Trashdome - Diplomacy VS Borderlands

The King in Yellow wrote:
" For the record, Borderlands/Lords of Conquest probably has even more alternative boards. Hell, I played one that was composed of Appalachia. I challenge you to show me a Diplomacy board that features West Virgina"
Challenge accepted! An easy ten minute internet search turned up:-
1427 variants.
One of these three dozen or so must feature West Virginia.
Dixie Diplomacy.
Your turn: how many variants does Borderlands have? Show me one that features Oxfordshire or Berkshire.
(That's the original county before the border was moved.)

The King in Yellow wrote:
" Nothing wrong with that. Billy Idol had it right."
LOL!

Notahandle wrote:

The King in Yellow wrote:
" For the record, Borderlands/Lords of Conquest probably has even more alternative boards. Hell, I played one that was composed of Appalachia. I challenge you to show me a Diplomacy board that features West Virgina"
Challenge accepted! An easy ten minute internet search turned up:-
1427 variants.
One of these three dozen or so must feature West Virginia.
Dixie Diplomacy.
Your turn: how many variants does Borderlands have? Show me one that features Oxfordshire or Berkshire.
(That's the original county before the border was moved.)

Aha! Well, I'll have you know that Borderlands/Lords of Conquest has a random map generator, so if I were to have an infinite number of nerds generating at an infinite number of Commodore 64s, I could create a pre-1974 map of Oxfordshire that omits South Oxfordshire and the Vale of the White Horse.
However, I believe that would violate the spirit of the challenge.
For this reason and the fact that your avatar indicates that you a gentleman of superb honor and ethics, I must cede you your point.
Good day to you, sir!

The King in Yellow wrote:

Aha! Well, I'll have you know that Borderlands/Lords of Conquest has a random map generator, so if I were to have an infinite number of nerds generating at an infinite number of Commodore 64s, I could create a pre-1974 map of Oxfordshire that omits South Oxfordshire and the Vale of the White Horse.
However, I believe that would violate the spirit of the challenge.
For this reason and the fact that your avatar indicates that you a gentleman of superb honor and ethics, I must cede you your point.
Good day to you, sir!

I'm pretty sure you could design custom maps in LoC, not only randomly generate them.

I've never played either, so I sat on the fence trying to come up with a difference worth voting on. For me, if I can get together 6 or 7 of the "right" people to play an all day game, there are other games that I would much rather play than Diplomacy.

Borderlands

So, Borderland fans, someone give me a quick synopsis on why Borderlands is so awesome. I've never played/seen it and I'm curious. All I've been able to infer from this thread is that it's in a fantasy land and is sort of like Diplomacy with Catan-esque resources thrown in.

Aarontu wrote:

So, Borderland fans, someone give me a quick synopsis on why Borderlands is so awesome. I've never played/seen it and I'm curious. All I've been able to infer from this thread is that it's in a fantasy land and is sort of like Diplomacy with Catan-esque resources thrown in.

It's more like Risk without dice. There's some diplomacy and trading and generating resources but the heart of the game I'd describe as diceless Risk.

The King in Yellow wrote:
" ...if I were to have an infinite number of nerds..."
Who needs an infinite number of nerds when we have Steve Weeks?
" ...and the fact that your avatar indicates that you a gentleman of superb honor and ethics"
And being of impeccable good taste I couldn't possibly take this opportunity to shill my Backstabber Microbadge.
" ..I must cede you your point."
I hope you're not just whistling Dixie!
(And will you change your vote?)

Notahandle wrote:

(And will you change your vote?)

Absolutely not!

The fact that you would even ask another gentleman something like that tarnishes your good name.
My poor wife, who was reading over my shoulder at the time, nearly fainted dead away after reading your request. (Either that, or she was overcome by the vapors. Poor soul, it's so hard to tell with her).

Good day again, I say!

The King in Yellow wrote:
"My poor wife, who was reading over my shoulder at the time, nearly fainted dead away after reading your request."
Then I pray that your browser has a 'Plonk the mad gamer' button! I fear his shenanigans would prove too much for the faint of heart.

MrZir wrote:

I've never played either, so I sat on the fence trying to come up with a difference worth voting on. For me, if I can get together 6 or 7 of the "right" people to play an all day game, there are other games that I would much rather play than Diplomacy.

Borderlands

So you haven't played either game, but know for a fact that you'd much rather play another game than one of the two with seven people enough to vote against it? And of the two, this is the game that has stood the test of time enough to have one release after another...

Death and Taxis wrote:

Ryan B. wrote:

Diplomacy rocks... the game is all about negotiation and adaptive game play. Being able to get out of a bad position in Diplomacy by shrewd discussion and bargaining is vastly more rewarding than getting a lucky run in the roll of the dice in some of the many games which plague the market nowadays.

Diplomacy is truly a game of skill... that doesn't devolve into some lame abstract Euro exercise.

Don't forget to vote...

I did. On Page 5. So what's the score so far?

quozl wrote:

Aarontu wrote:

So, Borderland fans, someone give me a quick synopsis on why Borderlands is so awesome. I've never played/seen it and I'm curious. All I've been able to infer from this thread is that it's in a fantasy land and is sort of like Diplomacy with Catan-esque resources thrown in.

It's more like Risk without dice. There's some diplomacy and trading and generating resources but the heart of the game I'd describe as diceless Risk.

Sounds kind of interesting.

[writes vote secretly on a piece of paper]

Vote: Borderlands

Mostly because you can actually finish a game. (I don't think I've ever finished a game of Diplomacy. We tended to get bored before the end.)

Borderlands is also one of those odd cases where the expansions do tend to help the game. So much that the German version (Ascarion) includes the expansions.

Diplomacy: played once as a 10th-grade social studies assignment. I don't like to mix my games with school.

Vote: Borderlands.

I've never even seen a copy of Borderlands (though I just discovered that, apparently, you can steal bootleg a copy from BGG files), so, by default, it can't get a vote. (I did play LoQ on my C64 a million years ago, but remember it only as dull enough to not be able to usurp LodeRunner's position as most-played C64 game at the time. Hardly a fair sample to judge.) I have, however, played Lifeboats and other alleged "it's just like Dip but shorter and cooler" games. They're about as useless as the alleged "Civ Lite" games clogging the shelves out there. Lifeboats? It's a fucking race game punctuated by periods of intense whining. [And, while I certainly enjoyed Dune, I think that those who hold it up as the Alpha and Omega of negotiation games have shrines to Frank Herbert in their basements and harbor secret fantasies of growing up to be the Kumquat-HaagenDazs, or whatever that glowy-eyed prat was called.)

If your classic Dip game really drags and stalls that badly, you're too stubborn to acknowledge a draw situation and simply refuse to end it as such. Since split decisions are valid end-games, get over your masturbatory fantasies of singular world conquest and just offer fucking terms already. (While not as radical as Barnes' insistence some months back that "a full game of Civ is really a 4-hour game and that 12-hour games are a fucking myth", 6 hours for Dip was an absolute max when I played F2F, not a minimum like so many seem to allege.) Beyond that, the scores of variants allow you to customize (and significantly alter) the game experience. Play a no-press Gunboat game sometime if you want an exceptionally different sort of gaming experience. Or, perhaps play 1898, where each power only starts with 1 home supply center and y'all actually have to fill the map.

That said, in F2F gaming, I wouldn't argue with it being described as an "experience game" as it certainly can be overly reliant on the players involved to have some sense of the various strategies (and to not be total douchebags). You can't drop it on the table at some semi-anonymous game night and hope that it will be worth a damn. It's unquestionably a slow-paced game. It's absolutely a much better PBEM game than almost any other I've played. The use of an automated order adjudicator reduces the "fiddly" [a word I'd like to see added to the site's filter--preferably with an auto-ban tied to its use] factor to just about nil save for convoy orders (which are a bit of a pain in the ass to craft but actually more clear than the F2F versions since you have to spell out the exact path. Considering that convoy rules seem to get re-addressed in every second or third reprint since 1958, there's no question that they're a pain in the ass)


Vote: Diplomacy*

*Not really an objective vote here. Though it's been at least 5 years since I played PBEM [and vastly prefer Here I Stand to *any* other 6+ player game these days, even though a F2F game of HiS can be a real iron-butt competition.] I really enjoy Dip in all its various forms, including "classic". But, having never even seen Borderlands proper, I can't really compare. While being able to play it with as few as 4 is intriguing [and can it really be played with 2 or is it actually little more than a half-assed Viktory II at that stage?], how much shorter is a 6-player game of Borderlands than a 6- or 7-player Dip? I can't believe that 2-hour time listed is anything but a pipe dream with that number.