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by tullianus 1298 days ago
Two features that make Diplomacy particularly bad:

1. Length. An in-person game can last easily 12 hours, and is mentally exhausting. Getting 10 hours in and THEN getting screwed by your friend feels worse than a game with less time investment.

2. Design. It's difficult to survive the opening few hours without alliances, but only one player can win, so everyone is incentivized to defect at exactly the moment they think they can make greater gains by defecting than by cooperating. Being betrayed, even if you survive, forces a total rethink of strategy and ruins the next hour or two of gameplay.
2 comments
mikelevins 1298 days ago
I was a member of an enthusiastic friends-and-family gaming group through the early and middle 1980s. We spent a good chunk of that time on Diplomacy, then moved to modified Diplomacy on custom maps (my first wife worked for USGS Map Sales, and so we had good maps to work with in creating our own Diplomacy maps), and from there we graduated to Nomic.

If you think Diplomacy is long and exhausting, wait till you get a load of Nomic with a bunch of enthusiastic players.

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irq-1 1298 days ago
This? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14451/nomic

> In the words of Nomic's author, Peter Suber: "Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed."

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mikelevins 1297 days ago
That’s the one. An intelligent and enthusiastic group of players can extend it indefinitely. It’s all lawyering and deal making, even more than Diplomacy, it can continue for hours and hours, and you dare not leave the room for a second, lest all your carefully worked out dealmaking be washed away in an instant.
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legitster 1298 days ago
> An in-person game can last easily 12 hours

How are you playing it? We've never had a game run over 4 hours.

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tullianus 1298 days ago
New players and stretchable diplomacy period length :)
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legitster 1298 days ago
> stretchable diplomacy period length

Yuck. I can not stress enough how important a timer is to play Diplomacy in person.

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SamBam 1298 days ago
I've generally heard of people playing over a weekend. So things like meals and sleeping sometimes happen during the negotiation turns.
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