Diplomacy vs. Squad Leader

Here I expect to leave 90% of my female readers behind, venturing forth into this uniquely masculine domain – home of little paper counters, dice, and innumerable charts and graphs.  In particular, I’ll focus on the top two war games, Diplomacy and Squad Leader.

 Diplomacy (made by Avalon Hill) is remarkable in that it uses no dice whatsoever.  It takes place in Europe 1900, the map as it was before World War I.  The players are England, Germany, Russia, Turkey, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and France.  Ideally you want seven players, one per country, but in practice we’d have to double up on a few: Germany-Turkey, Russia-Italy, and Austria-France, with England by itself, for 4 players. 

 The map is littered with supply centers which support either an army unit or a naval unit each, and the game proceeds in turns: spring and fall, with new armies/navies arising after the fall term.  Each player writes down orders, subject to negotiation with the other players, and reveals the orders in turn.  Attacks are resolved by simple arithmetic: equal numbers opposing each other result in a stalemate, whereas any advantage in numbers, however slight, prevails. Typically a single country can rarely muster enough forces on its own to force an outcome (except overrunning neutral, undefended countries at the very beginning of the game), so some cooperation between players is necessary, thus…Diplomacy.  And since you cannot bind your comrade to the orders he claims he will write, you may be unpleasantly surprised to find what they turn out to be.  Intrigue, duplicity and back-stabbing are all part of the fun!

 Another part of the fun is that the traditional alliances of Germany-Italy-Austria vs. England-France-Russia are not required, so you can have the French walk into London, the British take Paris, or the Germans march into Vienna.  In our experience, the Austrians usually ended up being wiped out, as they’re surrounded by Germany, Turkey, Italy, and France, whereas the English almost always did well, as they could usually put enough naval units around the island to prevent anyone convoying troops there.  If England was invaded it reflected extremely poorly on the English player. 

 These games lasted hours, well into morning, usually ended more by sheer impatience then any decisive victory by any player.  I do recall that my friends Sean and Phil usually teamed up together to form an artificially tight bond which produced stalemates, as they could never be persuaded to turn against each other.  Personal feelings were yet another ingredient – just as the Kaiser’s resentment of his royal cousins may have colored his animosity towards England and Russia.  Overall, though, a very satisfying game.

 My high school history teacher thought it would be a good idea for us to play the game as a class – and we had well more than 7 classmembers.  I was teamed up with Kirby, for Turkey, and we took Moscow and Sevastopol, and were on track to take St. Petersburg – allied with the Germans, who had taken Warsaw - before the game ended.  The French team took England, pushing the English into exile in Norway, of all places.  Most of the teams were female, though, and the girls really didn’t care much for the game at all.

 A Far East variant (Colonial Diplomacy) was produced, for which the powers were Russia, England, Japan, Turkey, Holland, France, and China.  By this time, though, all our gaming buddies had gone off their separate ways, so we never played this one.

 Squad Leader (also made by Avalon Hill) was much different. This was a squad-level wargame of WWII.  Small square paper counters represented squads, NCOs, officers, machine guns, flamethrowers, satchel charges, smoke, tanks, jeeps, armored cars, etc.  You could call in artillery support from off the board or even air strikes – Stukas, Sturmoviks or Mustangs.  The boards featured hexes and various different terrains: roads, buildings, plains, forests, even orchards and cemetaries.  The game was horribly complex and took ages to learn.  The rules had sections, subsections, exceptions, etc. and read like the Code of Federal Regulations.  It was set up with scenarios which progressed, each one introducing another new rule or element, to gradually familiarize the players, but even the first two, The Guards Counterattack and The Tractor Works, taking place in downtown Stalingrad, were still damn complex.  Each turn had several different phases – prep fire, advancing fire, defensive fire, movement, advance, rout, and rally phases; combat had various different charts of modifiers before the dice could be rolled.  Units broke – or could be rallied by officers, who could rally themselves. Despite playing the game for hours on end, we never finished all the original scenarios, much less progressed to the expansion sets Cross of Iron (which introduced SS units on dramatically cool black counters), Crescendo of Doom (adding in British, French, and Axis and Allied minor nations), and GI Anvil of Victory, which fleshed out the Americans and substantially changed whole chapters of the rules.  Later on, Avalon Hill revamped the system, producing Advanced (!!!) Squad Leader, in the process adding in the Japanese, Chinese and Pacific warfare.  By this point the rules were in a binder so that additions or errata could be added or subtracted page by page, like many of the CCH regulations manuals in the law library. That was a non-starter for us.  This was literally a game where you spent far more time trying to learn to rules and how to play it, than actually playing the damn game itself.

 If there was advantage of Squad Leader over Diplomacy, it was that Squad Leader was played with two players (German vs. either Russian or American), whereas Diplomacy was unplayable with only two players and best suited for seven.  But we could rarely round up as many as seven players.  Seven players in Squad Leader would have been hopeless.

 It was a given that I would almost always play the Germans, but since we never got to Cross of Iron, I never got to use SS units.  The dice, though, really made a difference.  Keep rolling snake eyes (two ones) and your enemies were mowed down, though it helped to have at least some clue about tactics.

 Risk.  Honorable mention for this game, which was even simpler than Diplomacy.  We used to play this one before we learned about Diplomacy.  But I found the chance element too high: some kid rolling sixes over and over again could wipe out your carefully developed invasion army.  I can recall making a huge non-winning argument that Ukraine was part of Asia, not Europe. 

 Illuminati.  Yet another honorable mention – and perhaps a precursor to those trading card games (they actually had an Illuminati trading card game, New World Order, which we never played).  This was the game of secret societies: the Bavarian Illuminati, the Gnomes of Zurich, The Discordian Society, the UFOs, The Bermuda Triangle, and the Servants of Cthulhu, each with their different goals (the UFOs’ goal was a secret duplicate of one of the other players’).  Then vast numbers of different groups (to name just a few): CIA, FBI, the Mafia, California (with a picture of a hot tub), cycle gangs, girlie magazines, convenience stores, GOP, Democrats, Libertarians, KGB, KKK, Triliberal Commission, the Oil Companies, South American Nazis, Swiss Banks, Semiconscious Liberation Army, Trekkies, the Reformed Church of Satan, Orbital Mind Control Lasers (a good target for the Bermuda Triangle), the Society for Creative Anarchism, joggers, and so on – extremely tongue-in-cheek. Each player develops a network of groups, tries to take over other player’s groups, or tries to destroy them (the particular forte of the Servants of Cthulhu).  The groups have different attributes: straight/weird, conservative/liberal, violent/peaceful, plus “fanatic”, which is the opposite of everything, including other fanatics.   Dice (2 six-sided) dice were involved, plus lots of fake money, humor, and as much back-stabbing and plotting as Diplomacy.