I'll Always Have Paris

DIPLOMACY

I learned a new game at my brothers' beach retreat this summer. It's called "Diplomacy." I think you'll like it. Here's how it goes.

My nephew, Tom, brought a crate of games with him, but was most keen to play one called "Diplomacy." The game had won a Nobel Prize, to hear him tell it. It was "Kennedy's favorite." There were "dozens of online discussion groups devoted to it." Books. Web sites. Entire universities, it seemed like. Students battling students for World Domination.

Well, (partial) World Domination, anyway. After the first turn, when I tried to move my troops, Risk-like, around the edge to the other side, Tom laughed. "You can't attack across the edge of the board."

"Why not," I asked. "They're next to each other."

"No they're not. North America is in between them," he said.

"But North America is not on the board," I protested.

"Precisely. It's not the whole world."

So onward we proceeded in our game of (partial) World Domination, in which, as is the case in the real world, none of us knew or understood the rules.

Tom had *read* the rules. He waved around a clutch of papers in 10-point type printed off the Internet -- sixty four pages, or something like that. We were all free to read them, too, which we declined. We preferred to squeeze the rules out of Tom as we needed them, and then berate him when we failed to ask the right questions or even understand what he said.

Playing the game, as in real life, is a lot different than reading the rules. So Tom didn't really understand the rules either until he saw them in motion, played out in a series of troop movements followed by resolution sessions.

Tom announced that it was okay if it took several days to play the game. We all groaned. Then we set aside a table that had been my dressing table and it became the Diplomacy Table around which our vacation would revolve.

RISK

Diplomacy is a lot like Risk. I don't know if you have ever played Risk. It is not like Monopoly. In Risk, the entire Earth is in play, you start with troops and territory, and you slowly add troops and territory or you die. When everyone is dead except one player, the game is over.

Risk can take hours to play. It would take days to play, except the game's inventors realized this pacing problem and added a trigger mechanism: cards that are exchanged for increasingly large sums of armies. In Risk, the world has a built-in destabilization plan. One player reaps a sudden, disproportionate windfall, then wipes out the others. Come to think of it, that is very similar to the real world of late. Risk is a study in globalization leading to destabilization.

Diplomacy has no such trigger. So impossible is it to accumulate enough strength to take over the world that they left two-thirds of the world off the board. The game was still too long, so they made it so you only have to hold eighteen "supply centers" and you win. There are 60-some countries in Diplomacy but only 30-some supply centers.

In Risk, the wheeling and dealing, bargaining, alliance-building, and double-crossing usually happens right in front of you. With a wink and a nod, two players agree not to attack each other, and to wipe you off the face of the Earth instead. Risk can lead to sore feelings.

The best Risk player I ever saw was Leo Drolshagen. Of course, he's German, as were the makers of Risk, most likely, and certainly the makers of Diplomacy. My nephew, Tom, who is a game aficionado, says that "all the best games are designed by Germans."

Drolshagen never lost. My brother, Mike, who was one of the best Risk players I ever saw, could not beat Leo. I had four brothers, and four sisters, and Drolshagen had a younger brother who played with us, too, and none of us could beat him.

That's frustrating, because it means first of all that Risk is not a game of chance -- it's a game of skill, like chess. Secondly, Leo Drolshagen has more skill than any of us. Period. That turned out to be true. He got some ungodly SAT scores, went to Vanderbilt (I think) and went on to become an M.D. and no doubt a nuclear physicist as well. He probably designed the European Economic Union.

Anyway, the worst Risk player I ever saw was my good friend, James Scranton. His stock in trade was unpredictability. No one could ever predict his moves because they were always stupid, and we knew he wasn't stupid, but he played like a complete moron. That was his strategy. Randomness. He would attack for no reason, without goal or strategy, and it irritated the hell out of whomever he attacked. He was the wild card in the game. I never saw him win. He never even lasted very long. But he always managed to put a monkey wrench into the game that left everyone else sore.

My ex-wife, Storme, was an excellent Risk player, which is not necessarily a good thing. Her strategy was to build slowly. She preferred to attack the least amount possible to get her card and gradually build strength. In my family, you do not let someone hold a continent in Risk. Ever. Period. To your dying last troop. You are socially obligated to break continents. Not so, Storme. She would let others hold their continents and took offense if you tried to break hers.

I am an attack player. I like David and Goliath odds, and the dice always give the edge to the attacker. I will go for as much territory as I can, as fast as I can, even at the expense of wearing myself thin. It's all conquer, conquer, conquer with me (and many of my eight siblings). Except that I will hew to the creed of self-sacrifice to break a continent.

Let's just say that if you play Risk, and your wife has a hold & build strategy and you have a lay-waste strategy, you are going to go to bed mad some nights, and that's just not healthy for the relationship. When Storme and I played with James Scranton, I was surprised there wasn't blood shed. We both wanted to kill him, whereas Storme and I were just furious with each other.

It was much the same with my siblings. I hated the way all of them played. I particularly hated games where I got rubbed out early, sacrificed to some scumbag alliance between siblings who were a little quicker than me. My nephew, Tom, says Risk has too much luck in it. I guess that means he doesn't win every time. But Diplomacy supposedly has all the luck taken out of it. There are no dice, no cards, no sudden windfalls. A better way to say it is that Diplomacy is all talk and very little action.

MORE DIPLOMACY

After a couple of rounds of all of us knocking up against the rules and trying to figure this game out, I could see my situation was hopeless. My nephew, Tom, who held most of Asia, had made an alliance with his fiance, Laura, who held Northern Europe. Under their mutual non-aggression pact -- sealed with a kiss, no doubt -- they agreed to leave their flanks open and take their troops forward to the front lines.

Tom and Laura have played enough games to know that it's best to align with your girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse -- for diplomatic reasons -- when playing any sort of game. What was he going to do, attack his future wife in front of his assembled family? Not a chance.

So Laura took me on in Europe and Tom took on Uncle Barry in the Middle East and my brother Kelly was rubbed out pretty fast in Turkey. That left my niece, Olivia, who was on my flank with nowhere to go except to attack me or her Dad. I cut a deal with Olivia.

MONOPOLY

When I was about Tom's age and in college, I had the pleasure of teaching Monopoly to an Israeli who had never played the game. That he was a Socialist at the time, and I a Libertarian, made the experience even more delightful. We started this lesson one night in a pub in East Lansing.

As the other players were explaining the game, the Israeli asked, "How do you win?"

And my friends said you won by getting all the property. And I said that's not true. And they said getting all the money. And I said, "No."

"You win by being the last player in the game," I said.

And they looked at me very oddly and huffed, "And you do that by getting all the property or all the money."

And I said, "We'll see."

And so we went on explaining the rules and then playing the game and no one thought anymore of it -- except me. I decided then and there to try to win Monopoly without having the most money or the most property. I made deals to exchange the property I bought for free rent on other players' properties, or for a percentage of the take, such as 15%, for a color-coded set-maker.

After about two hours of play, I was out of property. I looked for every opportunity to go to jail and hang there, because that was the safest place for me. Between GO money, free rent, and my cut of other players' rents, I could handle any Chance or Community Chest setback. I proceeded around the board, loop after loop, just scraping enough money to pay rents due.

Houses went up, hotels went up, players lost everything, but no one could get me out of the game. We had been playing for five hours. I was safely in jail, when finally my Israeli friend said, "I give up. I cannot play any longer. You have won."

Then everyone agreed I had won. They also agreed that I had ruined Monopoly for them forever and that what I had done was contrary to the whole spirit of the game. That was maybe my happiest moment on planet Earth.

FINAL DIPLOMACY

So here we were on Tomahawk Island, on the outer banks of North Carolina, indoors, playing a game of (partial) World Domination that did not even include North Carolina, and everyone is mouthing off about not knowing the rules and hating this game, and no one is mouthing off more than me.

But I calmed down when I finally saw what a sweet little setup the fates handed me. I made an alliance with my niece, Olivia, that she could rummage through my flank and take countries at will while I held off the female half of the Tom & Laura lovebirds up in Europe. That was okay with Olivia.

Laura was not too happy with my strategy, since it meant battling her to a standstill while giving Olivia a free pass but, hey, by that time I had zero interest in the game. I could see I was between a fiance and a niece and I had no chance, so I fell on my sword. That's diplomacy.

As my pieces left the board, however, a new reality settled in. I held one country: Paris. It is a supply center. I can stay alive as long as I can hold Paris. I would lose to any attack from two armies. However, I had a pact with Olivia. She agreed to never attack Paris. She further agreed to support me against attacks on Paris from Laura. Since Laura could only attack with two armies, she would never be able to take Paris as long as Olivia supported me.

And so it came to pass, my friends, that in the game Diplomacy I outlasted everyone. Once Olivia had consumed the territory around Paris, I was safe from attack. I was in the game, but I never attacked nor was attacked. I neither had to move or defend myself. I stood, motionless, in Paris, while around me great battles were fought and won and lost.

Because someone can win in Diplomacy by taking only 18 supply centers, the game could come to an end without me ever having to relinquish Paris. In fact, the game ended when everyone got tired of playing. I wonder if that is how the real world will come to an end one day -- everyone decides to stop fighting?

While some will say Tom won Diplomacy, because he was the most likely to capture 18 supply centers -- or because he achieved his victories without having to attack his fiance -- I feel as though I won. Any game for (partial) World Domination where I can spend the entire time peacefully in Paris is my kind of game.

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