On the Blog

I decided that it might be useful to have a list of blog series and stand alone posts here. I know there's the archive but that doesn't necessarily link series of posts.

Series

Links here will take you to the first post in the series.

Stand alone posts

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Tournament Scoring - Part 4: Supply Centre Scoring

The thing with tournaments is that a lot of games end in a draw. This means that DSS systems aren't necessarily going to produce a great result because a lot of players could well finish on the same score. An alternative to DSS is a Supply Centre Scoring (SCS) system. I'm going to use the game above as an example to explain SCS systems. (The game is from Playdiplomacy and so the colours are different from those I use for my maps.) The game ended with the following outcome: England - 12 SCs Russia - 9 SCs Turkey - 8 SCs Italy - 5 SCs France , Germany and Austria-Hungary were eliminated, with 0 SCs each. Supply Centre Scoring systems are based on the number of SCs the players owned at the end of the game. The basic pattern is: A solo results in all the points available. No other player scores points. A draw will be scored using the number of SCs the players hold at the end of the game. In the above game, on ...

WHAT IS DIPLOMACY? - Part 5: Variants

A variant is a game of Diplomacy where the rules or context are different from the standard game as designed by Allan B Calhamer. There are three types of variants: context variants, map variants and rules variants. Context Variants Context variants are those games that are played with a wider context. They may be tournament games, other scored games, or remote format games. These aren't often recognised as variants as such, as variants tend to be within the other two types discussed below. But the context the game is being played in will have an impact on how some players will play the game, and so they are certainly a variation of Dip. Maybe they should be called "variations" rather than variants but does it really matter? Map Variants Diplomacy has been adapted to different maps, or boards. Not surprising as the general idea of the game, pitting competing powers against each other in a localised region and time in history, can be adapte...

Tournament Scoring - Part 1: Tournament Games are Variants

Tournaments have come to be a big part of Diplomacy, whether face-to-face or online. If you're running a tournament you need to be able to find a winner, and so a scoring system has to be introduced. In this series of posts I'm going to look at different types of scoring systems and discuss the pros and cons of each one. And I'll end the series by discussing my own, as yet, prototype system. The first thing to be aware of is that a scoring system will change the way people play the game. It has to do. If you're playing and you need to do well then you need to play to the system. This means that the way the system affects the way Diplomacy is played. Tournament games are already a variant of Dip. Ideally, they wouldn't be. Players would be able to play x number of games and play them as they would any other game. In FTF play, you'd expect the game to run until they're finished or time runs out. Online, there should ...

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