Game Daze Foothills Mall Employee Review, August/September 2009

Thomas-

A friend of mine teaches twelfth grade humanities at a local school. As part of a two-week long section on rhetoric, in which the students read Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Machiavelli’s The Prince, he has the students play a game of Diplomacy.

Diplomacy is not a friendly game. In the game, you will be using your own skills of persuasion and logic to ally yourself with other players—you need someone else’s help to win. But there can be only one winner. This means that you must ally with other players, knowing that you must betray them before they betray you. There is no dice rolling in this game. There are no elements of chance. It’s just you and what you can get others to do.

His game was played over that two-week period, with negotiations lasting for a day (rather than 15 minutes in a regular game). After playing the game in his class, his students reported the ability increase their negotiation skills and to recognize when someone else is attempting to sway them using rhetoric. Because the players in his class were not used to board games (especially board games that take longer than an hour to play), they also remarked that they gained “the ability to sit down, focus for a long period of time, and analyze a large set of ever changing variables.” The students commented that in general, they have difficulty with long term patience and focus. This game helped them improve that skill.

A friendly game of Diplomacy is a good evening’s worth of entertainment for up to seven. You can play Diplomacy with six players, keeping Italy neutral, but the game is much better with seven players. Diplomacy is a game for adults because when you backstab your nine-year old niece Becky, she will cry.