Introducing the Diplomacy Games podcast, hosts and the variant Known World 901

Welcome to Diplomacy Games! In episode 1 we introduce the podcast and hosts Kaner and Amby and why we play Diplomacy online. Then we jump into discussing in detail the Diplomacy variant Known World 901.

But for starters, a little about ourselves - Kaner and Amby. We discuss our background and experience with playing Diplomacy. We get into the early days of playing, from face-to-face to rather embarrassing first ever opening moves when playing online. We also explain why the podcast is recorded over a few drinks in a bar.

Next up we give a bit of a high level overview of the type of things each of our episodes may cover, including:

• A "deep dive" into a variant
• Features/how stuff works on webDiplomacy and vDiplomacy
• Anything new that's happened on the  websites
• Any threads of contention in the threads
• Interviews

We go deep into the variant Known World 901 by David E. Cohen, and on-boarded to vDiplomacy by Kaner. We cover:

• How at a 15 player variant it fills the gap between large 10 player games and massive 34+ player games
• How Amby loves its historical nature and learns some history, all while continuously mispronounces players' country names
• The really cool transform option for changing armies to fleets and vice versa. Kaner talks about why he did this to improve gameplay
• We then look at an example of the map in the game Vae Victis . Here Amby made it into a 6 player draw despite only having 4 supply centres. What strategies and tactics did he use to make it to the end?
• Kaner discusses how you can use variant statistics to better understand how to play the country you draw

Finally we discuss the WebDiplomacy 2012 World Cup championship, a game that took three and a half years to complete. We're lining up a number of the key players to discuss this mammoth Diplomacy gaming effort in an upcoming interview.

Visit our website for the show notes for this episode.

Venue: Grand Central Hotel, Brisbane

Drinks of choice:

• Kaner - Fat Yak original pale ale from Matilda Bay Brewing, Australia
• Amby - Rymill "The Yearling" Cabernet Sauvignon from the Coonawarra

And a big thanks to Dan Philip for our rockin' intro music!

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.