Form alliances and unhatch traitorous plots as you negotiate and outwit—in a delicate balance of cooperation and competition—to gain dominance of Europe! In Diplomacy, your success hinges not on the luck of the dice, but your cunning and cleverness. Each player represents one of the seven “Great Powers of Europe” in the years prior to World War I.
The game board is divided into provinces. There are three types of provinces, inland, water, and coastal. Coastal provinces are land spaces that are adjacent to water. Provinces designated as supply centers are marked with a circle.
There are two kinds of units, Armies and Fleets. Each province can only hold one unit. All units have the strength of one.
This unit can only move on inland or coastal provinces.
Fleet This unit can only move in water and along coastal provinces. It can also convoy armies across sea territories using the convoy move.
Each turn represents six months of time. Beginning in 1901, the first turn is called a Spring turn and the next a Fall turn. After each Fall turn, Powers gain a new unit when they gain control of a new supply center and lose a unit whenever one of their supply centers is occupied by a different power.
Each turn has a set of phases:
Arguably the most important phase of each turn, during the Negotiation phase players make non-binding agreements with each other.
During the Order Writing phase of a turn, each unit may be given a single order. Units may hold, move, support, or convoy.
The unit will defend if its territory is attacked, but otherwise do nothing. Unordered units automatically hold.
The unit tries to move into or attack an adjacent province. If a unit is ordered to move into an occupied province, it is referred to as an attack.
The support order is the most critical order in Diplomacy. You can support another unit’s move or hold order. A support order adds a unit’s strength to another unit. As no one unit is stronger than another you need to combine the strength of multiple units to attack other territories.
If a unit is attacked, its support is cut because it must defend itself.
If the number of supports for an attacking unit are greater than the defending unit and its supports, the attack succeeds and the defending unit is dislodged.
Fleets given the convoy order can move an army across water provinces. You can string multiple convoys together to move an army unit a large distance in a single turn.
After all orders have been turned in, orders are read out loud and adjudicated at the table.
After all orders have been adjudicated and conflicts resolved, any dislodged units must retreat to an adjacent space they could ordinarily move to. Units cannot retreat to a province that is occupied, the province from which an attack came, or a province that is vacant because it had a standoff (bounce).
During the adjustments phase, Powers determine control of supply centers and adjust their unit counts.
A Power controls a supply center when one of its units occupies that supply-center province at the end of a Fall turn. Once a country gains control of a supply center, it can leave the center vacant and still keep control of it, as long as that center isn’t occupied by another country at the close of a Fall turn.
After each Fall turn (including retreats, if any), players adjust their units to match the number of supply centers they control. This may result in some units being disbanded (if the player has lost supply centers that year) or in some units being built (if the player has gained supply centers that year).
If a country has fewer supply centers than units, it must disband the excess number of units (owner’s choice of which units).
If a country has more supply centers than units, it can place new units in each unoccupied supply center of its home country that it still controls. It can’t build units in supply centers outside its home country.
If any Power controls 18 supply centers, they automatically win the game. Players can agree to end the game before this happens through a voting process known as a Draw Vote. All votes are secret, and the results must be unanimous. Before a game begins, players can also agree to end the game some other way such as at a specific time or after a specific number of game turns.
The Windy City Weasels use the Tribute Scoring System to calculate the score at the end of each game. The incentives in Tribute scoring can be summarized thus: Survive, grow as big as you can, top the board if possible, otherwise keep the board-topper as small as possible. Find out more about the Tribute Scoring System here.
Now that you have learned the basics, you’re ready to play the game.
All graphics from backstabbr. Document format from webDiplomacy.
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