When I first joined the web site, I wanted to join a game, because I had never played a video-game version of Diplomacy and wanted to see it in action.

I clicked on a live game and joined.

Something spectacular happened - the other players engaged me in Diplomacy. Plots were hatched. Conspiracies were launched. Minor powers became major powers, and the major powers then squabbled over power.

It was completely freaking awesome.

I had been playing Diplomacy for something approaching thirty years at that point. I'd of course played a couple of games in college, but college games were always troubled. The school I was at didn't have a lot of guys so it was hard to get enough people together for a poker match, much less a Diplomacy game.

Most of the games that I'd played up to that point in my life were in high school. The high school I'd attended had a few hundred students, out of whom you had about two dozen geeks. These were the potential Diplomacy candidates back before nerds gained social acceptance.

Out of these geeks about a dozen lived out in the county, making it logistically infeasible for them to attend a match over on our side of the tracks. That left about a dozen kids as potential recruits for a game. Now Joe, Tom and Carl were all comic book geeks, which meant that they thought they were too cool to sit down and play a board game. On a snow day, they were more likely to rent an anime or something. Because animated robot battles are so much cooler than Risk.

Art was usually grounded because his parents kept catching him smoking, and Vince wasn't allowed out after stealing a car.

In case you've lost count, we're down to seven. Seven guys that I could potentially recruit for a game. Assuming that everyone was getting along that particular week. Assuming that nobody had too much homework.

What I'm saying is that out of the thirty or forty some odd games that I enjoyed in high school, I never once sat down to a table where seven players were playing, where every single country started with a player. Sure, we could get Kevin's little sister to play sometimes, but she didn't really get it. And yeah Bill's pops would play for an hour (provided that we started after dinner) before he'd retire to his study with his pipe and a newspaper. But for the first thirty years that I played the game, what I mean to imply is that if I could get a game with five people in it, I felt really really lucky. Sometimes we'd play a game with just three or four players, just to kind of sort of enjoy the fun of a Diplomacy game. Because that's all we had.

And after Kevin joined a rock band, he didn't show up that much. Mike was pretty much a ghost during the summer when he'd go to help out at his grandparents farm, and this was the most important season for gaming.

And perhaps a few words about the quality of play? Yes, we'd catch a Joey Turner peeking at the orders after they were turned in. What could we do, ban him? We didn't have that many people...
Mike could be counted on NEVER to backstab Joey Turner because he had a crush on Turner's sister. Never backstabbed him. Never once. It was pointless to bring it up.
There was this one kid Mark who would never ally with me. Ever. He hated me and I hated him. I'd stop inviting him, but Kevin would bring him over because he was in the band. If I kicked him out, we'd loose Kevin too. Mark was too immature to actually play the game properly and would just randomly attack people he didn't like without any regard to strategy. Imagine trying to win at Diplomacy when some random person is just randomly attacking you each and every game, each and every turn. And refusing to discuss the situation.

Before the games could start we needed a twenty minute refresher course on the rules because somebody would always be confused.

Civil Disorders. Damn, where do I begin? We had to try to get six busy teenagers into the same place at the same time, when most of us didn't have cars. Most of us had curfews. Fifteen minutes was a safe minimum amount of time for a turn, but realistically you could only get three turns done an hour once you factor in time to calculate movement results by hand, and then there were the arguments. Anyone's parents could call at any time or stop by at any time and interrupt the game to extract a player to help with chores, etc. So by 1903 you could pretty much count on half of the countries on the map to be in civil disorder.

So for the first ten years that I played the game, 100% of the games that I played had metagaming, 100% of the games that I played had cheating, 100% of the games had noobs, 100% of the games had trolling, 100% of the games had civil disorders and none of the games ever had seven players. I don't think I ever sat through a full game before I played my first one.

Here is the link. For me it was a fantastic game and one that I will long remember.
gameID=90070

I guess I bring all of this up because it surprises me to see the amount of outrage that some of our players have over a few civil disorders or a bit of cheating. Some of you guys have no real conception at how bad things can actually be.