In Diplomacy everyone gets to be an emperor, and emperors don't always treat others with the respect demanded by family and friends. When a child tries to be manipulative, usually the effort is either revealed or rewarded; in Diplomacy both happen at once. No matter how much you remind yourself that Diplomacy is a game, an attack can feel surprisingly personal -- in part, as seasoned players acknowledge, because it is. "Some of it is France attacking England, but some of it is me attacking Michael," says Tom Kobrin of Greensboro, N.C., the one known as Evil Tom.
So sometimes a stab can reverberate beyond the board for years, raising fundamental questions about your ability to read strangers or about the trust underlying a long-standing friendship. Its impact isn't limited to the person on the receiving end of the dagger. As much as I enjoyed back-stabbing in high school, it bothered me that I enjoyed it, and that I might even be good at it -- a character flaw, I assumed then, for an aspiring politician or diplomat. Cunning is celebrated through nicknames and banter in Diplomacy circles, but the same players choose to keep thishobby separate from their professional and personal lives. Satan avoids telling outsiders how he spends his weekends. "I downplay the hell out of it," he says. "I don't want people to get the idea that I engage in this sort of lying and deceptive behavior in my real life. Partly because it isn't how I am in real life, and partly because it is."
(Ian Pollack)
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THE POTOMAC TEA & KNIFE SOCIETY sends out about 100 invitations to its floating monthly games in members' homes. The Tempest in a Teapot, which squeezes three rounds of Diplomacy into a 48-hour period, is its annual to-do; Satan, who lives in Germantown, is the tournament director. It's 6 p.m. on a Friday in August, the first day of this year's Tempest, and Satan is assigning players their tables and countries at the Hunt Valley Inn, a Marriott 20 minutes north of Baltimore. The champion will get a plaque, and the person who pulls off the weekend's best back-stab will receive the Golden Blade. "It's a good award to have, but you win too many of them and people start to wonder about you," Satan says.
The players proceed to unfold the Diplomacy boards, which feature a map of Europe divided into 75 spaces, corresponding to provinces and bodies of water. Spaces marked with dots are called supply centers, and each can sustain one army or one fleet. The major powers -- Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Turkey -- begin the game with three or four pieces in their home country, each one in a supply center. There are a dozen more unclaimed supply centers in minor countries such as Denmark and Bulgaria. To win, one player must occupy 18 supply centers, or a majority of the 34 of them on the board.
A turn begins with 15 minutes of negotiations in which the seven players discuss grand strategy and plan tactics. The pieces can go one space in any direction. Fleets can't go inland, armies can't cross the water on their own, but otherwise all pieces are equally strong. And two pieces can't share a space; for instance, opposing pieces trying to move into the same supply center would mean a standoff. Instead of moving, a piece can provide support to a nearby piece, its own or an ally's. Support is needed to capture a contested province, hold off an attack or force a retreat.
A similar dynamic exists on the strategic level. No player begins the game with enough strength to eliminate another country single-handedly, so you need to gang up. But on whom? Diplomacy is not a strict reenactment of history, so the battle lines of World War I usually go out the window. And while everyone wants to get bigger, nobody can afford to be seen as a threat to the others.
"When you're playing on a Diplomacy board, you are a salesman," says Jim Yerkey of Catonsville, Md., who has played competitive Diplomacy since 1976. "Whatever country you have, you have to sell your story to the other people. And in many cases, it's a different story to each of the other six people."
After 15 minutes, the players draft and submit written orders. Only when these are read aloud do you find out who kept their word, who betrayed you, who distrusted you, who hedged their bets (though the orders might contain a feint). Every piece moves simultaneously -- that is, the pieces that haven't been blocked from moving. The game begins in spring 1900; there are two turns per calendar year. At the end of each fall turn, players take inventory of supply centers, then add or remove pieces until every country has one per supply center.
I wander over to Board 6, where several top players are clustered, including Bad Tom, who is France. Perhaps the most formidable player here is David Hood, who picked up Diplomacy in high school in 1984 -- right around when I did, only he never put it away. Hood, who now practices law in Hickory, N.C., is short and thin, with a widow's peak and reddish sideburns. No diabolical nickname could possibly stick to his clean-cut appearance, honest face and gentlemanly manner. "In this game, lying is okay," Hood says in his smooth Piedmont accent. "You can't do that in a small town."
The timer is set, the spring turn begins, and players pair off to negotiate. With seven boards going at once, the players spill out of the Hunt Valley Inn's Garden Room into the carpeted hallway, the tiled vestibule near the catering kitchen and a brick outdoor patio. One player slinks around to another entrance on the far side of the patio so a clandestine rendezvous will go unobserved.
Hood, who is Turkey, first sounds out his immediate neighbors on the board -- Italy, Austria and Russia -- and tries to put them at ease. The Diplomacy circuit has its own balance of power, and Hood's national reputation and trophy collection make him a prime target for a preemptive attack.
