| This game takes like 8-12 hours, but if you do it in person, it just FLIES by. I was too afraid to take a food break or even a bathroom break because I didn't want to be out of earshot of everyone else so they could scheme against me. We had 15 minutes for planning each turn, and that never seemed like enough. You want to talk to everyone, sometimes including one person, then again after that person leaves to talk to someone else and the third person tells you 'Actually I didn't mean what I told him. Screw that guy, let's do this instead.' And then that guy backstabs YOU instead, and you find out their quarrel was all a ruse for everyone else and they were actually just pretend trading supply centers back and forth, not actually fighting. It was overwhelming and I never knew who I could trust, with each turn just nailbiting seeing how it actually played out. But it was also one of the most exhilarating (yet exhausting) gaming experiences in my life. There's also websites for doing it online, and you send messages back and forth, and can set how long each turn takes (like a day or two maybe). It still works that way, but the experience isn't quite as overwhelming. Not bad for a 62 year old game. |
I found the best Diplomacy framework is a hard 15 minutes/turn limit. After 15 minutes, your moves are down on paper or they don't happen. This yields a 4-5 hour game.
By "best", I mean, "it's fun, it's intense and it's done". I see a lot of variations being described along with notes they became intolerably intense for people.
Which is to say, this isn't a framework that needs help to be made more engaging. Keeping the excess-engagement genie sometimes in the bottle is more the challenge here.