The Embassy

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 ...

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...