Venue: The Cloakroom Bar, Brisbane

Drinks of choice:

Kaner & Amby – Rosé and Ouzo spritzer, followed by the The Other Wine Company grenache from McLaren Vale, South Australia

The guys go to another fancy pants drinking joint and jump from one Dip topic to another. Get ready for a wild ride talking rule changes to the Pirates variant and other variant development, around the grounds, the Viking variant and surrendering.

Intro

• The guys introduce the Cloakroom bar, while the bartender joins them to serve orders in the JFK Room and educate the guys on glasses. This is the first time Kaner grabbed a glass of red instead of beer or cider. Plus they get a mouth cleanser rosé with ouzo spritzer and chilled towels! (0 mins 30 secs)
• Oli at vDip has delivered on the money fixing a major problem in the Pirates variant Amby created. He then gives a quick overview of the dynamics of the game and Oli’s coding change. As discussed in the podcast there are two types of units: frigates that move normally but attack with double strength and clippers that have normal attacking strength but can move two places. The change relates to a retreating clipper that now will retreat only 1 space, not 2 spaces, which all too often resulting in dislodged units retreating easily behind an enemies’ lines (4 mins 30 secs)
• With that retreating rule, it means the same can now be implemented in Chaoctopi and Germany 1648. It will also allow Amby’s Ninjas vs Samurai 1-on-1 variant (8 mins)
• Western Known World 901 map is currently in development at the Diplomail Lab. Its similar to half the usual KW901 map but with some other changes (10 mins 15 secs)
• After another cheers they move onto talk about Napoleonic variant being live and the Sengoku version 2 progressing along well (11 mins 30 secs)
• Amby talks about his ideas about having a 1066 tournament and asks Kaner’s thoughts (13 mins)

Around the grounds

• The guys each talk about their dismal performance in their respective games trying out the new Balkans 1860 variant. You can see their dismal performances at: Kaner’s game and Amby’s game (17 mins 30 secs)
• Kaner gives a shout out to cjurick (sorry Amby may have written that down wrong – let us know!) after he got in touch saying he regularly listens to the podcast and enjoys it (19 mins 30 secs)
• Amby clarifies he in fact is not playing in round 3 of the Online Diplomacy Championship due to serial NMRing (21 mins 40 secs)
• He then goes onto discuss the Dissolution game he got eliminated in at PlayDip and how despite being removed from the board he, and other eliminated players could still allocate favor votes for the non-playing nuclear players. Amby talks about his sharing the love strategy (22 mins 15 secs)
• Amby mentions how the 1898 variant being put together by Flame at the Diplomail Lab follows a similar approach to the Age of Empires rule over at PlayDip (25 mins 40 secs)
• Kaner then asks about Amby’s poor performance in the WWIV Furnance of Affliction game (26 mins 30 secs)
• Amby flags an anon game he’s in where a number of players are wanting a draw, it appears to be stalemated but another player is holding out. He asks Kaner about the process for how things like this get resolved. Amby also discusses examples in the past where he’s played games where a player has held out as part of a strategy, where a bigger player in a gunboat is holding out hoping the other bigger players pick up the message to kill off the smaller players so they could share in a draw with the big players getting a bigger share of the pot (30 mins 15 secs)

The Viking Diplomacy variant + Online Pet Peeves

• Kaner starts talking about a Viking game he recently won, but discusses how he was driven up the wall by a player who appeared to have given up and was just putting hold orders in (not even self supporting) but would come back in put in retreat and disband orders. This is similar to a Pet Peeve submitted by Traumatizer to the forum thread. Kaner throws in some #BadSportsmanship rants (35 mins 20 secs)
• Amby talks about how Kaner brought the Viking Diplomacy variant to the community 3 or 4 years ago. They discuss the map and how you can convoy armies down rivers using code hacks. It also includes interesting twists with self-supporting neutral armies in a couple of strategic places on the board. Plus the balance between players is excellent and player positioning makes things really challenging. Kaner gives Amby a language and geography lesson (41 mins 40 secs)
• Due to a segue point Amby asks Kaner if anything is happening with the Mongolian Diplomacy variant at the Diplomail Lab. Kaner says Tristan is currently doing work on it which he’s more than happy to have happen (49 mins)
• Amby convinces Kaner to sign up to the Pirates game (52 mins 30 secs)
• The good folks at the Cloakroom misunderstood Amby’s visual cue for two more red wines, and thought he meant two more folks arrived. So the guys got more cool towels, more Rose and Ouzo spritzer and then their reds (53 mins 40 secs)

Surrender option?

• The guys got an email through the website from Bosch Dewalt about the idea of a Surrender button. Amby initially thought the Concede button achieves this, but the concept of how a Surrender function may work better if you don’t want to play anymore and it automatically puts your units into hold (55 mins 20 secs)
• They go onto discuss how the downside of this would be players could protect their NMR rating but this could be a bad thing. Players may want a game where other players are of a high calibre and won’t throw a game. Having “surrender” could ruin this, unless it was part of the mix when creating a game on reliability ratings: maybe a half penalty or another method? (59 mins 45 secs)
• The guys agree its got merit, although Amby and Kaner say they probably wouldn’t click it for their own different reasons (1 hr 1 mins)

Other stuff

• They segue onto a discussion about Diplomacy based publications with Kaner saying he owns a copy of “The Game of Diplomacy” by Richard Sharp and a board games novelette from Playboy which featured Diplomacy (1 hr 3 mins… they talk about it again 5 mins later too when Kaner says you can find it on the internet in PDF)
• Mrs Kaner segue discussion (1 hr 5 mins)
• Amby is trying to line up an interview with Oli from vDip, so if you’re a vDipper get in touch so we can put your question ideas in the mix (1 hr 6 mins 20 secs)

If you have any suggestions on what you’d like to see covered in an upcoming podcast, or something you’d like to see regularly covered, please contact us or leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Thanks to Dan Philip for his rockin’ intro to the Diplomacy Games podcast.