For those who don't know, Diplomacy is game that lets you control a country in Europe and you try to take over other countries. As the name implies, a lot of the game deals with talking to the other players. To be successful, you need to build alliances and know just when to abandon them.

To actually play, everyone except for the person running the game gets a country with 3 or 4 pieces. Everyone hands orders to the game master at the same time, and all pieces are moved at the same time. There are no dice or anything involved. All battles and such strictly deal with the amount of units attacking. If it is a 1-on-1 battle, no one moves. 2-on-1, and the one army advances.

There are 4 types of moves:
Move/Attack: This moves your piece to an adjacent space.
Hold: Your unit doesn't move.
Support: You use your unit to support another unit. You can support a unit in attacking another space, or support it in holding its position.
Convoy: You use a fleet to transport an army across a body of water to another piece of land.

My european history teacher ran a game a few weeks ago in class because of the parallels it usually draws with actual wars. We had so much fun playing it that I downloaded some mapping software and am currently running a game for some of my friends at school.

The game is really fun to play with smart people. That's the reason I want to start a game here. Would anyone be interested? You just have to send in orders once a day, and it only takes about 5 minutes (more if you include talking to other players about alliances and stuff).

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(board_game)
JDip open source mapping software: http://jdip.sourceforge.net/
The game I'm running at school: http://geocities.com/mcdiplomacy/
A tutorial on the game: http://ry4an.org/diptutor/

I've played this game before, it's really fun. We took one move a day and it took a month or so to complete. Some kids got really into it, they spent all day thinking about it and tried way to hard to win. It's really interesting when you allow players to make up rules as they go along and have nations vote on it.

In short, yeah, that game is fun .

Yeah, one move a day is the way to go. That way you have time to talk to other people and stuff.

I've never played, but I've watched. my uncle and his friends used to play by mail. my personal favorite board game is Settlers of Catan with the knights and cities expansion

Massive necro-post is massive, but I played Settlers of Catan for the first time last night with my sister and brother-in-law and somehow remembered this post. That game is awesome! After only 2 games of it, it's already my favorite board game.

We've got almost all expansion sets here at home. Moar awesomeness!

Oh dear, a necropost

Anywho, yeah pretty fun game, played it once though

Haha, I only noticed that this was a necropost when you mentioned it, otherwise I happily believed you had just discovered Diplomacy. I think I might have missed this topic the first time around, though; it sounds like fun!