September 28, 2007
The Great (Board) Game Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:10 PM EST All the talk of “Great Powers” over the last few days has reminded me of one of my favorite board games of all time: Avalon Hill’s classic Diplomacy. It’s kind of like Risk, but without the dice. The game has up to seven players, each of them representing a major European power of the World War I era (the choices are Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, and Turkey). All the countries start with equally balanced military forces, and there is a limited amount of free territory to gobble up. I won’t go into the minute details of game play, except to say that the game’s crucial innovation is that it does not permit any power to build up hugely superior armed forces in any one geographical area. As a consequence, you can only defeat your opponents through negotiation and deception. If you want to invade Trieste, you must somehow persuade the player holding it that, in fact, those armies you’re shipping through the Adriatic are actually heading toward Italy. Then you catch him off his guard and you’re on your way to Belgrade. This might sound like players have a limited set of actions available to them, and that games should get predictable pretty quickly. I assure potential players that this is not the case. The range of possible actions and outcomes is restricted only by the creativity of the players involved. Because there is no element of totally random chance, as there is in Risk, you won’t end up having the game dissolve into a series of ridiculous, strategy-free battles and utterly unlikely outcomes. You just might need to patch up a few friendships after a winner is declared. A while back I was speaking to a friend about the dearth of new board games after the model of Risk or Diplomacy. We agreed that part of this had to do with the expanding comparative appeal of computer games. But he pointed out that it also probably stemmed from the fact that the world we live in today doesn’t lend itself so much to a Diplomacy-style board game. As John Steele Gordon observed a few days ago, warfare between heavily armed, developed nations is a far less likely prospect today than it was a century ago. Maybe that helps explain why a Diplomacy enthusiast like Henry Kissinger has become even less effective with age.
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