Intrigue, Trust, and Treachery - GFF Diplomacy

Diplomacy can be tricky business.

Trusting others can be difficult, but necessary. Stabbing a good friend in the back can often be just as difficult. You need to know when to trust and when to stab in this game where friends can become enemies in just a matter of a few short months.

Diplomacy is a board game, which I have the honor of owning and the misfortune of having never played on account of not being able to convince enough people to join me. So I decided to see if the GFF community would want to dig in for some good old-fashioned war.

There are a few special things about diplomacy. The first is that there are no dice involved. Ever. The results of anything you do will always be decided by your strategy, never by chance. The most important thing to remember about the game is that all units have the same strength. No unit can ever defeat another without help.

The rules are very complex, but here are the most important ones:

Spoiler:

1. All units are the same strength.
2. There can only be one unit in a province at a time.
3. All orders are sent to the person running the game separately - orders are secret until they are carried out.
4. All orders happen at the same time.
5. Units defeat other units by having support from a province next to the one they are attacking.
6. Support can always be given and never refused
7. Defeated units are not destroyed. They must retreat to another adjacent province
8. Fleets can move through or to water or coastal provinces
9. Armies can be convoyed across water territories by allied fleets
10. Support can be cut by attacking a supporting unit.

Here are the rules in Wiki form, as I missed many of them - Rules

Once again, this thread mostly just exists to gauge interest into the idea. I'm not that hopeful (it will take some time and effort on the part of everyone involved to try to understand the rules - i won't sugar coat it, they're pretty complex), but who knows. We'll need seven players to control each of the seven Great Powers on the board - Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Russia.

map:

That said, let's get backstabbing.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Man, I used to love this game in my undergrad days. Me and a few of my more fanatical board game friends would play this maybe a couple times a year. Its an ambitious goal to try and do over the boards, but it could be fun. From what I remember, 75-90 of the game time was spent off in other rooms with folks trying to work out deals and avoid getting alliances formed against them.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

The game would rely heavily on PMs, that's for sure. People would PM each other for anything they didn't want everyone else to know (which, in this game, is almost everything) and PM me their orders. Then I'd figure out what happened and start the next turn.

I'm currently making tokens for the armies and fleets using the Advance Wars sprites. They seemed to fit the best.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.