I am starting a new gunboat tourney where a form of metagaming is required and highly encouraged. This tourney is meant to let people who like to discuss strategies and tactics of Diplomacy get a chance to do just that. I know from personal experience that I greatly enjoy talking with other people about specific moves as well as looking at the board as a whole. Here is my probably poor attempt at presenting my ideas and please help me do a better job of explaining or refining my ideas:

Imagine a circle of seven letters: A B C D E F G A (and we loop back to A here because it’s a circle) and each letter represents a player. So player A has two partners, B and G, while player D is partnered with C and E. Each player knows who his own partners are but no one else’s and during the game, each player may talk to his paired partner about each of their games but not about the identities of anyone else or about his other paired partner. In other words, A should talk with B about how they plan to moves in the games but not about A’s discussions with G. Please do not try to determine who is partnered with whom and who’s playing what country for each game. Obviously, A and B should let each other know which power they have in each game, but they cannot discuss which countries player D have. Players may discuss via PMs or emails. Honors rules apply.

The buy-in is 300 or some multiples of 3 since there are three “winners” at the end: the person with the highest score and the team with the highest combined individual score. Each game is scored out of 420 (LCM of 1 through 7) and it is divided equally among the draw/solo. The twist in the scoring is that if both of your partners make it in a draw, the the points you yourself earn from that game is doubled. For example, if A, B, C and E make it in a draw, then each person receives 420/4 or 105 . However, since both of B’s partners are in the draw, B gets 105*2 or 210 ; A gets 105, B 210, C 105, and E 105. If A, B, C and D make it in the draw, then A gets 105, B 210, C 210, and D 105. The winners are the individual with the highest score and the pair with the highest score. SC counts will be used as tie-breakers.

The partners are chosen based on their own preference. I am hoping to be able to play in this tourney, so I will designate or ask someone to be the secondary TD. Each player will ranked who he/she would like as a partner from 1-6 with 1 being your best choice and 6 your worst. The designated TD will do his/her best to organize the seven players into a circle. Since this is very different than what we’ve done before, and it does involve breaking some aspects of anon gb games -which is why I’ve asked the mods for their blessing, we will play 3 games concurrently to see how they go and if they go well, play 4 more for a set of 7 games. No shuffling will be made. All pauses are asked and agreed before hand or discussed with the TD privately. The TD will pause/unpause the games; do not vote pause.

I will send out some personal invitations and I would also invite you to post here if you are interested. If there is enough interest, we will do two sets of tourneys (one where I’ll play and one where I’ll just TD). I realize that there might be a number of flaws/challenges, so please help me to refine my ideas and let’s make a tourney out of this.