Overview of sites:

Play by E-mail:

• www.ludomaniac.de It is one of the largest Dip communities in the world. Human GM, no judge. One home page for each game, and a centralized web site with all links and the community stuff. Standard, gunboat, anonymous with a special negotiating tool, dozens of variants and special variants, among others World, Modern, Ancient Med, Colonial, Payola, Crystal Ball and Machiavelli. Forums, chat, and some nice traditions like favorites of the year election and a regularly updated first site. Contact: rdw@ludomaniac.de
• Project for English speaking players: http://www.weltkonflikte.de/diplomacygames.htm (Scroll down to World Diplomacy Variants) We once also had a no-press team cup called U-Boot with many players from all around the world. So far, no one has started a remake.
• www.lepanto.de Judge-based community (DEUS) with a forum. Contact: webmaster@lepanto.de
• www.graue-substanz.net Mainly variants. Contact: bacher@graue-substanz.net

Major tournaments

• German PBEM championship, organised by ludomaniac:
• diplomacy.de
  Some international players played here, René van Rooijen (Holland) was in last year's final.
• Many of our players start at World Masters, DipWorld and some at RedScape and 18centres tournaments.
• FTF: BerliCon and Rheincon each year since 2004, Waldkappel as the oldest German meeting (not every year anymore), and sometimes tournaments in Northern Germany such as NordCon 2002, NorDiC 2004 and ChillOutCon 2006 all around Hamburg / Hanover.
• Austria: FAT, Sebastian Beer, a9603697@unet.univie.ac.at

The German hobby org

• FTF: the DDB (Deutscher Diplomacy-Bund) is in charge of the ftf hobby, with around 60 members and a five-men board (André Ilievics is the Chairman, plus Björn Oberscheven, Stefan Unger, Attila Zarka and Julian Ziesing). Contact: vorstand@diplomacy-bund.de. Austrians and Swiss can become members as well, as everybody can, without voting rights.
• Play By E-Mail: each community has its own way of organising themselves. - Ludomaniac.de has a council called "Rat der Weisen", consisting of 7 people, one of them being the owner of the site, Dirk Hammann (< ahref="mailto:info@ludomaniac.de">info@ludomaniac.de). Contact: rdw@ludomaniac.de - Lepanto and Graue Substanz have some kind of admin group each. - The annual PBEM Championship is organized by 3 Ludomaniac players while the rules were agreed on by a bunch of organizers and players from all 3 communities.

A Unique Aspect of the German Language Hobby:

C group: you play your first game as novice, called c-player. You may only be in this one game at that time, and you may only play one such game. So each c game has new c players only.

B group: Once this game has reached fall 1904, you automatically become a B player. Now you can join one standard and one variant of category B at a time. So you can be sure people know what dip pbem is and they know the rules.

A group: When you put your ID card on a scanner and send the file to the Rat der Weisen council, they will upgrade you to A. Only A players can play A games including the full range of variants. That means a relatively high protection from fake accounts and NMR drop outs.

Besides, the social scoring point system lets you start your "career" with 5 points. For each game you play you lose 1 point. You can regain points by being GM (+7) or replacement player (+1). When your social score has dropped under 1, you can only start a new game every 3 months until you are back in the positive area.

Both systems have worked very well the recent years. We have a database for that. It also calculates the highscore, shows personal information about you if you like (age, pic, city, favourite opponent etc), and lets you search through all player and game records.

What can the international hobby do to help you all out?

Invite us to your tournaments.

Julian

Julian Ziesing (vorstand@diplomacy-bund.de)

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