Diplomatic immunity

I often start posts of this variety by saying something like, "One thing I've been doing a lot recently..." And in fact I was about to do just that until I thought about it and realized how completely inaccurate that would be in the case of Diplomacy. I mean, relative to the rest of my life? Sure, I've been playing Diplomacy a lot recently. But I played it for the first time last April and for, I believe, just the fourth time last night. So, does once every three months count as "a lot"? Probably not.

However, this is more due to the difficulty in rounding up at least five people for a game on anything approaching a regular basis than due to a lack of desire in playing more regularly on the part of some of the principals, myself included. I would very easily play at least once a month - while Diplomacy, like other games of its general ilk, can suck away an entire day quite speedily (Wikipedia lists its playing time as "4-12 hours"), I really find myself enjoying it, and I really have no other social outlet that involves an actual group of people.

The basic principle behind Diplomacy, for those of you who might be unfamiliar, is that you are tasked with playing as one of seven primary powers in 1901 Europe - England, France, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey. The aim of the game is to control supply centers - each nation starts with three (except Russia, which due to its size starts with four), and there are various unaffiliated areas on the board which can be controlled (Iberia, Scandinavia and the Balkans in particular) to add supply centers and therefore be able to build more armies. The ultimate aim of the game is to control 18 supply centers (half of the 34 total, plus one).

The reason the game is called Diplomacy is that between each round, you have to negotiate with the other players in (usually) private, one-on-one meetings. If you're England, for example, and you need to commit the majority of your resources to invading Scandinavia, you're probably going to have to negotiate with France not to invade your territory while you're busy moving most of your pieces out of it. You can use these meetings to divvy up neutral territory and thus avoid (for a time) conflict, you can partner with another nation against a common enemy, etc. The trick, of course, is that all of these negotiations are made with the tacit understanding that alliances can be and are broken at any time, sometimes with no warning. Really, the trick of the game is doing the best balancing act between getting people to think you're cooperating while actually not cooperating that much.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, I suppose. But for those who it is, I did look online today and there are quite a few sites that feature online versions of the game, which sounds great - a single game could be sustained until an actual end this way (as it stands we've never played in person to an actual 18-depot winner). I guess I'd put the pros and cons pretty much thusly:

PROS: Should be fairly easy to get a full seven-player game together; no need to spend an entire day playing when you can just do the kind of e-mail/Facebook checking you'd already be doing and only occasionally have to log onto the site to submit orders; the style of the game means that general gameplay would change very little in online form.

CONS: Possibly the most fun point of any game is during the period where everyone reads out their orders for that turn, and this is also the part that would be pretty much entirely lost in online form.

The point is, I'm up for some online Diplomacy. Anyone else?