Russia getting rocked by the power of Turkey!Ever since my high school math teacher Mr. Nelson showed me the game Diplomacy in 10th grade, I've fallen in love with it. In case you have no clue what Diplomacy is, check out the Wikipedia article on it.

The board is a map of Europe divided among the seven powers of the game: Austria-Hungary, England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Turkey. The map contains fifty-six land regions and nineteen sea regions, including portions of the Middle East and North Africa. The regions on the board are named after the general regions (e.g. "Bohemia") or countries (e.g. "Serbia"). Many regions or even playable countries (such as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, referred to as England) are named after a significantly smaller part of the region actually on the board (Budapest for Hungary, Holland for the Netherlands, etc). Tunisia is called "Tunis" on some boards. Thirty-four of the land regions contain supply centers, corresponding to major centers of industry or commerce (e.g. "Vienna", "Rome"); this includes several home supply centers controlled at the start of the game, named after capital cities of the time (e.g. "Constantinople," "Berlin"). The number of supply centers a player controls determines the total number of armies and fleets a player may have on the board, and as players gain and lose control of different centers, they may build and must remove units accordingly.

 Basically, you start out as a country with a couple of units. There will be a few centers nearby that if you capture them will allow you to build more armies or navies. However, the supply centers that no one owns quickly become diminished, and the only way to get more is to use some smooth talking and become allies with another country and attack some mutual neighbor. It is a very fun game, very prone to all sorts of backstabbing and strategy.

The problem with the game?

• Can take hours to finish
• Needs 7 people
• Friends can get pissed off at you if you "stab" them

The main issue is that it just takes so stinking long. The perfect remedy for that is an online game where you have plenty of time to enter in your moves and talk to other players. Unfortunately, everytime I had searched for online games, I was always finding play by email games. Now, there is nothing wrong with email, but I need more of a visual, not just sending in commands like Vla to Bls with support from Rum. That would get old real quick.

So, I continued my search for a site where the server would act as a judge and also give me a visual way of entering in my commands and seeing how everything stood.

Well, I finally found it, and it is World Leaders The Game. It offers everything I wanted.

• Visual way of entering in commands and keeping track of all the moves
• Easy way to communicate with other players
• Multiple game variants
• Very pretty interface

If you have never played Diplomacy before, but it sounds interesting, I highly recommend World Leaders. They have some FAQ's that do a nice job of explaining on how to play the game. If you have any specific questions, feel free to leave a comment :)

Update on Friday, June 19, 2009 at 1:03AM by Rob Steenwyk

I have now created a video overview of World Leaders The Game. You can view it by clicking here.