In the last few months I’ve played some games of Diplomacy on an online server called phpDiplomacy. You can reach me out there as “liopic“.
Diplomacy is a strategic board game that represent the position of European powers before the World War I. You start leading one of the seven powers, moving a really small amount of armies (3 or 4, actually), and the goal is to conquer most of Europe. With 6 more players on the board, and everyone owning only 3 units, it’s quite difficult to accomplish much expansion on your own. So, the only option is to start speaking with the other players, to form pacts, alliances, common objectives, etc… for getting support of your moves, or give it to theirs. Actually the game is strongly focused in the diplomatic part; the board is just a excuse to hold the conversations.
As I played more games, I discovered a lot of diplomatic rules, like “search the common benefit”, “be polite but firm”, etc. On the other hand, I also discovered new vocabulary like “stab”, “backstabber” and such. But in my opinion it’s a good game, specially to develop some social skills and try to improve the negotiations habilities. In my personal case, this is a must: my social skills are totally underdeveloped. Let’s see if this helps me. At the moment, I’ve only won a game, from 12 played :-/
Like myself playing Hex on littlegolem.. I suck at it :/ (far worse than your 1/12). Do you recommend me this game ;)?
Of course I also play Hex! It’s an excellent abstract game… and I’m a good player at it.
But the beauty of Diplomacy is this “opposite” focus, where you don’t need to calculate a sequence, but to be good convincing people.
I hereby accept your untold offer of help with hex playing 🙂 shall I invite you over LG?
No, I stopped playing there. But we can play in real-time on Kurnik.
Anyway… it seems I should write an entry about Hex :-/
Uh, I don’t really like Kurnik… but nevermind, we’ll met there sometime.