Freshman year of college, I was invited to play by friends in the dorm. I played Italy, poorly.

Started at age 13 in 1980 with my twin brother and friends, our older brother and some of his gang already knew how to play and we joined in. I played probably 1 full game every Friday or Sat night with those guys (so once a week) for the next 5 years until we moved on to college. In college at W&M and at OSU law school I found others who played and we got games together fairly regularly ... I was having a lull from 2000-2010, playing only once in a while, until I realized on-line Diplomacy existed!

I went in search of something like Diplomacy because I got fed up with losing at Risk because of dodgy dice rolls, I wanted a game where I and I alone determined my fate. After finding diplomacy, couldn't find enough friends to play it with.

So really my first real experience of competitive diplomacy was when I joined here!

I first found Diplomacy when about a month before i joined this site. Somebody on an online forum i go to was trying to get a game of online Diplomacy ready.

I drew France, jokingly complaning about it since France never won anything (how wrong i was, since France is the easiest to play as in Diplomacy). It was an all noob game (well, there was one experienced guy playing Turkey). It was a horrible game though, Italy failed to send in orders by fall, and later Germany did as well. But England let me into the Channel and i got three builds, and you guess what i did to England >:}. We ended up drawing due to the 9 center Germany cd'ing, with everyone but the cd'iers

My high school global history teacher always played Diplomacy with the upperclassmen, mostly seniors and juniors with a few sophomores. The bulletin board outside his classroom usually had three or four games going at once, with no fewer than a dozen students examining them, talking about games, and strategizing. My first game was as a junior in high school, probably 2003. I was Austria. I still remember my opening - Tri-Alb, Bud-Ser, Vie-Tri. I got destroyed. The teacher enjoyed beating younger competition, so he always made sure he won by manipulating dumb high school students. I only won once in high school, I played Germany and stabbed one of my good friends, who promptly quit, giving me the solo.

oh, and for my game we didn't play by the real rules. I opened Bre-Enc, Mar-Spa, and Par-Bur, using the Marseillies army to take both Spain and Iberia in one year.

Just to put a little more detail, I saw my brother play a game on this site when I was twelve, and I wanted to play instantly, but it took awhile for me to start. Unfortunately I have never played a face to face game. ( I probably only know 3 people IRL who play diplomacy, so I never had enough people.) my 2 way draw online was awesome, I was Austria and drew with Italy.

@Fortress --- we play "make up your own rules" all the time -- it's called "vdip"!!

well i am not really a rule breaker. If anything, i am a Rule Nazi. I very rarely break change a rule unless everyone agrees it is stupid and hurts the game

my us history teacher this year had us play diplomacy in class so we could learn the geography at the time of ww1. we played as teams of three players and my team drew italy, we stabbed austria without even meaning to do it then had a three way draw with england and germany.

I played the board game with some classmates of mine and eventually got introduced to the site. My first game was a bad showing for me, but it didn't take long before I had some decent skill in the online game and I found some people that I could set up friendly matches with just for the fun of it. That got me stuck here.

I frequent the Pointless Waste of Time forums, and someone on there started a thread to play diplomacy in the forums.

I clicked on it to see what they were talking about, and after reading the basic rules I knew I had finally found the game for me. Played on facebook for a while until I got sick of all the cheating (seriously, you think it's bad here, but it's not even 1/10 what it is on there) and googled "online diplomacy" which brought me here.

Dont remember how it happened exactly, but like others I was sick of Risk's giant luck factor, and went looking to see if a board game without dice existed. Found this game and site at the same time, and I currently know nobody in real life that plays Diplomacy

For me it was sometime in June when I looked up halo risk and found a page where a video about risk was but after it finished a diplomacy video popped up. It looked interesting so I googled it and found this site to be better than the rest.