TEACHING DIPLOMACY
A Five-Minute Teaching Guide.
Players: there are 7 players in the game, one for each of the major powers in Europe in 1901:
England/France/Germany/Italy/Austria/Russia/Turkey
Turns are divided: Spring and Fall with the game starting in Spring 1901.
Players discuss their plans for their pieces privately at the beginning of the Spring and Fall moves.
You are not bound by anything you say or do with another player.
Players secretly write down their orders for their pieces and then they are revealed and adjudicated simultaneously.
Abbreviations in order writing are listed on the conference map with S for Support and C for Convoy. When writing a support for a piece to move you have write where the target piece is moving to.
There is no discussion when players have to retreat or make adjustments to their positions.
The map is divided into different named spaces.
Spaces can be all water, all land or coastal.
Split Coasts exist in St. Petersburg, Bulgaria and Spain. A fleet in those spaces must be on one coast or another.
There are 34 supply centers on the map (stars/dots) scattered in 60+ named spaces.
To win you need 18 supply centers at the end of a Fall move.
Players start with 3 or 4 supply centers; these are your home centers in one of 7 Great Powers.
Two piece types are: Army and Fleet.
For every supply center you own at the end of the Fall you may have one piece on the board.
If you are short of pieces you build new ones in unoccupied home centers.
If you have more pieces than supply centers you must reduce your pieces to equal the number of supply centers.
Each piece has equal strength so it moves with a force of 1 plus 1 for each of its supports.
An Army may move or give support for another piece to move into or hold an adjacent land or coastal province.
A Fleet may move or give support for another piece to move into or hold an adjacent water or coastal province.
Only one piece may be in a space at any time.
You may move all or some of your pieces each turn.
Your piece may only do one thing in any turn:
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MOVE |
to an adjacent space or be convoyed from a coastal province to a coastal province Fleets in split coasts may only move to adjacent coastal or water spaces. |
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SUPPORT |
to defend another adjacent piece in place if you could have moved there and it is not moving. |
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SUPPORT |
a specific piece to attack another space that your unit could move to; fleets in split coasts may only support moves into a space that they could have moved on. |
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CONVOY |
if a fleet, you can assist in convoying an army. |
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HOLD |
(also called Stand) in place doing nothing. |
A piece moves only one space at a time to an adjacent space unless you are an Army being convoyed.
No switching. Units ordered to each other's space do NOT switch positions unless one is being convoyed.
When giving support you are adding your force to the mover on, or the holder of, a space.
You may support other people’s pieces.
Bounce: if units of equal support try to move to an unoccupied space then they BOUNCE and no one gets in.
Supports are CUT by a piece moving on the supporter from other than the space that the support is directed at.
To force someone out of a space requires that you have greater force than the piece that is holding the space plus all of its supports to Hold. A move with one support and a hold with one support bounce.
Cut supports do not count for the determination of who has the most force.
A convoy is a move of an army in a coastal province to another by a fleet or a chain of fleets in adjacent water spaces
A fleet in a coastal province may not convoy.
You cannot dislodge or cut support of one of your own units. No ‘friendly fire.’
Units forced out of their space are dislodged and must retreat to an adjacent space.
You may not retreat to a space that was the site of a Bounce.
You may not retreat via a convoy.
If you cannot retreat or decide not to retreat, the piece is disbanded.
A piece that is dislodged has no effect on the space from which the mover came that dislodged it.
A convoying fleet that is dislodged disrupts the convoy and the convoy does not take place.
Oddities: Kiel and Constantinople have a single coast due to their waterways (Kiel Canal/Bosphorus). Denmark is a coastal province that connects with Sweden so armies can go between them but does not divide itself or the Swedish coast in two. As a coastal province you may not convoy through Denmark, Kiel or Constantinople.
