September 29, 2007
The Great (Board) Game II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:45 PM EST Alexander Burns yesterday posted about a board game, Avalon Hill’s Diplomacy, which he described as “kind of like Risk, but without the dice.” I haven’t played Diplomacy since college, nor Risk for rather longer, but that description rings true. An interesting thing about Diplomacy in the context of our thread about Great Powers is that as I remember its rules, the game, if played properly, could never end. Diplomacy was a zero-sum game: one side won, which meant all the others lost. An ending required one power to control all of Europe, and rational actors would always combine against so great and obvious a threat—or at least they should have. But they didn’t, so the game always did end. Players made mistakes, which meant failing to realign with other threatened powers quickly enough to restabilize the state system. They too vividly remembered grudges, which they avenged at a greater long-term cost than they were willing to see, or they let clamoring greed excessively mute the shrewder voice of fear, and they took a smaller prize that in the long run let a current friend but future master extinguish their sovereignty. Balance of power theory as classically articulated has that problem: People are often too greedy or too angry or too stupid to see their real collective interest. Additionally, most actors, when threatened by a very great power, do not seek to combine against it, either in Diplomacy or in diplomacy. Some people engage in what the theorists call balancing behavior, but most people seek to propitiate a risen and truly threatening power by sucking up to it, or by seeking to grab a share of the loot. One thing Diplomacy did teach you, if you could learn, was that open treachery was (until the penultimate moment) self-defeating. If you lied repeatedly, nakedly, and shamelessly, few would again trust you, and you were without allies. But since repeated betrayal was necessary, you learned to use evasive and ambiguous language, to which you could later point in self-exculpation. The game taught you, with great precision, what the phrase “diplomatic language” means. People learned that they had to pin you down, and when they thought they had and later discovered that they hadn’t, there was rueful admiration for your successful misdirection, rather than hatred for your deceitfulness. Diplomacy was in that sense less than perfectly realistic but not hopelessly so; it may have captured the frame of mind of some successful old-regime diplomats. Mr. Burns mentions “the dearth of new board games after the model of Risk or Diplomacy.” There was one fascinating hybrid game called World in Flames, which when played with all of its modules simulated the warfare, war economies, and some of the diplomacy of the period 1936 to 1950. Diplomacy, which started in a very abstract version of 1905, had very few pieces and fewer rules, whereas World In Flames, which aimed at much less abstraction, had thousands of pieces and what seemed like thousands of rules. Like Diplomacy, it was best with seven players (the British Commonwealth, Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States, Italy, Japan, and China), and while hard to play—understanding the rules could be real work—I found it utterly fascinating. As I got older, however, it was increasingly difficult to find the time. Before age and responsibilities carried me away, I helped write a few of the rules for a diplomatic module and test some of the other rule sets the game successively employed. Unlike Diplomacy, World in Flames, played competently could end, although in my experience it rarely did, since it seemed to take 80 hours or so (at tournaments it was played over a weekend), and the side that realized it was clearly losing tended to concede. I did notice that people who played it were older—they had grown up on the Avalon Hill historical military simulation games of the 1960s. My guess is that games of its kind lost their audiences to people who grew up with computer games. Too bad. World In Flames was hypnotically interesting, if you were that sort of person. A friend, lost at sea for a couple of days (a small plane had crashed), later claimed that he’d spent some of what he’d thought were his last hours planning a set of moves, and regretting that he would never make them. True story.
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