Internet Diplomacy

Play-by-email internet Diplomacy followed from Play-by-mail games dating to 1970s fan zines. Similar to standard mail games, players originally sent press directly to one another through email, and sent their orders via email to a pre-designated human GameMaster.

As email became more prevalent software Judges were developed, which would route emails addressed from one player to another, and route submitted orders and results to/from human GameMaster(s). As well as routing messages they provided more accountability and security, a place where all the info about the game could be stored and retrieved, and provided a way to keep scores of players from multiple games.

These software Judges were eventually extended to include adjudicators, which are pieces of software capable of resolving orders and producing results, thus replacing the human GameMaster with software. Those adjudicators often had many bugs and only after a few years they became reliable. The Diplomacy Adjudicator Test Cases were written to overcome this problem. With the use of these test cases new programs can be of high quality on first release. The DATC contains also recommendations for ambiguities in the rules.

Variants to the original map and rules were also added to judges. As it is sometimes difficult to find many people who are familiar with the same variant in a face-to-face environment, and the addition of software expanded the possibilities for variants, many variants are specific to Internet Diplomacy, where players can easily download a map and rule-set.

The Ken Lowe Judge system was the first judge system to be created.[1] The Ken Lowe Judge system allows users to send press to one another and send orders to the processing server through a variety of text commands. Today, many online adjudication systems run in the same, or similar, fashion to the Ken Lowe Judges.

Njudge was a rewrite of the Ken Lowe Judge system, with more support added for different variants. This version of the judge software was created by Nathan Wagner, then Judgekeeper (Administrator for a Judge Server) to clean up issues that arose over the years due to the multiple different programmers who had made adjustments to the original code. This software program continues to be used on a number of email servers.[2]

In recent years as the web has become more dynamic Internet Diplomacy has shifted from email to the web. Due to the complexity of adjudicators and judges, the earliest web implementations primarily provided a web interface to the email based Judges.

One of the main advantages of web-based implementations over previous options is that they can display computer-generated graphical maps of the current board on the web-page, instead of requiring the user to update the positions of the game's units on a physical board based on text output.

In 1995, Manus Hand created the DPjudge, among the first to use a web interface for an email judge. DPJudge allows players to view maps, game history, enter orders and write press to other players through a web interface, however some features, including signing up for a new game, or filling a vacancy in a game in progress, require email usage. The DPjudge is also able to handle numerous variant maps and rules, in addition to the standard map and rules as published by Hasbro.

The most recent Diplomacy via web implementations were created for the web from scratch. This gives the advantage of allowing more complex features to be added (e.g. rule variants), but requires that complex adjudicator code be rewritten.

DipGame provides a web-interface to an AI server that allows a web-based single-player game against 6 bots (i.e. computer players). It is also possible to save games and to resume later. The website is a beta version and has some known bugs, including a critical one that makes the game stop and impossible to log in again until the webmaster restarts the system and your game is lost (June 2012).

The website was initiated for a PhD research project to provide a Multiagent Systems' testbed developed at the http://www.iiia.csic.es/ IIIA-CSIC in Barcelona. They plan to develop negotiating capabilities for the bots,[5] however these are not available in the web-interface yet (June 2012). It is also possible to download an off-line version to develop your own bots.[6]

Resolution Phase (Conspiracy Android App)

There are also several implementations for smartphones, like Droidippy, Diplicity (Android)[7] and Conspiracy,[8] all of them free. Realpolitik for Android[9] also has a hot-seat mode for local play. While Subterfuge provides a modern adaptation.

The GEnie online service offered fully automated versions of Diplomacy and variants to subscribers.[10]