prase is starting up a Prisoner’s Dilemma Game Theory Lab which you ought to check out, and that revived (my) interest in playing Diplomacy with LWers. We’ve had twogames run on this site, and one run on WebDiplomacy.
Diplomacy is easy to learn and, at its heart, a very simple game. Strategy and (surprisingly) diplomacy take center stage; tactics cannot get you very far, and there is no randomness. Players control a great power chosen at random on the eve of WWI, with all powers having roughly the same army size and strength, and so the ability to prevail in conflicts comes almost entirely from creating the right alliances and knowing when to trust (and betray) others. (Also, did you catch the lie in this explanation? Diplomacy involves a lot of lies.)
WebDiplomacy is a free site you can use to play Diplomacy with people online; make an account here. It also seems convenient for having multiple games going on or doing games repeated- Yvain did a heroic job in organizing, administrating, and updating the first game, but it’s the sort of job that can be done with less personality by a computer. So, this post exists to help people interested in playing Diplomacy with LWers find other people to play with.
The games spawned by this post will start around the beginning of September, and a typical game lasts somewhere around 20 turns (though many players are eliminated before then). If there’s continuing interest, we’ll probably have a thread like this once a month, so if you don’t know if you can commit to being active during September, but want to make sure a November thread gets posted even if there’s not much interest now, reply to the November comment below.
A downside of Diplomacy is it really only works with 7 people, but we should be able to get at least one game going. It seems natural to break people up by game pace, as that represents significantly different time commitments. I’ll be posting a number of comments with different game paces (i.e. times between turns); please only reply to the time you would most prefer. That’ll make it easy to see how many players we have that are interested, and if we need to shuffle people between paces that’ll be easy enough to do later. Signups will close August 31st, and games may start before then if we have sufficient interest. An exception is single-day games; those games will only have 15 or 20 minute turns, and thus only last one day (try to have an 8 hour block open) and so shouldn’t conflict with longer-running games.
[Edit]The comments below mention that orders must be submitted “at” a particular time; what I mean is they need to be submitted by that time. Apologies for any resulting confusion, and hat tip to RobertLumley for pointing that out.
[Edit 9/1: I’m sending out private messages to everyone who signed up pointing them to this new post.
LW September WebDiplomacy Games
prase is starting up a Prisoner’s Dilemma Game Theory Lab which you ought to check out, and that revived (my) interest in playing Diplomacy with LWers. We’ve had two games run on this site, and one run on WebDiplomacy.
Diplomacy is easy to learn and, at its heart, a very simple game. Strategy and (surprisingly) diplomacy take center stage; tactics cannot get you very far, and there is no randomness. Players control a great power chosen at random on the eve of WWI, with all powers having roughly the same army size and strength, and so the ability to prevail in conflicts comes almost entirely from creating the right alliances and knowing when to trust (and betray) others. (Also, did you catch the lie in this explanation? Diplomacy involves a lot of lies.)
WebDiplomacy is a free site you can use to play Diplomacy with people online; make an account here. It also seems convenient for having multiple games going on or doing games repeated- Yvain did a heroic job in organizing, administrating, and updating the first game, but it’s the sort of job that can be done with less personality by a computer. So, this post exists to help people interested in playing Diplomacy with LWers find other people to play with.
The games spawned by this post will start around the beginning of September, and a typical game lasts somewhere around 20 turns (though many players are eliminated before then). If there’s continuing interest, we’ll probably have a thread like this once a month, so if you don’t know if you can commit to being active during September, but want to make sure a November thread gets posted even if there’s not much interest now, reply to the November comment below.
A downside of Diplomacy is it really only works with 7 people, but we should be able to get at least one game going. It seems natural to break people up by game pace, as that represents significantly different time commitments. I’ll be posting a number of comments with different game paces (i.e. times between turns); please only reply to the time you would most prefer. That’ll make it easy to see how many players we have that are interested, and if we need to shuffle people between paces that’ll be easy enough to do later. Signups will close August 31st, and games may start before then if we have sufficient interest. An exception is single-day games; those games will only have 15 or 20 minute turns, and thus only last one day (try to have an 8 hour block open) and so shouldn’t conflict with longer-running games.
[Edit]The comments below mention that orders must be submitted “at” a particular time; what I mean is they need to be submitted by that time. Apologies for any resulting confusion, and hat tip to RobertLumley for pointing that out.
[Edit 9/1: I’m sending out private messages to everyone who signed up pointing them to this new post.