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× WELCOME TO TRASHDOME!

This is part of a series of bloody matches to the death. Show support for your favorite game so it will do better in the fight. You can support it by writing why you think its the better game and more importantly by betting (i.e. voting for) it. Please make it clear for when I check the bets later. You have until Friday when I tally the bets and declare the winner. I will reserve my bet for any tie-breakers.

Although you should be familiar with both games, there is no rule that says you have to have played both of them. The only rule in Trashdome is this;

Two games enter! One game leaves!

Trashdome - Diplomacy VS Borderlands

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06 Jul 2009 10:49 #33756 by ChristopherMD


WELCOME TO TRASHDOME!

This is part of a series of bloody matches to the death. Show support for your favorite game so it will do better in the fight. You can support it by writing why you think its the better game and more importantly by betting on it. End your first post in this thread with the title of the game you're placing a bet on (i.e. voting for) so its clear to me when reading it later. You have until Friday when I tally the bets and declare the winner. Counting expansions or not is entirely up to you just as playing with them or not is. I will reserve my bet for any tie-breakers.

Although you should be familiar with both games, there is no rule that says you have to have played both of them. The only rule in Trashdome is this;

Two games enter! One game leaves!

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06 Jul 2009 11:07 #33758 by OldHippy
Borderlands becaues it's still playable (haven't been able to get Diplomacy to the table in years, don't think we will any time soon either). I love Diplomacy but it's too long and too dependent on having 7 players, it does create a really interesing room (social scene), and I have laughed a great deal at the reactions of others but as much as I love long games no one in our group is willing to bring it back. Borderlands people will play.. I still prefer Cosmic but that could be said about many games. It's a great design and that's my vote.

Borderlands

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06 Jul 2009 11:10 #33760 by Almalik
Vote: Marvel Heroes!

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06 Jul 2009 11:31 #33762 by Shellhead
Diplomacy is garbage. I've played twice, so I know that's it's long, tedious, annoying and then only gets a little interesting when somebody gets stabbed in the back. And some people can't handle getting stabbed in the back, so Diplomacy can actually do damage to friendships. It's a huge waste of time, and I would rather play anything or even take a nap on the couch. I will never play Diplomacy again.

I don't know much about Borderlands, so I looked it up at BGG. Sounds okay, not my usual kind of game but definitely something that I'm willing to try.

Vote: Borderlands.

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06 Jul 2009 11:41 #33763 by Michael Barnes
DIPLOMACY is quite possibly the most overrated game ever published. The last time I played it, about two months ago, will probably be the last time I _ever_ play it.

I have fond memories of playing it on our friday "Game Days" in gifted class, but we stretched games out for weeks and weeks so its problems weren't so evident. Maybe if you do PBEM or something it isn't so badSitting down to play it today in real time. is pretty much like torture.

The game starts out awesome. For the first third, when everyone is kind of establishing their territories and working out alliances, the game is pretty awesome. There's usually a lot of energy, saber-rattling, and fun. But once you get into the second third, it slows down as some players start to lose ground. By the last third, there's likely players left and it turns into a dismal slog- particularly if you're on the ropes and nobody will put you out of your misery.

I think the game is, in sum, crap. The core system is a good idea and I like the minimalism of it, but it turns into a bunch of back and forth with some arguing thrown in. AFRICA 1880 does everything DIPLOMACY does in 2 hours, and it adds some neat but simple mechanics for development. INTRIGUE is nastier and even more cutthroat than DIPLOMACY. A GAME OF THRONES is a better game all around. COSMIC ENCOUNTER is better than all of those. There's just so many games with backstabbing, treachery, and alliances of convenience that are infinitely better than DIPLOMACY. If you've never played it, you should at lest one time- it is an important game. Just not a good one.

BORDERLANDS is an awesome game that hopefully will increase in profile when FFG does their edition of it. It has some of the DIPLOMACY stuff in it, but it's got a cooler theme and there's some tough logistical decisions to be made in it. You can definitely see that it's an EON game, it has traces of DUNE and COSMIC in it. There's some SETTLERS-style resource trading and management too. Totally a better game on every level.

Vote BORDERLANDS. Let's put another tired ass game into the grave where it belongs.

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06 Jul 2009 11:53 - 06 Jul 2009 11:56 #33765 by Matt Thrower
I dunno about this. I take all the points about Diplomacy being over long and having a very variable pace that can get boring but hell, there's no other game - not Cosmic, not AGot, none - which has the potential visceral impact of Diplomacy. There's a reason why everyone that's every played Dip has a story to tell about it. There's a reason why it usually involves someone physically attacking someone else, or destroying a friendship/marrage, or resulting in actual illness due to stress. A game - just a mere game - that can do all that has to be worthy of some sort of respect. And it works very well PBEM: you can actually pretend you're an early 20th century diplomat sending missives to your counterparts in foreign embassies as you scheme and plot.

I've never actually played Borderlands but we did square up to try and start a PBEM game before discovering that the negotiation before and during every single phase pretty much rendered the game unplayable by that means. But it struck me as we fumbled around that the deterministic combat could lead to there being an immense amount of annoying min/maxing in the game during the attack sequence as everyone tries to figure out exactly who needs to ally with who to get what outcome. Dip has deterministic combat, but the hidden orders solves this problem. I could be wrong about this happening in Borderlands, but if it's a persistent feature of the game then it would have the potential to ruin it for me. I hate that sort of shit (see Power Grid for an even worse example).

Vote: Diplomacy
Last edit: 06 Jul 2009 11:56 by Matt Thrower.

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06 Jul 2009 11:54 #33766 by Columbob
VOTE: Borderlands.

Haven't played either yet, but Diplomacy doesn't really interest me that much. I'd propably try it if given the opportunity.

I've been keeping my eyes on Borderlands for a few years now, and FFG's reprint should be great and give it a new life.

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06 Jul 2009 12:17 #33769 by NeonPeon
Well I've played neither, I have no desire to play Diplomacy, and I used to love Lords of Conquest so Borderlands!!

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06 Jul 2009 12:34 #33771 by Tamburlaine
Diplomacy may well be cripplingly flawed in the late game and it certainly has, whether for good or for ill, the most "visceral impact" of any game. But someone's gotta put it on the table: Diplomacy is almost certainly the most influential game of modern times. Both culturally and mechanically it contains everything hobby games represent and everything they loathe about themselves. The game is a force in peoples lives, it breaks friendships, so they say. But it is also a force in history and stands as the father of Wargames, Euros, and Ameritrash alike.

The mechanics of the game stand out as rather simple and intuitive--yet in being so simple they also open wide the gates for some confusing paradox-like situations. There is no luck whatsoever in the game--yet there is also no turtling, no economic efficiency whatsoever. The facts of history have been smoothed out to purchase what looks like a symmetrically balanced game--but the facts of geography make it assymetrical nonetheless. The DOAM game, the Negotiation game, the Grand Historical Simulation game, the Simple and Elegant game--they all have their roots in Diplomacy. But The Atrociously Overlong Game and the Negative Play Experience were also born there.

The culture of Diplomacy is also the culture we have come to expect of hobby gaming. The fan magazines (which now have migrated online), play-by-mail (which likewise became PBEM), game variants--all these began with Diplomacy. Diplomacy also took over from Chess the air of an intellectually superior pastime and settled it in a much smaller and immensely more obscure segment of the population, founding the gamer's nerdly superiority, that spirit of an aloof cabal which still reigns in some quarters of the internet boardgame community. Yet unlike "these games of ours" Diplomacy actually reached the elites of society: it was played in the Kennedy White House and Henry Kissinger is on record as a fan.

In short, Diplomacy is hobby gaming, the good, the bad, the aspiration, the failure. Like some primal force of nature it pairs an immense fecundity of genius with a violence and irrationality that now offends our developed sensibilities. All this by way of saying,

Vote: Diplomacy

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06 Jul 2009 12:45 - 06 Jul 2009 12:46 #33773 by southernman
Never played either ... was in the 'nearly' PBEM of Borderlands and it looked interesting - well more interesting than Diplomacy did when I looked at it, plus if Matt compares it to Powergrid then my vote has to be ...

Borderlands

(Plus-plus if Mikey Barnes fixes another vote I want to be on the winning side this time.)
Last edit: 06 Jul 2009 12:46 by southernman.

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06 Jul 2009 13:00 #33775 by OldHippy
Tamburlaine wrote:

Diplomacy may well be cripplingly flawed in the late game and it certainly has, whether for good or for ill, the most "visceral impact" of any game. But someone's gotta put it on the table: Diplomacy is almost certainly the most influential game of modern times. Both culturally and mechanically it contains everything hobby games represent and everything they loathe about themselves. The game is a force in peoples lives, it breaks friendships, so they say. But it is also a force in history and stands as the father of Wargames, Euros, and Ameritrash alike.

The mechanics of the game stand out as rather simple and intuitive--yet in being so simple they also open wide the gates for some confusing paradox-like situations. There is no luck whatsoever in the game--yet there is also no turtling, no economic efficiency whatsoever. The facts of history have been smoothed out to purchase what looks like a symmetrically balanced game--but the facts of geography make it assymetrical nonetheless. The DOAM game, the Negotiation game, the Grand Historical Simulation game, the Simple and Elegant game--they all have their roots in Diplomacy. But The Atrociously Overlong Game and the Negative Play Experience were also born there.

The culture of Diplomacy is also the culture we have come to expect of hobby gaming. The fan magazines (which now have migrated online), play-by-mail (which likewise became PBEM), game variants--all these began with Diplomacy. Diplomacy also took over from Chess the air of an intellectually superior pastime and settled it in a much smaller and immensely more obscure segment of the population, founding the gamer's nerdly superiority, that spirit of an aloof cabal which still reigns in some quarters of the internet boardgame community. Yet unlike "these games of ours" Diplomacy actually reached the elites of society: it was played in the Kennedy White House and Henry Kissinger is on record as a fan.

In short, Diplomacy is hobby gaming, the good, the bad, the aspiration, the failure. Like some primal force of nature it pairs an immense fecundity of genius with a violence and irrationality that now offends our developed sensibilities. All this by way of saying,

Vote: Diplomacy


I'm not so sure that I agree with you but man you sure make an excellent and passionate case.. almost enough to make me change my vote (Dipomacy IS closer to my heart... but that could easily be nostalgia). Great post!

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06 Jul 2009 13:02 #33776 by Aarontu
OK, I never played either, but Diplomacy seems to me to be THE classic game of negotiation, alliances of convenience, and bluffing, all done with a highly appropriate WWI theme. So would someone tell me what is so cool about Borderlands?

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06 Jul 2009 13:17 #33778 by Juniper
Tamburlaine convinced me.
Besides, I learned a lot about European geography from the Diplomacy board when I was a kid.

My vote: Diplomacy

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06 Jul 2009 13:18 #33779 by Michael Barnes
(Plus-plus if Mikey Barnes fixes another vote I want to be on the winning side this time.)

That's a good policy, Tom Tom.

Tamburlaine's argument is good- probably the best politicking we've ever seen in Trashdome, really- but it just doesn't hold up if we're assessing this on game versus game basis. BORDERLANDS is, out of the box, the better game. Maybe not the more elemental or signficant game, but it's the more fun and playable one.

I agree that DIPLOMACY is hugely influential, important, and even essential but it still fails under the scrutiny of the actual gameplay. I would also like to get all nitpicky and pedantic and point out that the DOAM, Grand Historical, and negotiation games are not, in fact, spawned from DIPLOMACY but in much earlier examples going back to the 19th century. Sure, the early designers of games in those genres were influenced by DIPLOMACY but it's a much longer heritage that predates the game.

DIPLOMACY is still significant, and it is one of the games that this entire hobby is built on. Definitely concur with that assessment.

But it still sucks.

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06 Jul 2009 13:36 #33780 by blarknob
I still love and play Diplomacy. I actually have a plaque on my office wall from playing the best Italy at Gencon in 2008.

I've never even heard of Borderlands.

Diplomacy.

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