Diplomacy

Diplomacy is the anti-Risk. Like its Parker Brothers cousin, Diplomacy is a conquer-thy-neighbor board game. People band together to balance a dominant power, and you make deals to save your skin. What sets Diplomacy apart is that there is no room for luck. Victory depends wholly on convincing your opponents that you’re not such a bad guy, and that you have a bridge to sell them. The latest computer version is developer Paradox’s most ambitious game yet.
That might sound, well, paradoxical. The Swedish strategy masters are known for their hugely ambitious, even encyclopedic, historical simulation games. Diplomacy has very few and very simple rules. But capturing the skulduggery and backstabbing that make Diplomacy an enduring classic proves to be harder than making the ultimate WWII game.
Predictably, the game comes apart in single-player. The attempt to craft a wide array of computer opponents proves to be wasted energy when no single one of the challengers is very sharp. The computer will stab out blindly to grab supply centers (the source of new armies) with little understanding of long-term planning or durable alliances. This instability at High Command means that you can easily grab what you need through deliberate and steady growth. The fact that you can get close to total victory without ever cutting a deal with the AI demonstrates that the game misses the entire point of diplomacy.
Much development time seems to have been expended on making the map a three-dimensional board, which is as unnecessary a use of 3D as has ever been conceived for a computer game. All the AI opponents grimace and growl. These avatar scowls are intended to convey attitudes toward the player and the game, but you would have to play a lot of solo Diplomacy to figure out what they all meant. And that is inadvisable.
Single-player reveals the ugly truth that, without human opponents, Diplomacy isn’t much of a game. Unlike in other board games, the rules here are not the true contest; they only set the stage for the real battle—the give and take, the push-me-pull-you trust game. At its heart, Diplomacy is about human interaction, not the movement of armies. Bluffing a computer animation of a guy in a spiky hat just isn’t the same.
This leaves the passable multiplayer game. It’s nearly impossible to screw up a classic game like Diplomacy in multiplayer if you have a clear interface and a reliable way to pass on your plans. The chat applet is a little awkward but serviceable. The full complement of seven players is recommended for the best experience, unless you want to leave Turkey in the hands of the computer so you can re-enact the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. Playing with fewer than five players is only slightly better than playing alone. The tutorial is slow but thorough. Newcomers to the game will not be lost for long, so the online game might serve as a decent proving ground for people who want to see how they stack up against real minds.
The question is how much credit to give to a game that is merely a decent port of a well-known title. Unlike a good chess program, this has no library of games or openings. The lack of any significant Diplomacy variant list (there are hundreds of different versions) is a major oversight. Though the board game has been played over e-mail for years, there is no PBEM client in the computer version. As elegant as the icon orders interface is, it is no substitute for face-to-face discussions or a well-crafted letter.
It’s worth remembering that Paradox’s first big hit, Europa Universalis, began as a board game, too. Its cardboard predecessor was an unwieldy mess of rules and charts that the computer game adaptation mostly tossed out in favor of a fresh, deep, and fascinating revision. That option simply wasn’t available for Diplomacy. Tinkering with the core game would be like assigning resource points to squares on a chessboard. Diplomacy is one of the greatest board games ever devised. Re-imagining it is out of the question.
This is a pity. With artificial intelligence as unintelligent as it is, the pure thrill of Diplomacy is untranslatable to the computer. And there are already well-established online avenues for playing the game. Paradox’s Diplomacy is not just unimpressive—it’s probably unnecessary.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #182