Oh! This is abuse!
Today I’d like to start a new playthrough about diplomacy. Not Diplomacy, but diplomacy. If you follow. There have been many diplomatic games in the past, famously Diplomacy, as mentioned before, and if you are unaware of that game, search for “Losing friendships due to a boardgame” and read what comes up.
There’s also (off the top of my head) games like Article 27, Democracy: Majority Rules, Die Macher, and to a ridiculous extent: Junta. You’re making friends one turn, and making enemies the next. You can also use these negotiating principles in non-political games like John Company and make partnerships for businesses in much the same way. You can also have “Political Phases” in wargames to simulate the back and forth of treaties and whatnot before you start pushing around your tanks.
And then there’s this guy:
Diplomacy without the Negotiating. Negotiating with cards. History with A-historical realism. Backstabbing without losing friends (mostly). Working together towards a common good, but only one winner allowed. It’s a whole different take on the Diplomacy genre.
And it’s freaking good.
This bad boy puts you in the seat of one of the Big Three: Churchill, Stalin or Roosevelt/Truman (Roosevelt’s health is a concern throughout the game, and Truman may have to pony up). You have to work together with your allies to stop the second world war, yet set up the post war world to your own liking.
Most of the game takes place on the left side of this pretty, pretty board, where the three players (yes, it’s a three-player game. How odd.) debate the issues of the day, ranging from where money will be spent, what global rules will be in place post-war, who is going to lead which theater and whether to use a nuclear weapon. You know, no big whoop.
The right side of the board shows you the state of the war, how far along each of the fronts are, as well as which governments the various countries and colonies are rooting for (or becoming puppets for, depending on your viewpoint).
All points for the game are able to be seen on the board (which is why the rules state not to calculate your final scores until the game is over), so you always know where the game stands, which makes for the most interesting element of the game:
Sometimes, you don’t want to win.
Ish.
There are three possible endings of the game:*
3. The Axis doesn’t surrender. The worst of all possible endings, but it’s possible that by Conference(turn) 10, no one has made Germany and Japan surrender. In that case, the scores are wildly modified: Each player rolls a d6: The player with the highest score subtracts that value from their score, the 2nd place player subtracts half their die roll from their score, and the person in last place adds the die roll to their score. This represents the peace created after the war and who managed to make the best deal with Germany/Japan.
2. One player has a score that is 15 points higher than the lowest player’s score. If this is the case, then one country has bullied the other two countries so much, that they have decided to ally themselves into a post-war alliance to take that country down! You roll 1d6 and add it to 15. If the spread is STILL in existence (ie. the 1st player is 16-21 points more than the last player), the player with the most points still wins because they are strong enough to withstand the new-found alliance, otherwise the SECOND PLACE player wins.
1. The Axis have surrendered and the point spread is 15 or less? Then the player with the most points wins. Simple.
*- These are the victory conditions for the 1st edition of the game, which I have. The 2nd edition has done away with die rolls and has made everything static numbers because a lot of people felt the end of the game was decided by a die roll. I, however, LOVE this concept because going for Condition 1 victory is the smart way to go so you DON’T let a die roll decided the end of the game! If you see a 2 or 3 ending coming, you alter your play to not let that happen, or you play so that no matter what the dice come up, you land in the place needed to win. It forces the players to work together and not always go for the most Victory Points on every move, but sometimes go to score Victory points for the other players. I personally love it. So that’s me. And you’ll just have to deal with it. Nyeah.
So what did I mean about Diplomacy without Negotiating? I meant that though you can table talk all you want about what you think the players should and should not do, what ACTUALLY moves the Issues up and down the table to see who has final say over what should be done is handled by a hand of cards:
Each card represents an actual person that worked for a statesman or two and helped one of the Three during the conferences. The number in the upper left shows how many spaces on the table they are able to move issues towards their leader. Of course, they each have specific abilities that make them more powerful on specific issues, or provide help on different fronts or all kinds of other vaguely historically accurate things.
Your hand will tell you what you’re going to focus on in a turn, what’s important to you (which is usually what you think you can win based on what’s in your hand) and will steer all conversation you may have. So yes, there is Negotiation, but it’s more like talking aloud what you’re trying to do with your eyes in poker. Convey information that makes your opponent do what you want them to do while not letting them know what cards you have.
Easy.
For this playthrough, I will be playing the “Tournament” Scenario. This cuts the game in half, only playing 5 of the 10 Conferences. Playing all 10 is fun, it’s neat seeing the board develop over all those turns, but I have noticed that often after 5 turns, the board looks remarkably close to what it looks like in the Tournament setup anyway, so I’ll save myself a few posts by just jumping to Tournament. There’s also a “Training” scenario that is only the last 3 Conferences that help you learn the game OR provide a tense, under-the-gun kind of game for 3 expert players. All three are fun. But Tournament is what we have, and our board starts like this:
The left side of the board merely has the chits for all the players set up, and the only thing of note is the “Second Front” marker starts in the middle of the table. This is the “Normandy Landing” Issue, where Roosevelt finally convinces Churchill that attacking Germany through Italy isn’t going anywhere. Churchill, however, scores VP for the Italian front to get to Rome before boots hit the French coast, so it’s a point of contentions for the Allies. Always fun to see how that turns out.
On the right side of the board, we see all of the war.
This circle, one for Europe and one for the Pacific, shows who is in charge of which theater. This shows the UK is in charge of Europe and we can see on the board that the US is in charge of the Pacific. This gives those players some money to put to the fronts of their choosing every turn. For instance, the UK will probably put more money to get troops into Rome than into France if he wants more VP. Theater command, like anything else, can be put onto the table and changed.
And here we see how the various fronts actually look. We have the Western Front and the Mediterranean front. The blocks with the tanks on them show how far along they are, and where they are planning on going next. There’s chits covering a lot of information there, but you see five Naval markers on the Western Front. Usually you need 3 Naval markers to move a Front to any space with an anchor symbol on it, however Normandy is a special space that needs 5. Looks like everything is prepared for it, the Second Front Issue needs to just be agreed to.
There’s also the “Spheres of Influence” that have little discs and cylinders on them. The discs represent Clandestine Networks. This is getting your foot in the door to make a way in to say “Remember how I saved you from the bad guys in the war? How about we run your trade routes now?” The Cylinders are the actual Political Alignment markers that straight up say “We’re like this now (holds up crossed fingers).”
The UK gets mad points for getting political and crossing fingers with a lot of colonies. The US gets mad points for building the A-bomb and not having to invade Japan. The USSR gets mad points for stealing A-bomb tech and taking out Germany before the other Allies do.
And during all this, everyone else just gets mad.
Now that we’re set, I’m going to play Roosevelt and the other two are going to be played by the Churchill ‘bot and Stalin ‘bot that come with the game. They are a very, very simple set of conditions that say what cards will be played before others, often leading to a die roll amongst many choices. This leads to many decisions that don’t make sense, but this leads to the difficulty of a solo game: to win WWII when dealing with allies who bicker over meaningless stuff. It’s a lot like a reality show.
Let’s get it on.
Ah, if you’re looking forward to all this and you like what I’m doing here, you can head over to my ko-fi page and say thank you, or buy me a cup of coffee as a thank you. Or not, and that’s okay too. See you tomorrow!
Very Wordy 