and tactics did he use to make it to the end?
• Kaner discusses how you can use variant statistics to better understand how to play the country you draw

Finally we discuss the WebDiplomacy 2012 World Cup championship, a game that took three and a half years to complete. We're lining up a number of the key players to discuss this mammoth Diplomacy gaming effort in an upcoming interview.

Visit our website for the show notes for this episode.

Venue: Grand Central Hotel, Brisbane

Drinks of choice:

• Kaner - Fat Yak original pale ale from Matilda Bay Brewing, Australia
• Amby - Rymill "The Yearling" Cabernet Sauvignon from the Coonawarra

And a big thanks to Dan Philip for our rockin' intro music!

If you have any suggestions on what you'd like to see covered in an upcoming podcast, or something you'd like to see regularly covered, please contact us.

Diplomacy Games: Start Here

This is a pre-intro episode recorded 3.5 years after the Diplomacy Games podcast began, giving an updated context of what the show is all about.

We discuss face-to-face, online, drinking, interviews, episodes and much more. Listen to it first to get an idea of what the podcast has become.

DiplomacyGames is released usually about every two weeks. It is brought to you by two drunk Australians - Kaner and Amby - in various pubs. 

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, DiplomacyGames.com or practically anywhere.