Geek Night: Diplomacy

After last Sunday’s Geek Night, I’ve observed that there are a fair number of us (well: Claire, JTA, Ruth and I, at least) who would be interested in an online, one-day-per-turn game of Diplomacy, an entirely skill-based strategy game made in 1959 and based on World War 1. It’s a really, really simple game, but the only way to win is to negotiate with the other players and to make promises which you may or may not keep. And it’s very clever.

But… the only way to truly appreciate Diplomacy is with a full complement of seven players. So – that means we need three more people who are willing to trade about 15 minutes a day (for about a week and a half to three weeks) for a chance to participate in Geek Night‘s own Diplomacy war. All you’ll need is an internet connection and access to e-mail.

You can even play as a pair or a team, if you like, and have several people ‘lead’ one country (which might be useful if, say, you don’t want to dedicate 15 minutes every day – you can take turns). But the crucial point is that I need to find representation for the seven powers of Europe, and right now I have four.

The game will start next weekend, probably.

We’ll be playing by the standard Diplomacy rules (summary), on a standard map. All player identities will be public and diplomacy between players – by both private and public channels – will be encourages. Any questions, or people who want to join our little game, can be posted as comments or e-mailed to me.

Edit: Player List (see comments for discussion):
Player list currently as follows:

  • Dan & Claire
  • JTA
  • Ruth
  • Jon
  • Andy K & Faye
  • Matt
  • Andy R & Sian

That’s it. No more players this game.

I’ll explain how we’re going to play this by next weekend. Hang in there.

Freedom Sport And Surf

There’s a lesson here for any business with a web site:

I’m sure that you may be familiar with Freedom Sport & Surf, the sports goods shop on Alexandra Road (opposite the carpet shop formerly known as Rumbletums Cafe). Well; they had a website – FreedomSportAndSurf.com. But they let the domain name expire, and it’s been picked up by a porn site: take a look.

In any case, the owners of the store aren’t internet-savvy, and had completely forgotten they had a web site. Similarly, most of the staff weren’t aware of it, either, until a lady came in, recently, and informed the staff member at the counter they she thought it was “disgraceful” that the shop had “things like that” on it’s website, where “children could view it”.

Today, staff at the shop are frantically scrubbing the web address from their carrier bags. Hilarity.