I recently finished playing a game of Diplomacy with six fellow Metafilter users.  I’ve enjoyed reading End Of Game (EOG) summaries by other players in the past, and this is my long-winded attempt to jump into that pool.

If you’re interested in looking at the game in question, you can find it here.  If you’re reading through the turn-by-turn details below, I’d recommend you grab this PDF of the game history to use as reference.  See also the Metatalk thread that spawned this (and other) games.

If you have no idea what Diplomacy is (it’s a classic European-warfare boardgame that mixes tactics and negotiation) or at least have never played it, you will probably find the following confusing and dull, though there’s a chance you’ll find it confusing and fascinating, in which case you should really consider giving it a go.

This was my first game played with other metafilter users, my first game as Austria, and my first solo win.  It was a fast solo, too — 1907 is an early victory.

Here’s my thoughts on the game, turn by turn, in detail, followed by general thoughts and a quick note on each of the other powers at the end.

Game start:

Austria.  A pessimist can find something to complain about no matter what power they draw at game start, but if you really enjoy complaining it’s hard to beat Austria.  Four separate fronts, the specter of a Russo-Turkish Juggernaut hanging over your home centers, a uniquely claustrophobic border with Italy, and all this with France, England and Germany too busy sizing each other up to have much interest in talking with you.

I’ve seen friends play Austria with some success, and I’ve seen friends play Austria and get torn to shreds by the end of 1902, but I don’t think I’ve ever played Austria myself.  So after the draw and a little bit of pessimistic despair, I decided to try and take what I’d seen from friends’ better Austria games and run with it.

I decided to go big.  Win or lose, it’d be an interesting first couple of years.

Spring 01:
I waltz into RUM, and bring my other units south.  Italy heads for PIE instead of jabbing at TRI, Germany turns his attentions north, and Russia is more interested in Turkey than in me.  Good news for Austria all around.

Fall 01:
Russia is poised to take RUM from me and I can’t do anything about it — unless the Turk will help.  I make an agreement: support my unit in RUM and I will stay out of GRE.  The Turk agrees, and I promptly fail to keep up my end of the bargain.  Why leave Greece empty, I ask the Turk after, what foolishness is that when it can lend power to our alliance?  The Turk seems unimpressed by this reasoning.  He will never forgive me, despite my pleas for letting water flow under the bridge.

The Russian meantime finds himself without a build in 1901 and with a Turk in the Black Sea.

Germany and Italy continue about their business elsewhere.  Italy draws France back into MAR by standing around in PIE looking menacing — a small nuance with great implications, as an army in MAR in the winter of 1901 means a fleet does not get built there.  The rest of France’s game proceeds under the shadow of this decision.  If he had used BUR and SPA to self-bounce in MAR, would things have gone differently for him?

England builds fleets, France builds armies.  Good news for me on both fronts — Germany will be busy with a naval England, and a land-based France will be a ripe target for Italy’s fleets.

Spring 02:
I give RUM to Russia — something I was by agreement to have done back in F01, except for that “surprise” support from Turkey  — in exchange for his promise to attack BLA to cut Turkey’s support on BUL.  A fruitful Austrio-Russian alliance finds its feet, as we agree to carve the Turk into pieces together.

In the meantime, an explicit Germany/Italy/Austria alliance has come together; I talk in detail with the German, and in brief with the Italian.  It’s an alliance of convenience — all three of us can go about our business elsewhere while ignoring our shared borders.  The alliance will persist until the final two years of the game, when all but one other power has been eliminated.

A healthy stripe of land — VEN, TYR, BOH, SIL, PRU — is demilitarized around this time, which not only reinforces our natural DMZ-of-convenience but makes it explicitly difficult for Germany and Italy to coordinate in a betrayal of Austria without sending up some rather bright red flags with preparatory troop movements.

I was surprised that Italy accepted VEN as part of the DMZ without either objecting or asking for TRI to be added in return.  A diplomatic freebie, that.

Italy moves west, but not very fast — firstly there’s nothing to recommend building a fleet in ROM instead of NAP, and secondly there’s nothing to recommend a move to TUS instead of following his WES-bound fleet into TYS.  These bits of tactical weirdness leave me wondering a little about what Italy is up to and if he is a newer player.

England marches on the Russian, Germany mostly sits still, and France occupies the hell out of his own country, four armies staring down the German’s one unit in BUR.

Fall 02:
Russia loses STP to the English; I hold onto BUL, again with Russian help; Germany grabs Denmark; Italy and France commence hostilities to little effect while Italy outright baffles me by leaving F TUS sitting right there in Tuscany instead of sailing into LYO where he can do some proper damage to the French.

Getting a fleet into ION makes dealing with the Turk much easier.  Italy trusts me well enough to let it happen, and I keep up my part of the bargain by not grabbing NAP.

No builds for me this winter, which is probably just as well as I’ve been feeling conspicuous about my +3 in 1901.  Nobody wants to look like the 800 lb gorilla too early.  Russia still only has 4 SCs, and that only thanks to the RUM handoff.  I hope that this endears me to him.

Spring 03:
Operation Crush The Turk commences.  I force my way into AEG while Russia flanks his F SEV down to ARM so he can supply tactical pressure on the Turk and get an army into SEV to support MOS from a possible English invasion via STP and LVN.  The only cost there is trusting me not to grab RUM from him, something I manage not to do.

In the mean time, Germany, who had explained his movement to SIL as necessary to take with my assistance WAR (something I put off by explaining a need to pacify and lull the Russian — now someone I genuinely valued as an ally — to accomplish work against the Turk), continues to sit by in SIL while I throw unnecessary support at WAR with my A GAL.  Which I explain to the Russian as supportive theater and to the German as deceptive theater.

Italy finally moves on LYO, and France sails to POR, but other than that everything on the Italian/French front fizzles.  Meanwhile, England and Germany bounce around in the North Sea and Germany throws another fleet at the problem.

Fall 03:
Greetings from Constantinople!  The Turk seems to have lost his will to live at this point (and all the while I was worried he would be conspiring madly with the Russian — certainly, conspiring madly beats despair, and if he wasn’t conspiring madly with ME, then…), which would have been nice to know about ahead of time.  F BLA and A CON sit idly by while his other fleet sails to SYR.  Syria!  Russia and I execute a combative bounce in RUM, which I hope will help to convince Germany and Italy that we are not working together as closely as we are — though the bounce was intended as much as anything to repel a potential jab by the catatonic F BLA at RUM without otherwise altering our positions.

In the mean time, Russia’s need to defend against the English assault that never came and the ensuing isolation of his fleet in the far east and RUM left open as a building block of trust between us?  Gratifying.  Especially as I begin to contemplate the ensuing stab once Turkey is sufficiently dismantled.

France continues to mount a defense against Italy; Germany and England tussle in the north, with Germany finally grabbing NTH while England nabs SWE.

In the winter, I build a fleet in TRI.  Germany and I are on good terms and I have a healthy crop of armies on the ground already, whereas I could use another fleet to force the issue with the Turk and then later to deal with the Italian.  Italy in the mean time builds another fleet in ROM.  It could be interpreted as a tacit diplomatic gesture — building away from ION as a sign of good faith? — but Italy never mentions this to me.  Am I getting the short end of the conversational stick, or is he just not much of a talker?

Spring 04:
I take SMY, while Russia coasts into ARM.  Turkey, now clearly on the good drugs, attempts to stir things up by throwing his support at the Austrian half of the now-well-established Rumanian bounce.  He guesses BUL instead of SER and so saves me some complicated apologies to the Russian.  Entertainingly, this doubles the void support I’d already thrown out for shits and giggles and the thin hope that Germany and Italy might believe I actually just wrote my orders down incorrectly.

Russia informs me that he has made an agreement with Germany, to vacate Warsaw while Germany leaves Silesia.  I’m a bit put out — I don’t know whether this means G/R have been having deep and promising talks, and I certainly don’t want A SIL heading for MUN where it would reduce somewhat the previous openness of our G/A/I alliance.

Germany moves instead to BER, and Russia heads to LVN as planned.  I throw a hold at WAR with my A GAL, though at this point with G/R trusting each other on the matter and willingly disclosing that fact to me, I’m not sure who I’m trying to fool or what I’m trying to fool them into with this.

I bite my tongue and refrain from grabbing WAR, RUM, and VEN this turn.  I think I still have toothmarks from that.

Italy and Germany make their part of the alliance something more than convenience and begin to take apart France in earnest, while England and Germany continue to skirmish.  England takes back NTH, Germany retreats to the Channel — a nice consolation prize, especially with France busy trying not to lose his shirt in a land siege.

Fall 04:
I break Russia’s heart, grabbing WAR and RUM.  Turkey’s final act is a failed jab at SEV.  Russia fails in his bid to retake STP.  This is great news for me — one foe gone and another badly crippled, all in one turn.

I’d be more worried about getting the stinkeye from my G/I allies over this coup, but they’re having good years too — Italy grabs the peninsula, Germany storms Paris, England doesn’t do better than trading DEN for SWE in the latest turn of the Scandinavian Shuffle.  And England keeping Russia out of STP doesn’t necessarily look like *good* news for me so much as good news for England, who Germany and I are in principle united against, so I gamble that that’ll fly under the radar as well.

In the winter, I build another fleet in TRI; Germany makes my day by building another fleet instead of an army (more German commitment to the northern waters means less chance of either a land invasion by him or a viable defense from one my by me down the line), and Italy ices the cake with yet another F ROM, and an utterly unthreatening A NAP.  Again, if Italy had sold this to me as a favor, or better yet for him managed to put me in a position of asking for it, that’d be one thing, but as a gift without comment it’s hard to read it as anything but the slow-motion exposure of his belly.

Spring 05:
Russia makes a nice effort at delaying my onslaught — I get into UKR but he bounces my attempt to backfill RUM, leaving me with less leverage to push on MOS and SEV than I had hoped.  I shift my A CON into BUL to make space for a fleet there, which is bad news for him.  In the mean time, I bring my F TRI down to Albania while my F ION waves cheerily to the Italians.

Italy for his part is shifting his forces through the Med up toward England, which he and Germany are now sharpening their knives in anticipation of devouring.  Germany remains somewhat distracted in Scandinavia, however, and on the French mainland as he tries to clean up France’s remaining SC and deal with the corresponding army.

I’m happy to see the Italian go, and wondering if the time for stabbing is ripe, but I hold off.  Seeing him leave NAP undefended, I regret after this that I did not take a stab at VEN and NAP right then, and get an earlier foothold into his homeland, but I wasn’t confident it would work.  What if he remained in NAP?  What if he dropped a fleet back to TYS?  It would have changed the flow of the game, in either case.

On the diplomatic front, I was at this point doing my best to court England.  With Russia collapsing, I could either attack England (a sad prospect for a power that can’t build northern fleets) or befriend him.  His previous correspondence had sounded pessimistic, which had me worried — a player who believes he has lost can make for a nice target, but Germany and Italy would be the ones in a position to take advantage of that and (to get a little romantic here) I just hate the idea of someone not flashing an evil grin and holding on for dear life even when stick clutching the short end of the stick.  Go out screaming and biting, if you have to go out!

After some false starts, and English alliance started coming around.  I did my best to make it clear to him that (a) I was happy to do whatever I could to help him in his defense bid against the Germans and Italians with whom I was ostensibly loyally allied but whom I didn’t trust one iota, and that (b) I didn’t want Germany especially to know I was making nice with England, so we’d have to be subtle and not start having hug-of-wars and such.

Diplomacy with Germany and Italy became somewhat more rote; I found myself trying always to send out after each season a cheerful “gosh, these Russians are a tough nut, how you guys doing with France/England, what’s next?” press to G/I just to keep up the dialogue and support the fiction that we weren’t all eyeing one another’s home SCs.  Maybe Germany and Italy weren’t, at that, in which case kudos for honor and demerits for unsound planning, but I doubt that was truly the case.  The win condition for Diplomacy isn’t “be awesome friends”, and everybody has to have known that going in.

Fall 05:
Goodbye, France.  Now I’ve got to hope England is enough to keep Italy and Germany both busy with a slice-and-dice operation that doesn’t succeed any time soon.

England seals the deal on our alliance by agreeing to help me take MOS in exchange for my promise to leave STP unmolested for the rest of the game.  We demilitarize LVN as well a good-faith buffer.  With MOS taken and ANK nicked from Russia (who perhaps thought I would slow-play my southern attack by heading to BLA myself — not a bad gambit, really), I’ve almost finished that part of my game.

I’m pretty happy at this point having England on my side and him feeling hopefully a little more flush at having eliminated one of his fronts and being in good with the current leader.  He’s in reasonably good shape to continue his defense against Germany, and Italy is only bringing limited forces so far to bear on the English homeland, which is in general a tough nut to crack.  England isn’t going anywhere.

The Italian finally shows a glimmer of paranoia and drops a fleet back into TYS, which makes me further wonder if I should have stabbed him already, but as defenses go it’s far from robust.  An assault on Italy seems like the thing to do next year, and I soon begin discussing this with Germany in frank terms: “It’s one or the other of you.  I can’t invade England and I trust you more, so I’m going for Italy.”

Germany agrees, at least to my face.  His disclosure that he can’t really do much to help me right away because he doesn’t want Italy to twig and stop helping him?  A good play.  Essentially what I’m telling England in the last two turns re: Germany, in fact, and just as plausible.  Even better for Germany, he could be telling Italy every detail of this behind closed doors and I’d never know.  I speculate he’s not doing this, however; at this point I am ahead but not apparently decisively, and if Germany still imagines a quick mop-up of England and a bite at Italy right after, he may see himself as a contender for the win.  I pray for this.

Winter sees my first army build in TRI.  I have more fleets than I know what to do with,  enough certainly to blockade the Italian at ION if things go terribly, and by the time I no longer have to worry about all those Italian boats clogging up the Med I’ll have won or very nearly so regardless, is my thinking.  So armies it is, the better to storm VEN and TYR and firm up a defensive or offensive line along the DMZ Germany and I had previously sworn to.

Germany builds an army in Berlin, another glimmer of defensive sensibilities from my ostensible allies.

Spring 06:
Operation Italian Soda gets under way, with a successful grab of VEN and the occupation of TYR and ADR.  I try to outthink Italy on what to do with my ION fleet and end up kicking myself in the ass instead — TUN and NAP, both wholly undefended, remain Italian while our ION and TYS fleets bump foreheads.  Still, VEN is a good start and the Italian is still moving fleets north in the mean time.  His moves this turn are a weird mix of forward and retro movement, a mix of defense against Austria and attack on England, whereas a full-on defense (against, granted, a stab he may not have really believed was coming) might have saved his bacon while costing him his attempt at LVP.

My army in TYR is a violation of my DMZ agreement with both Germany and Italy, but shortly before moves process I write to Germany to apologize for not clearing it with him well in advance.  I send this press with such little notice in hopes that he will accept the forewarning when he reads it as a good faith gesture but not actually receive it in time to get paranoid and start moving into a defensive posture; this works out for me well enough, judging by his correspondence.  Though at this stage in the game I am assuming everything I hear from Germany comes through a white-lipped rictus while he makes frantic hand signals to his generals.

I also write to Italy to try and convince him that neither I nor Germany means him any kindness, but that I was at least being upfront about it and was furthermore willing to deal if he could come up with a reasonable proposal.  Italy tells me he’ll see me in hell — so, well, that’s probably a bridge burnt then — but I hope he’ll feel anxious enough toward the German that they won’t get their heads together.

Also on the Italian front, I accidentally (no scare quotes here, this was an actual goof) send a press to him that was meant for Germany.  Fortunately, it’s light on tactical details and overtly chummy with Germany and clearly discussing in a casual fashion the Italian’s pending destruction.  I choose not to acknowledge the mistake to Italy (or to Germany!), and just hope the Italian will in fact read it as what is is: a genuine mis-send.  If he decided it was a cheap ploy, a fake press that suggested a friendliness with Germany on the Kill Italy front that didn’t exist in our actual correspondence, it might only make him bind closer to Germany after all.

(Definitely my biggest Oh Shit moment of the game, regardless.  I spent the next few minutes wondering whether I should start putting my press through some client-side filter that would warn me if my salutation line didn’t match up with the press’s recipient.  Then I remembered that I’m a lousy liar anyway and it wasn’t likely to come up that often in the future, and I decided to just double-check more often myself.)

The ION bounce annoys me in part because it stalls up F AEG, which I had heading for ION instead of helping with the Russian fleet in BLA.  That damned Russian — faced with breaking all but one unit, he did exactly what I would have done, and exactly what I was hoping he wouldn’t do: he gave up on (doomed, granted) defense of an SC in favor of making as much trouble as possible.  He confirmed this by correspondence, in fact, which is also likely what I would have done.  Whether he made any long-shot conciliatory bids to England to help him 1905-06 is something I’ve wondered about, though.

If I had involved F AEG in my defense of the Black Sea’s coast, I could be certain of trapping F BLA with 100% certainty — the Russian would have literally no chance of grabbing an SC and staying in the game.  But if I left F AEG out of the equation, I still had good chances — BLA borders on five SCs, and I could cover four of them with my A RUM, A BUD, A SEV and F ANK and force the Russian to guess which one I wasn’t defending.  In Spring, he guessed wrong — a jab at ANK would have succeeded, but he tried BUL instead.

Fall 06:
Russia guesses wrong again, and that’s all she wrote for the Bear.  Meanwhile, ION bounces again and so F AEG stays put again as well, which makes my whole Guessing Game decision feel a little silly and reckless.  But at least AEG isn’t sitting farther from the front in CON instead, which is where it might be if I’d gone for the 100% defense.  Silver lining, which I considered when I was deciding on the gamble in the first place.  Diplomacy is a game where knowing how to console yourself is a valuable asset.

I drop an army into APU, guessing correctly that Italy will want to cover one of his centers and so will vacate APU himself.  He’s in the unenviable position of having to defend three centers with two units — A APU and F TYS covering TUN, NAP and ROM — and he manages to guess well by bouncing me in TUN.  On the bright side for Austria, that means he’s not in TUN either, which gives him less leverage on ION and surrounding territory than he might hope.

Germany moves to MUN but only as an expressed defensive posture; I vacate TYR as promised.  Things look cheerful in microcosm, diplomatically, though it’s hard to believe that will mean anything with me growing to 14 centers this year.

Italy snags LVP afer all; Germany doesn’t get LON, and doesn’t eject England from DEN either, which means he’ll be -1 for the year and have to disband a unit.  I speculate on the subject with England — he thinks it’ll be A GAS that goes, I argue for A BEL or F BAL as Germany realizes that defense is more important than squabbling with England.

In the end, Germany removes A HOL, leaving the question of whether A GAS is there as a tool of influence on the Italian, a poised dagger, or a theatrical feint to convince me that he and Italy are indeed on the splits while they in fact plan to unite against me at last.

The protracted and largely uneventful battle between England and Germany doesn’t hold my interest in detail — it’s a world away and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere — but I’m pleased that it is so dull and unending.  A healthy England is exactly what I want, and I can hardly blame England for wanting it as well even if at this point it’s more a matter of pride in living to the end of the game as an equal contender than anything else.

Spring 07:
Another guesswork defense for Italy, and this time it doesn’t go well: I take NAP.  In retrospect, choosing between defending ROM and defending NAP may not be the 50/50 it looks like on paper — sure, he had to guess, and so did I, but my getting a fleet in NAP significantly unhinges an otherwise powerful potential blockade at ION.  If this Spring hadn’t otherwise gone so well for me, keeping me confined to my side of that wet divide would have been key for the Italian.  Ergo, he should probably have defended NAP, 50/50 bedamned.  But then, I can clearly not choose the glass in front of me, and so the second-guessing cycle continues.

In the mean time, the Germany army sits in Gascony.  I hope for Germany’s sake that this unit was doing something profoundly useful, because leaving it there instead of bringing it over to BUR is what cost him MUN and, in that respect, gave me the game.  I am deeply curious about the diplomatic motivations there.

In worse news for Germany, I move also into TYR again (again without asking, and this time without apologizing) and also, appallingly enough, SIL.  My being there can’t mean anything but all out war at this point — unlike TYR (a vital pressure point on northern Italy), I have no business being in SIL at all.

As long as I’m violating DMZs, I waltz into LVN to set up an attack on STP and hope (reasonably enough) that England won’t suddenly cede ground to the German just to effectively defend against a stab.  He doesn’t.

Fall 07:
The first thing I saw when I reviewed the Spring results was that it had gone very well for me.  No German defense; the Italian cracked wide open; STP there for grabbing.  A second pass surprised me with what looked like (and turned out in fact to be) something more than just “going very well”:

Mate in one.  I had won the game already, though we’d still have to put in a set of Fall orders unless everyone else came to the same conclusion and conceded.

I had NAP.  That would give me 15 at the end of the turn.  On top of that,

- MUN was unsupportable, and I had units in SIL and TYR — Germany could not keep me out if he wanted to, at least not alone (more on this in a moment).
- ROM had VEN, APU and NAP bearing down on it, with only TYS to defend it (the Italian army in APU having had no retreat in the Spring and thus being destroyed).
- STP had only NWY to defend it against LVN and MOS.

+3.  18.  Game over.  I went to bed knowing it would happen, and got up the next morning to iron out the details:

STP: LVN has to attack, MOS has to support.  If I did it the other way around, F BAL could attack LVN and cut it’s support of MOS, and A NWY-STP would bounce me.

ROM: I could attack from VEN, APU, or NAP, and support from either or both of the remaining units.  My first plan was an attack from A VEN-ROM, with support from F NAP, with A APU-VEN to do backfill to prevent the Italian from sneaking in from PIE and turning it into a trade instead of a +1.  Satisfied that this would work, I moved on to…

MUN: With A SIL and A TYR vs. just MUN, this seemed like a gimme.  As with STP, attacker mattered: the attack had to come from TYR, with SIL supporting, since no one had anything in range of SIL to cut its support (whereas A PIE-TYR would cut Tyrolian support).

A good plan.  A foolproof win, with half my forces not even involved in the final push.  I considered a series of bizarre moves — a triple self-bounce in BUD, a convoy from TRI to ALB via ADR, a retreat by GRE and AEG to BUL and CON to stage a historical recreation of some sort of naval battle — but decided it’d be more in the spirit of Austrian domination to make sound moves to shore up my lines of attack, and be less of a dick move than silly taunting regardless.

I drafted up my Mate In One letter, and got ready to send it.  And held off to double check; the last thing I wanted to do was declare victory prematurely.

Foolproof isn’t always foolproof.  A friend of mine (there is no greater resource for a Diplomacy player than idle friends with an enthusiasm for tactics) found a problem with the plan.  With VEN-ROM as my attack vector on Rome and APU-VEN protecting VEN from PIE, I had covered my ass well enough but hadn’t made MUN a sure thing after all:

A PIE S A MUN-TYR would let A MUN-TYR deadlock me, and Germany would keep MUN. Would Germany or Italy see this?  Would they act on it?  I wasn’t sure — with everything going on on the board, it was a subtle detail.

Fortunately, it was fixable.  A VEN-PIE cuts Italian support of MUN-TYR, and I take ROM with APU instead.  Italy can either attack NAP, cutting its support but leaving ROM undefended from APU, or he can attack ROM and lose a 2 vs. 1 battle.  It’s a no-win for him, and 100% for me.

Everything else was academic at that point — I didn’t care what Italy, Germany, and England did with their units, since it had no effect on my win.  I sent my declaration of victory, dropping England a conciliatory note ahead of time — he was very much my ally still, as far as I’m concerned, up to the moment that stabbing STP became the necessary winning move.

Final thoughts:

Germany and Italy should never have trusted me so much and so long.  In their defense, my last three years were *huge* — from 10 at the end of 04 to 12 and then 14 and then 18, bam bam bam — and they were rightly interested in France and England as prospects.  But still: I got away with far too much.  In Fall 1907, when the game was as good as won already, there was only one enemy unit adjacent to any of my SCs, a ridiculously indulgent situation and one that seems like a pretty good recipe for domination.

Getting rid of the Turk and the Russian is huge for Austria I had a great big pile of the board at my back, and better yet was able to build units in the center of the map, something that even a domineering Turkey can’t get away with.  If the game had gone differently, I think I might have been held to a draw, but I doubt I’d be anything but the biggest guy in the draw and there was certainly no question of anyone putting me in danger of elimination.

Draws are (I reckon) hard things to put together from the allied-minor-powers side.  It’s easy for me to say Germany and Italy (and England) should have done more to stop me, but it can’t be any easy feat to accomplish that amidst your own varied tensions, especially with England beset for so long by clashes with Germany.  An alliance, my worst fear, would have been a hard thing to put together, and perhaps with the mix of players and their respective motivations it was just not going to happen this time out no matter what.  But next time this sort of thing comes up, I bet that it’ll be more likely indeed.  Heh.

Notes on/to the powers:

Italy has mentioned being a first-time player.  That explains some of the odder moves, especially the camp-out in TUS during the beginnings of your assault on France.  On the other hand, for a first-timer I think you played very well in general, and you displayed much more cunning and sense at times than I did in my first couple games.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this and will keep at it.

France I can’t say much about.  You had a rough game, and we didn’t talk much.  Being denied the fleet build in MAR was bad news for you; I thought your armies lined up around Germany’s A BUR was a funny site but I was dismayed that you didn’t use them to promptly kick him out and give yourself some room to breathe.  I would suggest being more aggressive next time when things get hairy, and consider reaching out to your enemies-of-enemies with more ambition and detail, and do it early.  They might be the sort of people who like spoiling a neighbor’s plans for fun and profit.

Turkey was my favorite correspondent.  I’m sorry I crushed you.  I wasn’t kidding when I said that a vacant GRE was an intolerable waste, nor when I said that I’d work with you if you’d just let that be bygones and look to the future, but I respect your desire to fight me to the end.  I enjoyed your weird moves in your last turns, though I wish you’d put a little more fight into them even if you thought you were doomed — watching someone give up while they’re still on the board (SYRIA?!) is a little frustrating.

Russia, you were a good ally and if you weren’t by definition a horrible ravenous monster trapped to my east by the northern glut of England and Germany, I would have been happy to keep working with you instead of stabbing you to death.  You went out like a champ, and I almost wish it had been a fairer fight when it came down to pulling out our knives.  But next time don’t trust Austria with WAR and RUM both when it’s clear he’s on good terms with the German and the Italian.  There is no such thing as a Wallet Inspector.

England, I hope you were having fun.  I was worried throughout the game that you might be going through the motions, convinced you were doomed once the German hostilities commenced.  I enjoyed our correspondence and our late alliance, and while stabbing you didn’t quite hurt me more than it hurt you, I felt a twinge of something in the dark, viscous place where my heart would otherwise be when I did it.

Germany!  You had me worried all game long.  You talked like a Diplo regular, and it turns out now that the masks are off that we played (or nearly played?  I can’t remember) against each other in the past.  You got locked up badly with England, which was great for me, and you picked perhaps exactly the wrong game to try out that whole Actually Trusting Someone thing, but I think your willingness to experiment earnestly with an AIG alliance laid the foundation for a very interesting and fun game.