DipInit - Diplomacy Country Allocator

September 11, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games, Software

Just uploaded a new application to the site: DipInit, a Diplomacy Country Allocator. This is not only my first Mac application I wrote but something damn useful for Diplomacy players as well.

The problem is always the same: Once you found seven players to get a game going you need to allocate the seven countries that can be played. You can do that by random but why not do it based on the priority by which the players want to play each country? Good idea but what happens when two or more players want to play the same country? This is where DipInit kicks in!

You simply enter the players’ names and the priorities of the players for each country in the respective boxes where priorities range from 1 for most favorite to 7 for least favorite. After entering the necessary information you simply click a button and DipInit will then calculate the best distribution of countries for the given priorities using an algorithm and finally display the results.

There’s already a Windows application managing this, called DipCountry, but well, it’s only a Windows application and honestly: What person, who is even remotely sane, still uses Windows nowadays?

If you want to give DipInit a spin you can find more information on the respective page or simplay download it straight away.

Writing this application really got me hooked to Objective-C, Cocoa, Xcode and Mac coding in general. Guess I should be writing more stuff for everyones favorite OS or isn’t it everyones favorite yet?

World Diplomacy Convention

August 22, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games

I’ve been attending the World Diplomacy Convention 2008 at Burg Lockenhaus in Austria last weekend. From Thursday the 14th to Sunday the 17th we played four rounds of Diplomacy to find the new world champion. And now guess who made it… *drumroll* …not me!

I managed to get to the Top Board - which is more or less the finals for those of you who don’t know about Diplomacy - but that’s where it stopped for me and I could only watch a fellow German player, Julian, to win the game and take the title.

With the competition being that big - there’ve been players from all of the world - I am more than happy that I managed to place 3rd in the end. Up to now my best result in a Diplomacy tournament and that in a world championship, not bad in my books. This also scored me the “Rising Star” trophy which was awarded to the best player of all those which attended their first world championship.

For those of you interested in how a face-to-face diplomacy convention looks like and what a beautiful location we played in I uploaded a couple of photos my girlfriend took during the convention.

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World Domination: The Game

March 7, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games

The Washington Post had a pretty nice article on Diplomacy back in November 2004 which I was just pointed to. It’s really worth a read if you’re interested in learning more about the game or already know it.

I especially liked the following statement which is simply too true:

I would trust him with the payoff mortgage on my house — in cash. But I wouldn’t trust him to stay out of Belgium.

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Diplomacy

February 5, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games, Miscellaneous

Always wanted to write an entry about one of my favorite hobbies but somehow didn’t come around to do it or was just too lazy to write something up. I guess it’s time to change that now.

Diplomacy is a strategic board game (Yes, board game, that means no computers involved you nerds!) released in the late 1950s. The difference to other board games is that it heavily relies on negotiations with the other players and there’s no luck by rolling dice or anything involved like there is in games like Risk for example.

Diplomacy is played with seven players where each player controlls one major European power (England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia and Turkey) on the brink of World War I. The goal of the game is to gain control over the majority of Europe by defeating the other players.

The rules are really simple, what makes the game interesting is the negotiations with other players, trying to convince them that you know what’s best for Europe. There are thousands of articles on Diplomacy already so before I bore you I’d rather give you some hints on where to learn more:

Diplomatic Pouch - Ressource for rules, strategy articles and more
Wikipedia - Nice primer covering the most basic facts
Diplomatic Corps - Global Diplomacy network - A bit outdated :(
Google - The answer to stuff, the intraweb and everything

There are a lot of online communities around where you can play Diplomacy by e-mail, in my humble opinion you should definatly try it one day. It really is interesting and fun to play. To extend the play by e-mail experience there are loads of face-to-face tournaments all around the world for example the World Diplomacy Convention 2008 which takes place in Austria this year.

If you’re interested feel free to have a look at a game I’m currently playing as Turkey in the Diplomacy Nations World Cup which is held by the French community Stabbeurfou. Wish me luck, I might need it…

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