Diplomacy Without A Board

I seriously doubt that I am the only Diplomacy player who has trouble responding to that question. I have to answer it everytime a new acquaintance learns about my involvement in the hobby, and I imagine everyone reading these words has the same experience. Frankly, it's a sad testament to how poorly I have been able to answer the question in the past that the co-worker I mentioned above has asked me the same question before, more than once.

How do you describe The Game to people who don't know anything about it? Perhaps everyone does it differently, and perhaps someone has a good answer, but I myself have never found one (or at least I've never been able to articulate one).

Unfortunately for you, I have -- for some reason -- decided to write an article exploring an attempt to come up with an answer that we can all use. Fortunately for me, I think I have at least the beginnings of one up here in my head. Now it's just a matter of forcing it out through my fingertips and onto the pages of The Zine. And so, here I am.

Let's begin, then.

To serve the purposes it needs to serve, an answer to the "What is Diplomacy?" question first has to be short, because it needs to fit into small-talk. You're standing there with a cocktail glass in your hand and suddenly -- right after "What do you do for a living?" -- there it is. The question with the Diplomacy answer. It might be, "What do you do for fun?" It could be, "Do you travel a lot?" Or maybe, "What did you do last weekend?" Whatever the question is, the answer is Diplomacy. How do you answer? Perhaps you don't even necessarily know the questioner very well, but you certainly don't want to blow this chance to tell them about Diplomacy. But how?

The answer cannot betray how much you hope that the questioner will ask you to explain every little detail of The Game -- that would scare the person off. You'd seem to be forcing Diplomacy on them. And another important reason for brevity is so that you don't seem like a total geek, whose entire life revolves around a silly game (no matter how well that might happen to describe me -- er, I mean, you).

The obvious downside to giving a brief answer is that it becomes seemingly impossible to provide an adequate answer. The danger is that you will make Diplomacy seem trite, as if it's "just another game." You'll lose any chance of sparking an interest in the questioner. If you leave it at "a game I like," your questioner pegs you as a Chutes and Ladders player or, worse, one of those "breathe on the table and the thousands of little cardboard pieces move and you have to start the weeklong game all over, being sure to always check the myriad 20-sided die-roll results charts to see if each and every soldier twisted his ankle" wargamers (no offense, anyone), or, worse still, a Dungeons and Dragons player who's lost his grip on reality and who is in league with the devil or something.

Another reason you cannot simply answer with, "Oh, it's a board game" is because there is absolutely no way to avoid the guaranteed follow-up question, "Yeah? How do you play?" At that point, you're stuck. What to do then?

For a couple of reasons, you can't answer the question with a simple explanation of the rules. After all, if you asked a Monopoly-obsessed person what he does for fun, do you want him to start reciting all of the game's rules to you? Even if he chose to answer with the nuts and bolts of Monopoly play, though, that game is at least fairly easy to explain. By telling you that players roll dice in turn, move their piece around the board, purchase the squares on which they land, buy houses or hotels to build on their land, pay rent to players whose squares they land on, and that the last person with any money wins the game, he has explained Monopoly to you in a nutshell. Oh, sure, I left out mortgages and stuff, but basically, someone could be made to understand Monopoly in under a minute of conversation. Diplomacy is, at least for me, a much more difficult game to explain.

How do we usually answer the question, "What is Diplomacy?" What are the most common answers we give? Well, for whatever reason, one of the answers that seems to be most frequently given is, "It's sort of like seven-player Risk." Personally, I very passionately dislike this answer. I don't think Diplomacy is anything like Risk, myself. After all, who makes alliances in Risk? Does Risk have simultaneous movement? Do Diplomacy players hope to spend their turn rolling high numbers on a set of dice? No, no, and no. And yet, most Diplomacy players seem to rely on this quick answer, and can usually count on being able to continue the conversation in other directions without a follow-up question about The Game. The problem is, the questioner didn't learn anything about Diplomacy. The next time he hears about the game, he will probably picture a dozen little plastic pieces being pushed into Kamchatka with three sixes showing on some red dice, and he'll dismiss Diplomacy as just a variant of Risk.

Players who know that "a seven-player Risk" isn't the best answer usually add "diceless" or something, to give a hint that there's something more. And they may follow up with something like, "but it's also like a seven-player chess game too." This attempt to ennoble the game and illustrate its cerebral element is a good start, and when you get someone thinking about a mix of chess and Risk, you have a pretty good chance that they might want to know more. We're still not there, though, and how do you answer the follow-up question -- when it's time to explain what Diplomacy is, not just list the other games to which it is (only tangentially) similar?

As I said above, you can't hope to resort to the rules, the way you could with a game like Monopoly. Even though Diplomacy's rules are extraordinarily simple, any brief recitation (such as, "well, the players move all their pieces simultaneously after discussing their plans with each other") makes for an amazingly incomplete description of the game, and one which absolutely requires lengthy follow-up. Any conversational partner will instinctively shy away from asking the next question ("what do you mean 'simultaneous'? How can that work?"). As interested as he might be by a new concept, he does not truly want to invest the brain cells just now to learn about the mechanics of Diplomacy's simultaneous movement. After all, the person you're answering is more interested in small-talk; he certainly doesn't want to prompt you into monopolizing the conversation on a subject that, so far at least, reads to him like the signposts on the road to Geekville. There are other things to talk about and other people to talk with, and what you've said sounds like only the beginning of a long one-sided lecture on a subject in which only one person is interested.

Also, saying something like, "the players move their pieces simultaneously after discussing their plans with each other" makes you sound, frankly, more than a little bit patronizing. Even though you know you're stopping there for sound social reasons, failing to explain what you mean leaves the other person with a feeling that you were thinking, "well, I understand Diplomacy, but I doubt you would, so let's move on." It implies that you would consider any follow-up question tediously beneath you to answer.

At the same time, your questioner will also feel tricked into asking you for something more about The Game, and then you've committed the worst conversational error of all -- you've made your partner feel unable to change the subject at will. If he does resign himself to asking you for an elaboration, you can mark my words that he will not care about or even listen to your answer -- his mind is now concentrating on looking for a way out, on finding his path to firmer and more level ground. Whether he asks you for that answer anyway out of a sense of obligation, or awkwardly chooses not to do so, the instant result is uneasiness, and the end of the road. It's a no-win situation for him, and for you too, because there's another potential Diplomacy player lost. Lost because you couldn't explain or describe the game briefly in conversation.

Worst of all, though, any cursory overview of Diplomacy's mechanics captures nothing of the spirit of The Game. The reason for this is that the play of our game does not really take place on the board; it takes place in the minds of the players. The real problem is to determine how to describe a board game that isn't really played on a board.

Believe it or not, I think I have found the beginnings of a solution, with a bit of assistance from the current popular culture. There are very few television shows that I myself feel are worth watching. I prefer the History Channel, the Biography Channel, the Discovery Channel, things like that. I don't know how U.S.-centric those references are, but if they are, at least my next sentence should make my non-American readers feel a bit better. It seems to me that the best mass-market shows currently on American television are imports from across one ocean or the other. (Of course, so are some of the worst shows -- don't even get me started on that crappy "Weakest Link" show.) One of these great shows is "Junkyard Wars" (known in its original form as the British series "Scrapheap Challenge"). Another is "Trading Spaces" (okay, okay, I'm not sure why I like it; blame my wife and kids, but it's kind of fun watching people ruin each other's houses -- this show is a transplant of the British series "Changing Rooms"). A third is the Japanese import "Iron Chef" (what a great show!)

The show I'm leading up to, though, is "Big Brother," which is also an idea from the U.K. "Big Brother" is one of a trio of "real-world people stuck with and competing against each other over a long-term" type of shows that have seen great success here in the States. There have been more than three such shows, of course, but really only three have been really successful: "The Mole," "Survivor," and "Big Brother."

For those of you who don't know about the shows, here's a brief rundown of the competitions:

"Survivor"

A couple of groups of people (called "tribes") are taken to the middle of nowhere and made to live there, relying only on themselves and each other. Each week, the "tribe" votes someone out, and that person is out of the game and goes home. When there are too few people left in the two tribes, they are combined into one. If I'm not mistaken (and maybe I am -- I haven't been a "Survivor" watcher), the splitting of the players into two tribes at the outset is something that didn't happen in the first year of the series, but was a change made as a reaction to the way the first-year players split themselves, Diplomacy-like, into two strong alliance structures anyway.

"The Mole"

A bunch of people are thrown together and asked to work as a team on a number of challenges. They will gain money for the final prize if they succeed. However, one of the bunch is secretly charged with doing everything possible to make the team fail. Each week, all the players are questioned individually with questions like, "What color eyes does the mole have?" and "How many children does the mole have?" The person with the lowest score on this questionnaire each week is out of the game and goes home. In the end, only the mole and one other player remain, and that player is the winner. This game has many Diplomacy parallels as well. For example, players often deliberately try to make the rest of the team fail, so that they can pretend to be caught at their act of sabotage, and then they get back to work to succeed with the team. Having allowed himself to be "caught in the act," such a player hopes to have tricked others into believing that he is "the mole" when he's not, resulting in their making more wrong answers on the questionnaire than he will. Of course, players also have to wonder, "did he want to be caught doing that?" It's a game of double-dealing and deception, not just for the person who is the mole, but for all the other players as well.

"Big Brother"

A dozen people are put in a house and cut off from every outside contact. Cameras are all over the inside and outside of the house (thus the Orwellian name). Every week, the winner of a competition becomes "Head of Household," which means that person has the power to nominate two other players for eviction. The rest of the players vote to decide which player is evicted each week. There is also a contest whose winner can choose to un-nominate one of the nominees. There is maneuvering to convince the "Head of Household" to put up the people you would like to get rid of, and to convince the person with the power of veto to use it or to decline to do so, and there is constant conversation to determine how each player will cast his or her eviction vote. The ability to properly measure the things you say and properly weigh the things you hear, accurately determining the amount of truth in each, is the player's only hope. Players often turn against each other suddenly. A player could nominate the person with whom he has been best friends ever since the show began, shocking everyone including the best friend, and causing all sorts of turmoil. But maybe the whole thing is a put-up, and the two friends just see this as their only chance to get rid of the second nominee, sure that the voting houseguests will rally to the aid of the betrayed and loyal best friend and will therefore vote to evict the other player instead, something they would normally not have done. Weakening the opposition alliances is key. Knowing where the alliances truly are is just as difficult as knowing how best to weaken them. (Does this sound familiar?)

A lot of Diplomacy players have noticed and commented on how "Survivor" resembles our game. Some have even grafted Survivor-type voted banishment rules onto the board to make a Diplomacy variant (uh, isn't that simply what taking a player's last SC is?). As I say, I've never followed "Survivor." I often feel and felt, especially in the show's premiere year, when it was such a tremendous sensation, that I may have been the only one in the country that did not follow it. I don't know; something about it has just never grabbed me. But "Big Brother," I like that show, and the reason is that what I see in it is Diplomacy on a big stage.

I find myself able to watch "Big Brother" with a very real understanding of who is playing the game well, and who is not. From our experiences at the gaming table, we Diplomacy players can see and understand all of the interplayer moves and know why someone says something a certain way to a certain person. We can notice, probably better than most viewers, all of the subtle mistakes that the "Big Brother" players make, and then we see the mistakes discussed and exposed by the other players.

Through our Diplomacy experience, we Diplomats notice which players are good in the opening phases of the game, when there are a lot of other players to use and hide behind and feel secure among. We see which players have strengths that emerge more in the middle game, when strong defense and the ability to properly partner become more critical. And we see the steel nerves of a Diplomacy endgame. All played out on television.

The best players are constantly pushing the other players' buttons, aiming for an edge by getting under this player's skin, or by buddying up to that player. Pretending to be upset, pretending to be sad, pretending to go along with a plan they have no intention of following. Doing anything it takes to stay in the game.

We see players routinely stab each other in the back. We see and feel the private and shared agony over a decision to break an alliance. We think along with the players about what would be in their best interests: stick with a friend or sell him down the river. We hear whispered conversations about who should be stabbed next and how and why. Players intentionally lose contests for "Head of Household" or "Power of Veto" so as not to be put in a position they do not feel it advantageous for them to hold that week, and they maneuver to cause a certain other player to win those little battles, often against their will, to force that player to show his or her hand. We hear plaintive pleas for friendship as well as open expressions of enmity. Secrecy and collusion abound, but the camera and microphones pick it all up and broadcast it all. The entire viewing audience sees all the negotiations of a full-scale Diplomacy game, played all the way to a solo (the way it should be).

What's more (and this is perhaps most important), everyone in the audience also gets to hear the constant and repeated expressions of friendship, the assurances that "I only did it because this is a game. In real life, we are and will remain close friends. I'm only trying to win the game, just like you are." All of the viewers and all of the players immediately understand and entirely believe statements like this, because we have all seen that they really are true. These people do indeed become close friends. Thrown together all alone and forced to live in extremely close quarters and learn all about each other, it would be impossible for them not to have become sympathetic to each other's weak spots. They truly do feel for each other in their separation from their family, and it is obvious that no one in the house is truly an enemy. Everyone sees enough of the players' actual humdrum putting-on-their-pants-one-leg-at-a-time, brushing-their-teeth lives to know that none of them is an amoral, conniving, scoundrel in real life. They're just a bunch of regular people, playing a game, all out for a prize.

That's Diplomacy. And frankly, I am extremely pleased that it seems like when the rest of the world gets to see it played on television, it's the makings of a huge hit. I would love to see a season of "Big Brother" populated exclusively with seasoned Diplomacy players. I'd happily volunteer for that one.

It looks like our game may be is a lot more appealing than we gave it credit for -- we've just had a hard time explaining it to other people. Now that there are cultural points of reference, though -- a show like "Big Brother" that the whole of the television-viewing public is familiar with, and that in my own opinion is an extremely close parallel to Diplomacy -- maybe we finally have a quick and easy answer to the question that has always been so hard to handle. Better still, the quick and easy answer I'm about to propose may and should indeed convey enough information in it to intrigue the questioner sufficiently -- if a person would be in any way inclined -- to get them involved and join our community of players.

And so, in conclusion, ...

The next time I am asked, "What is Diplomacy?" I am going to try answering, "It's 'Big Brother' in a board game." I think that answer conveys the essence of the game better right now than anything I know of.

If someone doesn't know what 'Big Brother' is, suddenly you're talking about television, a very safe and easy topic. You're no longer stuck trying to explain a game that cannot be quickly explained. Once you've discussed the show, you can easily come back to the fact that Diplomacy is the same thing on a board game, and by then you'll know whether to even bother, or if the other person is not the type who would be interested in playing a game like "Big Brother."

If those who've asked you about Diplomacy do know the "Big Brother" show, they immediately realize that the game of Diplomacy is about whispered machinations, subtle maneuvering for player vs. player advantages, leveraging of interpersonal relationships, and putting to use one's beliefs and best guesses about each other player's positions and intentions. They'll realize that all of this can indeed exist in an atmosphere of true friendship and cameraderie. In short, you will have explained Diplomacy to them.

By introducing the game in this way, with this sort of accessible parallel, hopefully the people who are first told about The Game will no longer have what is an all too common and permanent adverse reaction when they hear of Diplomacy's premise that outwitting the other players, using every possible tool, including deception, is the modus vivendi. No longer will someone explaining Diplomacy be instantly branded as a conscienceless liar with no regard for real-life friendships, and no scruples or morals at all. Hopefully, the opposite reaction, and a spark of interest will be the result. And all without the need to immediately start explaining the convoy rule.

Finally, to put a positive spin on one of the first things that turns people off about our game, I think I'll add, "and it's all played in only four hours, instead of four months!"

Manus Hand
(manus@manushand.com)
 

P.S. By the time you read this, I'll have returned from Seattle and I'll be busy informing my co-workers of my next Diplomacy tournament -- see you in Washington, D.C. in October!

Publisher's note: The brief discussion I offered in this article concerning the conversational pitfalls that lay in wait for a Diplomacy player who is charged with explaining the game has got me thinking that this is another ripe topic that deserves some exploration in these pages.

Sadly, many players do not properly understand the psychology of conversation, and they inadvertantly misstep in their inter-player negotiations. Ignorance of the natural and unavoidable consequences of a conversational faux-pas, and what they might be, is not without its price. As I said, the game is not on the board, it's in the conversations, and mistakes in properly carrying on the necessary conversations in the game will alienate one player from another quicker than just about anything else will.

A mishandled conversation can immediately set an ally to the task of covertly looking for a new alliance partner, and worst of all, the person who made the mistake and made his partner feel uneasy with the relationship probably does not even know he did it and is going blithely along, unaware that he himself has put the knife into his friend's hand before turning his back at the conclusion of the negotiation. An understanding of how to converse is essential not only away from the board, but on the board as well, and perhaps the principles of conversation should be more completely expounded upon in another Pouch article, entirely dedicated to the subject....)