How can I play a short/small, but still satisfying round of Diplomacy?

Question

I liked playing Diplomacy back in university, where I had almost no problem gathering seven people with a whole day (including the nights) to spend.

Nowadays however, I'd consider myself lucky to find maybe four like-minded people who have the better part of an evening to play board games, and my beloved Diplomacy set is gathering dust.

So, especially considering all the variants out there, I'm looking for ways to play and complete a satisfying round of Diplomacy in an evening's time (maybe 3h?) and with four to five players.

Answer 1

As I see it there are two independent questions being asked here. One is how to play a short game and the other is how to deal with having fewer than seven players. I'll discuss them separately.

First what to do when time is scarce. There are two ways I know of to deal with this. One is to play an abridged version, the other is to ensure play proceeds at a decent pace. Apart from Tom's "joint victory" suggestion already mentioned, the other workable option I know of is to agree beforehand to play a fixed number of game years. Then when these game years are completed, whoever has the most centres on the board is declared the winner. (This is quite similar to some practices on the European diplomacy tournament circuit).

Different groups of diplomacy players play the game at vastly different speeds, and this can obviously have a big influence on how much a game can progress in a limited amount of time. Experienced players can get through one game year every 30 minutes, including adjudication and build phases. Most groups of players should be able to proceed at one game year every forty minutes or so. The best way I know of to achieve this is to have everyone agree to have their orders in the box as soon as the time for diplomacy runs out each turn (no "order writing time"). You might also like to try using DipTimer (free windows download) to run your games with.

Second, what to do when you have fewer than seven players. I suspect that the main reason that there are options for fewer than seven players in the rulebook is so that they can advertise as "for 2 to 7 players" instead as "for 7 players". The rulebook versions for 6 or fewer players play poorly. Better is to find and play a map variant designed for the number of players you have. These are variants where the rules are the same, but the map is different (you'll have to print one out). There are lots of variants that have been created and many are terrible. So the best bet is to find one that has been played often. Eg Ancient Mediterranean is a 5 player variant (map downloadable at http://www.variantbank.org/results/rules/a/ancient_med.htm) that has a good reputation.

Of course the best way to solve the fewer than 7 problem is to ensure you have 7 players in the first place! There are many other people in similar situations to you, and there are groups of players over the world who play face-to-face diplomacy and are always looking for new players. If you find such a group geographically near to you, you hopefully don't have to resort to the contortions of the previous paragraph. Your favourite search engine is good for finding such people, as is the website http://diplom.org/Face/hobby_info/

Answer 2

You probably need an odd number of players, say five, to make the game flow with a majority vs. a minority dynamic.

Second, you need to choose two countries to eliminate. Italy is the obvious first choice, least fun to play. Germany is the recommended second choice by the game designers. But that has the disadvantage of separating the board into England-France, and Russia-Turkey-Austria. In a game I once played, we eliminated Turkey, instead, as not really being part of Europe. It had the advantages of keeping the countries connected, and of making Austria fun to play with two fewer enemies. The game itself goes faster with two fewer people.

You put single armies in each city of these eliminated countries, and let human players defend these "city states" by supporting them.

The other rule is that a "minority-majority" wins. That is two people (a minority of five) can declare themselves co-winners if they control 18 (a majority) of the 34 supply centers. Not needing a single winner shortens the game. Alternatively, anyone that survives the whole three hours is a "winner."

In this game, Austria and Russia won. They carved up Turkey and the Balkans, then headed west, while England, France and Germany fought among themselves. Not hard for them to get 18. And the game lasted just over three hours.

Answer 3

May I introduce you to Quo Vadis by Reiner Knizia? You play a family that tries to reach the senate in the ancient Rome. The only way to go up from a politic chamber to another, up to the senate, it's to negociate with others. You must have the votes of at least half the chamber to go up. This game is made for 5 players and really works like Diplomacy. I would suggest you to try it with your friends and you will see that the game is very much like Diplomacy concerning the negociations. About the time it takes, you can play it 2-3 times in 3 hours.

Enjoy playing!