Across the Board

Diplomacy  is a complicated game.  Now,  there's  an understatement! However, when learning how to play it, there is one source which can't be ignored: the creator of the game, Allan B Calhamer. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/ Philosophies If you read anything Calhamer wrote, it seems clear that he had a certain way of playing in mind. Play to solo; if you can't solo, play to prevent any other player from soloing. The objective is to win - to solo - and the secondary objective is to draw, to prevent that other winning; nothing else matters. Stab when you have to; maintain an alliance only so long as it's useful, and keep in mind that 'useful' means until the alliance is preventing you from winning. I call this philosophy  Calhamerism . And yet, for a number of reasons, other philosophies have developed, all of which vary from the origins of the game. I will examine the varieties of philosophies in another series of posts, but it is worth summaris...

Diplomacy  is a complicated game.  Now,  there's  an understatement! However, when learning how to play it, there is one source which can't be ignored: the creator of the game, Allan B Calhamer. http://hybridsrising.com/ In the Diplomacy Archive , there are two articles which deal with how Diplomacy came into being: A Dozen Years of Diplomacy  (1966; First published in Diplomania, issue 12, Aug 1966.) The Invention of Diplomacy  (1974; First published in Games ad Puzzles, issue 21, Jan 1974.) Both articles explain the forces that led to Calhamer creating  Diplomacy and they are, pretty much, repetitive of each other. Although they explain how the game was formed, they also have implications on how Calhamer intended the game to be played. The Influences From A Dozen Years of Diplomacy : At the end of World War II, I came across an article on "post-war planning" which reviewed the European diplomacy of the period 1815-1914 and...