In high school, Diplomacy was king. Our global history teacher organized dozens of games each semester, sometimes as many as five or six at once, with regular and Colonial tournaments each year as well as a few experimental versions like Machiavelli and gunboat. He had a bulletin board outside his room with the latest maps posted along with the latest set of orders and proposed draws. Most high schools have a place where the cool kids hang out before school - for us, it was the Diplomacy boards. EVERYBODY played. The jocks, the nerds, the band kids, even a few girls and several teachers as well. My friends and I were always in a game and it was always a topic of conversation. We'd pull out maps on the bus to games, at lunch, in the library, and in between classes, not to mention spending hours just staring at the boards during study halls.
The coolest part of all this is that our teacher has kept a record of every game played at the school since 2000 along with the number of "DipPoints" accumulated by each player as well as a ranking system similar to the WebDip system. Squires had 50
, Knights had 100
, and so on and so forth, until you reached elites - the Knights of the Maltese Cross, Grand Teutonic Knights, and the Most Exalted Grand Master of Diplomacy himself, the teacher, the SplitDiplomat of our high school. The rankings are posted in a display case in a far corner of the school and I check them occasionally just to see how I stack up to the new crop of Diplomacy players.
17 games, 17 players
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