Diplomacy

Avalon Hill's Diplomacy is a military strategy board game set in pre-World War I Europe. It not only underscores but also demands the shrewd and often deceitful making and breaking of alliances between would-be superpowers vying for domination of the continent.

Allan Calhamer developed Diplomacy throughout the 1950s while a student of 19th-century European history, political geography, and law at both Harvard University and Harvard Law School. The game achieved its final form in 1958 and saw mass production in 1960. In a 1974 essay written for Games & Puzzles, Calhamer recalls drawing inspiration for his game from an article in Life magazine contending that a world government constituted by multiple [Page 174]Great Powers of relatively equal strength would provide a system of checks and balances adequate for maintaining world peace and allaying geopolitical aggression. “Regardless of whether such a plan would have worked or could have been brought about in the real world,” Cal-hamer writes, “the system of multiple and flexible checks and balances offered itself as a possible basis for a strategic parlour game of some depth and colour.”

Diplomacy unfolds on a map of circa-1900 Europe, which is divided into 76 discrete land and sea “provinces.” Seven players represent diplomats from major military powers—France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, and Turkey—who order armies and fleets to both defend and capture provinces with the aim of controlling at least half the board by game's end. Certain provinces contain supply centers whose capture infuses more resources into the controlling power's forces (in the form of additional pieces deployed on the board).

Unlike similar military strategy games (for example, Risk or Axis & Allies), conflict in Diplomacy is resolved without rolling dice; therefore, combat outcomes are not left to chance. Instead, players privately compose written orders for their units, which can move into unoccupied adjacent provinces, attack neighboring enemies, defend secured territories, support advancing units controlled by any power, or convoy units across bodies of water. When orders are revealed, unit movement occurs simultaneously (not in the turn-based fashion more common of the Wargame genre). These moments of revelation are filled with tension not because players worry about the caprices of dice, but because they can never be entirely confident their human ally-opponents have acted as anticipated.

Diplomacy's eponymous core element occurs between players in seclusion, often behind locked doors in hushed whispers. Playing the board game indeed means spending a significant portion of game time—hours, minimally, but entire weekends, more frequently—away from the board in clandestine negotiations. Cal-hamer wanted Diplomacy to be a game “principally of manoeuvre rather than annihilation.” It is notoriously cutthroat, predicated on a striking paradox: No player can accumulate resources and territories without the support of other diplomats, yet winning the game necessitates emerging as a single dominant superpower. Thus, diplomatic sessions inevitably involve duplicity; all seemingly good-natured gestures of collaboration are nevertheless motivated by rapacity. “Loyalty, honesty, frankness, gratitude, chivalry, magnanimity—these are the hallmarks of the good friend, the good husband and father, the nice guy we all hope our daughters will marry,” writes Richard Sharp in The Game of Diplomacy. “In the amoral world of Diplomacy, however, they are the hallmarks of the born loser.”

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