I Played Diplomacy: World of Chaos

I've long been fascinated by the game Diplomacy. Allegedly the favorite board game of John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy is a war game with relatively simple mechanics where seven players try to take over pre-WWI Europe. What differentiates it from other war games you may be familiar with, such as Risk, is that there is no random element: all moves are simultaneous and deterministic. Two armies of equal power cannot overpower each other. In order to win, you must enlist the help of others. But all friendships are contingent: you'll have to determine the best time to betray your former allies in order to win. This mechanic, "backstabbing", is core enough to the game that it is abbreviated "stabbing": making a promise to someone that puts them in a vulnerable position, then exploiting their trust. This means that the primary mechanic of Diplomacy is lying and manipulating others towards your will.

I am by no means an expert in the game, but got recently re-interested in it through the YouTube channel DiploStrats, which is impressive in its ambition: covering games turn-by-turn, move-by-move for hours on end. This is how I (and many others) found out about Diplomacy: World Chaos. I have only played Diplomacy a few times. I had a copy of the board game in high school, but could never find seven people willing to spend a full day on this board game. The community of competitive Diplomacy is understandably pretty small. I played a few games online and briefly ran a game series with some coworkers. I don't really know how strategically to play Diplomacy, nor what to expect from a 340 player game. I sort of came up with my strategy as I went. up. I picked a random country and was assigned Quebec.

Diplomacy is not a rational game. If everyone played "rationally", no one would move anything and the game would end up a draw. This is where personality and style come in. I quickly learned that it matters a lot what immaterial things people value. Some people are alliance players: they want to build coalitions that work together and have a strong sense of justice. Others are "villains", willing to lie, cheat, and sell out anyone to get a leg up, making enemies along the way who eventually become forced to respect them. And still others are "meme" players, whose primary goal is to unite on some absurd or funny plan.

There are strategic benefits to each of these styles, and players that follow each of them justify them strategically, but ultimately a lot of it comes down to values. You have to get people to care about something immaterial. It matters, especially early in the game, what people want and enjoy doing.

I found myself much more interested in the "villain" and "meme" styles than alliance play. Endless discussions in the Canada chat voting over this or that procedure, more than anything, bored and frustrated me. And as a practical matter, I didn't have the ability to read chat all day, or even every day. So I opted with a different strategy. My strategy was that of "free Quebec" — I would openly operate independently, making and breaking alliances as I went. My second strategy was a sort of radical openness and general chaos — inundating people with every thought that I had, promising wildly contradictory things to everyone, and mixing radical openness with bald-faced lies. Finally, I wanted to have fun with it. My goal was to win solo, not as part of an alliance, but not antagonize people. And I was willing to take wild, irrational risks and do silly things for fun. I told people that what made me different than others is I do not fear elimination: and at a certain point, when the game was kind of exhausting me, that was true.

Diplomacy is a very mentally taxing game. At some points, I became totally obsessed with the game, doing press for hours on end. I'd do Diplomacy during work, I couldn't stop talking about the game to my friends, I'd interrupt a conversation to go do press or check moves. I don't think I was involved enough that it had a negative impact on my life, but I can see how easily players can get burnt out from this. Some players expressed this openly and had to call in substitutes, and it's a feeling I totally understand. There were moments when the game made me feel genuinely angry, frustrated, and upset. I don't think I let it show too much and never lashed out at anyone on a personal level, but it affected my play: I had to sometimes take breaks, leading to me making sub-optimal moves. It's not surprising to me that people got banned for bad behavior; It's a genuinely ruthless environment. I liked what the game admins said at the beginning about how mentally tough this game is, especially the World variant, with hundreds of people playing for almost two months.

Still: I think that I was able to find balance, and I had absolute blast. It was a memorable experience: I spent a month playing this! As time went on, I got a bit sillier. I built a fleet in possibly the worst position on the map. I sent all my units to Paris when I realized I had nothing better to do. I'd log on and do press at 1AM, mildly drunk coming back from bars before bed, look at the map for a few seconds, and throw out a bunch of insane, half-baked ideas (sometimes, somehow, they worked). I'd appeal to one person to be my friend, then immediately betray them elsewhere. I'd make vague statements like "anyone want to help me out?" and ask people what I should do. I'd publicly state all my moves, sometimes honestly. At one point, I honestly told the Canadians I wasn't reading their press for two days, before returning and replying to everything with a bunch of proposals for how they could betray each other. I would name search "Quebec" and send heart emojis to everyone who said something positive.

Somehow, all of this sort of worked. I started the game by openly stealing from my neighbors. I got three people eliminated quickly, to very limited personal benefit, and made a ton of enemies along the way. Still, for a while, I somehow evaded getting punished for it. I peaked at three SCs and a tie for 13th on the leaderboard, in a game of 340 people. My fatal mistake was Fall Year 4, where I didn't hold my unit in Quebec, leading me to lose the center and get knocked down to two. This was the point at which I knew it was over. My neighbors' patience for my antics was wearing thin, major powers were getting big, and the game was transitioning away from the early game chaos to more long-term consolidation.

Quebec is a strange province, probably the most inland water province on the map, and in a line with a bunch of other powers with no buffer. I think my early strategy of stabbing anyone for dots was the correct one, but I realized that my chaotic, "free Quebec" play didn't really have a long-term plan. My general idea was "might makes right": more SCs demands more respect. But this didn't hold up in the face of a relatively strong and aligned alliance. Better tactics could have gotten me more SCs, but I think that my strategy had fundamental flaws, given my neighbors.

It's interesting how anonymous everyone is in the chat. I had no idea if people were young or old: high schoolers or college students on break for the summer? Older folks with a lot of free time? Or people in their 30s with 9-5s like me? Were they Americans, Europeans, etc? I think I started to get a sense, and I found it fun how people's personal lives bled into the game. When you're talking to people 24/7 for a month, you start to get to know them. People would talk about sneaking away from dates or their partners to play the game, they'd add anecdotes about their work, school, personal lives or interests. One time I was doing press from a Kayak on Lake Tahoe and said "one sec, I'm on a kayak". These moments were rare, and some people revealed nothing about themselves, but I always appreciated them.

At the end of it, what struck me is how personal of a game Diplomacy is. Despite the game being centered around lying, cheating and stealing, you ultimately can't be anything but yourself, you can't hide your personality from others, especially talking to them for so long. I was pretty much myself the whole time, I didn't really play a character or act like someone I'm not. But on the other hand, all of your words and actions are part of a multi-player game of manipulation. Even being nice and friendly can be part of a ploy to build someone's trust before tearing it down. I think that most players I interacted with had a degree of compartmentalization, where they didn't consciously use a lot of "meta" strategy like this: just good tactics and alliance play. It reminded me of how politicians speak: no matter how compelling or honest they may be, every aspect of their public persona and speech is strategically crafted in order to achieve a goal. I thought about how hard it must be to split yourself like this, especially without driving yourself insane or becoming totally evil.

I learned a massive amount from this game, and it was a really great experience. However, I'm not sure if I'd play it again. Maybe if I came up with some way to have better boundaries (both psychologically and in terms of time investment). But I think my strategy would probably be leaning into the things I ended up doing anyway: spread chaos, say absurd things, lie constantly, tell the truth about lying, agree to anything for "the bit", and generally just have fun with it. Diplomacy is a game of strategy, but like in real world politics, it's not always enough just to be the most ruthless and conniving player (many of these players got terribly punished in the mid-game), at the end of the day, often, you have to get someone to have a reason to cheer you on. That's the style of play I found most fun. I loved that the Vikings kept their alliance together by coming to the New World: it was 'a joke', but they were also serious and clever tacticians.

Thanks to all the folks at the Imperial Diplomacy and World Diplomacy Discord for setting things up. I look forward to the retrospectives on this game and the games people set up in the future! There's not really a central hub or public archive of the game that I can link to, but if anyone is aware of one, please let me know and contact me via email! I'd love for information about this game to be preserved. I found this YouTube series by the Benin player but not much else!