WACCon, the Diplomacy hobby’s most sophisticated and, in my opinion, best tournament folded its tents after hosting the North American Diplomacy Championship in 2014. Dubbed Ultimate WAC, the send-off featured a roast complete with an Elvis impersonator. It was an epic weekend, even by the impossibly high standards of the WAC team: Mark Zoffel, whose membership in Seattle’s posh downtown Washington Athletic Club grants us access to the venue and whose generosity keeps the cost reasonable for attendees; Nathan Barnes, the hobby’s greatest showman; and Matt Shields, a Portland resident whose Tournament Director credentials are so impeccable that the Seattle team drafted him long ago to run their events.
Sadly, Ultimate WAC, as the moniker suggests, was the end of an era. … Until now.
The WAC team will be back this September to celebrate DipCon’s golden anniversary. If you enjoy the Diplomacy hobby, then you will not want to miss this event. Here’s what the organizers are saying about the 2019 North American Diplomacy Championship at WAC:
Just a reminder that we are 100 days out from DipCon 2019. September 6-8, 2019.
We will be celebrating 50 years of DipCon–so many great memories with such a great community of people.
We’re doing 4 rounds of diplomacy at the Washington Athletic Club. For those of you that managed to make it out to one of the 10 WACcons we had out here before we retired the event, you know what a show we put on! We’re doing that again and upping the ante a little by including a black tie round, a team round, and randomly drawn scoring systems each round. And! Thanks to some outside support, we can make this happen for $50 a person.
We’ll have a welcome dinner on Thursday night at a downtown venue that we’ll nail down over the summer.
What scoring systems? What’s a black tie round? Where is the WAC? Glad you asked – it’s all here: www.dipcon2019.com.
We have crash space in the Presidential Suite on a first come first serve basis, so please let me know as soon as possible. Rooms can be booked at the WAC, though you’ll find cheaper prices at nearby locations–suggestions for that are also on the website.
It’s going to be a great deal of fun and I’m really looking forward to seeing some great folks. We’re going to play our game, sure. But this is also a chance to celebrate this crazy community that’s meant an awful lot to people over the last 50 years.
See you there,
Nathan Barnes
Seriously, you don’t want to miss this. I’ve attended lots of different tournaments and have enjoyed all of them, but WAC is the one that will make you feel like this weird little hobby of ours could actually play on ESPN2. I hope to see you there.
