CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. – For the four years alumnus Kai Hsieh was enrolled at the university, he spent six hours every Saturday afternoon trying to do one thing: take over Europe.
Seated around a board with six of his friends, Hsieh would plot, lie, cheat and negotiate his way through the game Diplomacy, forming alliances and stabbing other players in the back through the afternoon and night. And when the bout was finally over, Hsieh would go home and start the process all over again online, with players he’d never met and games that could stretch on for months.
For the small number of students who play, the board game is unique not only for its intense pace and intrinsic use of social skills but also for the community it created on the campus through Diplomacy Club.
But, now that the majority of club members are graduating, players worry the game which helped them break out of their shells and make new friends will disappear from the campus forever, disservicing students who could have used Diplomacy to come into their own.
Game Day
At 9:30 a.m. Saturday in the Doubletree Hotel in Charlottesville, Va., Hsieh was already knee-deep into his first round of gaming at the Dipcon, an annual national convention for Diplomacy enthusiasts. This year, 35 players from every age group gathered for three days to compete against one another.
Diplomacy is played around a board showing the map of Europe as it existed in the beginning of the 20th century before World War I. The seven players must represent France, England, Italy, Germany, Russia, Turkey or Austria-Hungary, with the goal of dominating Europe through negotiation, alliances and back-stabbing.
Created by Harvard alumnus Allan B. Calhamer in 1954 and released commercially in 1959 because it took him so long to perfect, Diplomacy has four simple rules. The manual describes how often players can trade their armies or supplies, how they can move around the board, and also states that a player can support or attack another country.
The rest is up to the players. During the game’s negotiation periods, which span for about 15 minutes at a time, players can get up and move around a room they play in. They can seek each other out or corner each other to form alliances or plans of attack. The game gets complicated when betrayal enters the picture: There is no limit on how many alliances players can form, and the movements get very complex, often causing the game to span for hours and end in a draw.
Lisa Marshall, a professional player who attended this year’s Dipcon, said a winning strategy involves doing whatever possible – manipulating, persuading, kissing up, intimidating – to get other players into alliances.
“We were comparing it to Survivor: You’re thrust into a room with a group of people who you have to size up immediately, and sometimes you have to be coldhearted,” she said. “Being persuasive can be charming or bullying – whatever works. The friendlier you are with someone off the board, the more comfortable they are going to be on the board.”
Being secretive about intentions is also important, she said.
“If everyone knows you hate that guy, they’ll use it to their advantage,” she said. “That’s why you keep personal opinions to [yourselves].”
Staring intently at the board during the convention, Hsieh’s eyes dart from opponent to opponent as he listens to the moves being read out loud by the game’s referee: England moves to support France, Turkey moves into Greece, Germany sends in an order for more units. Then, five minutes later, the time for negotiation has begun: Hsieh jumps up, turns to the man next to him and says, “Can I talk to you?” The chance for alliance-making and calculated betrayal has begun.
As Hsieh zips around the room during Dipcon, stalking opponents and working out deals, he has more than one mission in mind. He is at the convention not only to conquer Europe, but also to prove to the club members back home that there is a reason to care about the game.
The Diplomacy Club
As various club members and Hsieh, its creator, have graduated, the club is facing the possibility of disbandment this year. The current club president and treasurer are graduating this spring, no one is actively recruiting members as Hsieh did, and the Student Government Association has not approved the club’s funding for the year.
Hsieh decided to attend Dipcon this year to show members there are opportunities for playing the game beyond the campus, and that the communities forged between professional gamers can be just as special and long-lasting as those bonds between the students who played the game during his four years here.
Though the game centers on “cunning and cleverness, honesty and perfectly-timed betrayal” as “the tools needed to outwit your players,” according to the Diplomacy gaming manual, the social nature of the game still encourages a casual environment that allows friendships to develop, said Erin Mulcare, president of Diplomacy Club and a senior English language and literature major.
“The people that we started playing with, I didn’t know all of them to begin with, but now I feel like most of them are not necessarily my best friends, but I know all of them and I’m comfortable with all of them,” she said. “It didn’t just start out with that, but it ended with us all knowing each other.”
David Hood, the tournament director of the national Dipcon Championship held this past weekend said many people create lifelong relationships through the game.
“People who are interested in board games get into [Diplomacy], but those that stay [into it] do for the personal aspect,” he said. “Some people meet their husbands and wives here. Some of these people, their best friends are Diplomacy friends.”
Such was the case for the seven members of the Diplomacy club, which Hsieh began in 2003. By playing once or twice a month, the members grew more comfortable with each other and formed numerous friendships, even though the nature of the game stresses manipulation and deceit, Hsieh said.
The only drawback is that personal relationships outside the game can skew how people play, Hood said.
“Personal drama definitely plays a role in negotiation,” he said. “It screws up your thinking about whether you stab someone or not. It’s not about, ‘How will that make them feel?’ The game isn’t supposed to be about that.”
Much of the fun of the game comes from its unpredictability, in that it is so unlike other board games where the end is predictable.
“It is the element of chance in the game in so much that you don’t know what the other players are going to do,” said Beau Bigelow, a senior electrical engineering major. “So if you’re working with anyone, you have to work with the idea that they’re going to turn at you.”
Though Hsieh didn’t do as well as he would have hoped at the convention – getting phased out before the game ended as a draw – the experience was incredibly educational, he said. And he still has a hope that the game will continue to have its niche on the campus.
Marshall, the only female player at this year’s Dipcon, added that losing the Diplomacy Club would deprive future students – even self-proclaimed nerds – of fun and competitive social interaction.
“It’s gonna be a bunch of geeks, but the thing is, you cannot be socially inept to play this game,” she said. “For a lot of people, this helps draw you out of your shell.”
Contact reporter Roxana Hadadi at roxanadbk@gmail.com.
