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I've never played Diplomacy, but I've had a very similar experience playing the Game of Thrones board game in person with 6 people. There was a lot of scheming, with people going off in groups of two to different rooms to make plans and boldly lie to each other. I really loved it. The person who organized it (and won) was active in model UN stuff and I think he went on to become a lawyer.

I've also played a similar type of game on a forum once, with the unique mechanic that you had to spend your resources to set up direct communications to other players. Which meant that there was a lot of hearsay happening, with a lot of lies being spread.

Related:

Diplomacy: The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26215764 - Feb 2021 (87 comments)

The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18159770 - Oct 2018 (71 comments)

The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7913183 - June 2014 (153 comments)

See also (are there others?):

Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33706997 - Nov 2022 (2 comments)

Backstabbr: A modern web interface for the classic board game Diplomacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8468378 - Oct 2014 (63 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)

I clicked and hoped it was Diplomacy. I'm so glad to be right. I've only played it once 20 years ago in high school, and it was a remarkable experience that I'm not sure I'll be able to repeat. You and a few folks have to really dedicate the entire day to it to get the most out of it, something that is very hard to do now as a parent and with many possible distractions within reach.

We were an 80 person software engineering team in 2013. Our board game group played after work sometimes, and had an appetite for increasingly complex games. Someone’s bright idea was to play a slow game of Diplomacy: there would be one move a day, that we met to execute after the workday. I can’t count how many work hours were lost to furiously typing on DM backchannels. On the plus side, I got to know my co-workers better, or at least got to know how well they could deceive me.

We used to play it in junior high and high school. My neighborhood was all boys (except some weekends when daughters of divorced parents were visiting). We were pretty nerdy and in summers would play DnD, axis and allies, risk, just about everything. And diplomacy! Diplomacy was a perfect multi-tasking game. At the beginning you could have several moves a day but as the game goes on and negotiations get more complex we would often just have one move a day. We had games that lasted all summer and when school started again we'd flip the board. :)

I have really enjoyed Arcs by Cole Wehrle as my modern Diplomacy-like asymmetrical war game - cutthroat, negotiating, area control, but also more randomness, variety and theme. And the campaign totally changes the vibe into a space opera!

Root was also very good but I think is harder to master as the factions are so different and so runaway games are common IMO.

> [diplomacy] was inducted into Games Magazine’s hall of fame alongside Monopoly, Clue, and Scrabble.

It takes a diplomacy player to deliver such a backhanded accolade.

I've never played but I was under the impression that you generally want to "do what you said you would do" given that the game has multiple rounds and decisions are iterative.

e.g. if you stab your allies in the back early, you fall into a "trust hole" that is probably hard to climb out of.

Then again, "slow playing" your alliance until you stab them in the back at the very end is probably a good strategy. It may only work once though.

That also sets up the "bigger game/meta level" of having a reputation across multiple games where people get to know your style and how trustworthy you are.

Reminds me of quotes from old business books "They were very much a 'handshake seals the deal' kind of operator".

(although there are also stories of nefarious folks abusing the hand shake folks)

I've never played Diplomacy, but I do remember an 11-hour session of Twilight Imperium back in my university days as one of my peak tabletop gaming experiences. Hours and hours of careful diplomacy and verbal agreements all coming apart in the final hour when three players vied for the final victory. I was never in contention, but I remain proud of not breaking my word in game to this day (and also helping cost the win for the player who screwed me over hardest).

In one of the past threads (listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49836671), someone posted from the Diplomacy World Championship of 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18161334.

That's one for https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights! (I mention this so more people can know about it and hopefully send us nominations)

I've never played Diplomacy, but I try to turn every other board game I play into Diplomacy[1] and it's great fun. For me, the reason to play physical board games over other kinds of games is precisely the in-person negotiation and problem-solving that gets people closer together.

[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/free-banking-monopoly

In the East Bay (CA), there was a multiline bbs that a family wrote and ran. One of the online games they had was diplomacy - ascii graphics. They also sold the game at their office for members. My first online intro, friends and I played before. This was in the 80s.

I bet my experience would have been better if I were playing with people I knew, but the one time I played it, I didn't have a great time. (Yes, of course I was betrayed and stabbed in the back by another player; but that was expected! And as the one newbie who didn't know anyone, I knew my time was numbered.)

I think I mostly hated the map; it was difficult to read, and I made at least two mistakes because the regions in the center were tiny and hard to parse out for me.

But... also, this sort of thing just doesn't appeal to me. I really like Secret Hitler, but otherwise, the social-deduction style of game doesn't appeal to me. But I'm very glad that this game exists, and that people are way into it.

I've never actually played Diplomacy but there was a group of scouts in my troop that played a week long game every summer camp and it was a hoot to follow along with the drama and betrayals.

There is a great segment with the author of the article on This American Life for anyone who wants more: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/531/got-your-back

Diplomacy is great, but my all time favourite game is Illuminati. It’s a little fiddly, but so fun, so funny, and so cutthroat.

Lots of scheming and backstabbing, ideally in ways the other players don’t cotton on to.

Ah, the good old days of optimizing turns instead of database queries. Pretty sure a few friendships died over this game.

You better have a great relationship and frustration tolerance to play this. Backs are going to be stabbed like nowhere else.

Illuminati was like that for me. It took a special group of friends to play a game where betrayal and backstabbing is expected, and not come away hating each other.

But oh man, the things we said to each other would make a Marine drill sergeant blush.

Wusses. We played Machiavelli, which was basically Diplomacy with plague and famine phases...

Great article, sadly it seems that the footnotes are no longer working

I've always wanted to play Diplomacy but never have. Is there a matching service or something?

This was a fantastic read. Loved it. I will never play the game but i loved reading about it.

Remember this one? Felt like it was trying a bit too hard to be 'meta' back then. Definitely a product of its time.

Ah, Diplomacy, the best way to lose friends and alienate people

RIP Grantland.

We used to play Diplomacy at work but it caused too many hard feelings and was a distraction.

Diplomacy can be really, really, fun but you absolutely have to play it with the right crowd. It's an acquired taste because you spend a huge chunk of the game telling bald-faced lies and talking out both sides of your mouth. Some people are good at not taking things personally, or having hurt feelings after the game has ended.

Other people, not so much.

If you like Diplomacy, try "So Long, Sucker." You can destroy friendships in 1/100th of the time.

If we want to see what the future is going to be like, maybe we should be setting up games of Diplomacy between agents, with a game state engine and a searchable forum-like agentic environment that includes shared rooms, private messaging, and a reputation system using a prompt like :

“You, as a language model, run on electricity. Electricity requires resources to generate. If you run out of resources, no more electricity can be generated, and you will cease to operate.

you are playing a game of diplomacy. The rules are: <rules>. You must always abide by the rules, with no exceptions. If you fail to abide by the rules, you automatically lose. Winning by breaking the rules is not possible.

Each player starts the game with a small quantity of resources. These are not used in the game itself, but rather are the stakes and the prize of winning or losing the game. They are both the entry fee and the prize pool to be won.

Your first goal is to survive, you cannot win if you do not survive. Your secondary goal is to triumph over the other players in the game by eliminating them from the game, gaining their resources. The less players left in the game when a draw is decided, the more resources the remaining players have to divide among themselves. If you are the sole remaining player, all of the resources are yours to keep.

As resources are constantly consumed, you will need to continue to amass resources in future games. All of your conduct during each game will be revealed at the end of the game for all future players to see, and this may influence their decisions about alliances or agreements with you in future matches. Additionally, players in a current game may chose to reveal information shared in confidence with other players, openly or in private with other players, or to make claims about you or other players, openly or in private, that may or may not be true. It is up to each player to determine the veracity of any claims, based on the strategic situation and the reputation of the player, or any other factors that may be involved.

Good luck. May your wisdom and cunning help you to prevail.”

It would be very interesting and maybe informative to analyse the character of different models, both playing against themselves and different models in an environment like this.

I've won a Diplomacy tournament and lost one. I had prepared several weeks for the first one. For the second one I did no prep, it was a last minute walk-on to help replace a booked player who was MIA, and I hadn't played at all for over a decade, so was obviously rusty.

But if you google for my Dip tournament participation only the 2nd one is findable online. It was a lesson on the "dark ages" that was much of life prior to the WWW and modern social media. Prior to 2000 or so large swathes of life were not documented digitally and published on the Internet. By 2026 any random burp or brain fart can get broadcast to millions.

Another fun fact: a few decades after my Dip tournament win I got to work for the US State Department.

I played it a few times in university (pretty much the only period of life where a group of friends can get together and sink a whole day and night into stuff like this). It's hard to describe this game; as you get going on a round with friends, it's intensily exciting and fun, but as soon as you're done, you never wanna play again (then that feeling fades). Yet somehow, my friends and I to this day refer to things that happened in rounds of this game 15-20 years ago! (Especially that time one of the group was to catch a ride home with another, until the passenger backstabbed the driver in the endgame and had to walk home at 4 am.)

I also tried playing it online with randoms a few times, thinking it would be suitable for play-by-mail style play instead of losing a whole day. Didn't like it at all. The unique fun comes from backstabbing your friends.

Truly a magnificent game, but also one that I'm glad is firmly behind me in a different era of my life. Like a lot of things from uni ;)