Diplomacy is a 7 player board game in which players move armies and fleets across a map of Europe with the aim of becomming the sole ruler of the continent. An unusual feature of the game is that all moves are made simultaneously, after being written down, and that players are allowed to discuss the game privately in pairs before the moves are entered. Thus negotiating skill is an important game playing skill. The game has proved very suitable for online play, with discussions and submission of orders taking place by email. A program (called the judge) has already been written to automatically parse orders enterred in the correct format, forward secret messages, decide on the moves and return the results. There are around 2000 active judge players and the definitive web site is www.diplom.org
This project will display a game history once it has finished. It will show the movements of pieces each turn, where battles were fought and where countries helped each other. The source data will be a history file, which the judge program will generate once a game has finished.
We will focus initially on the standard map, but may include some of the many varients if all goes well. One interesting varient is the Nessie varient, set in Scotland!
No knowledge of diplomacy, or interest in game playing, is required. This is essentially a visualisation project.