Labor of Love

The game DIPLOMACY by Gibson Games, then Avalon Hill, has many devotees, including myself. I have tried running a couple of games in the last year or so and they have all pretty much degenerated or have been sabotaged from within by indifference or malevolence.

I still hold out hope. I was a big fan of DIPLOMACY back in the day and in a sense it is the perfect email game, as the interaction is 90 per cent verbal and ten per cent mechanical, making turns easy to adjudicate.

I've used a few turn adjudicators I found on the Diplomatic Pouch, which were nice standalones.. like JavaDip. Now a installable server based setup has come along which handles adjudication in a fashion not unlike a robot judge on the internet. It's called PHPDIPLOMACY, and it is the work of a dedicated group of Diplo fans trying to find an easier way to play with players separated by long distances.



The code is free, and available on the PHPDIPLOMACY project page on Sourceforge. It will require MYSQL and a PHP compiler. This looks to be a very worthy project, and I will see if I can implement it locally myself.