The Asia Variant

Last revised: June 14, 1994

Send comments or corrections (only for the HTML version of this file) to Doug Massey (masseyd@valhalla.btv.ibm.com).


You can receive a copy of this file via E-mail by sending your local Judge a message with "get info.asia" in the body.


Asian Diplomacy was originally conceived of and created by David Lawler,
updated and modified by Peter Baer.  Territory chart revised by Will Wible. 

This variant has undergone extensive development and playtesting over more
than four years.  Several email and quite a few live games later, here are the
results.

Note that there are absolutely no rule changes from the standard Dip
rulebook. Just a new map.  Comments: canals are similar to
Constantinople in the regular Vanilla game; ie fleets and armies may
cross, but only one may be occupying the territory at a time. Asian
Diplomacy has almost no historical basis.
  
The original designers of the variant said "It is VERY well balanced,
which should be the final criteria for a wargame.  All powers have
equal chances to win." However, experience says that this is not the
case. Some powers are much stronger than others. It is also very easy
to stalemate the game, which makes solo wins unlikely, and draws much
more likely.

Map

An ASCII version of the map is available from the judge as the file asia.asc.
A PostScript map is still under development.  The interconnectivities between
the provinces, and the abbreviations for the provinces, can be found in the
file map.asia, or on the ASCII map (asia.asc).  Many provinces have a few
abbreviations that are acceptable; for example, ura and ural for urals.
Most provinces can be abbreviated by the first 3 letters of the name,
exceptions to this rule are:

eas      East Africa Sea
esb      East Siberia
ecs      East China Sea
eio      East Indian Ocean
eme,emed Eastern Mediterranean
hkg,hk   Hong Kong
hon      Honshu
irn      Iran
irq      Iraq
jav      Java
jvs      Javan Sea
scs      South China Sea
sio      South Indian Ocean
tha      Thailand
ths      Thai Sea

Other acceptable abbreviations are in the map.asia file; if in doubt you can 
always spell out the name in full.


Countries and Starting Positions

There are 7 nations.  As with Youngstown, there are 2 nations beginning with
the letter "I"; once again, the letter "N" is used for India.  "I" is used 
by Indonesia.
                           
The starting positions are:

China              India               Indonesia           Japan
A Beijing          A Calcutta          F Borneo            F Hokkaido
A Tibet            A Delhi             F Java              F Honshu
F Shanghai         F Bombay            F Sumatra           A Manchuria
                                                           F Philippines
Russia             Siberia             Persia
A Moscow           A Irkutsk           A Iran
A Sevastopol       F Kamchatka         A Iraq
F St Petersburg    A West Siberia      F Arabia (east coast)


Victory Conditions

40 territories are marked as supply centers, and 21 are needed to win.

Programmed for the judge by Nicholas Fitzpatrick


* Diplomacy is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc., all rights reserved. Used with permission.