More Diplo-Blogging

This is another picture from the Diplomacy Tournament I wrote about earlier this week. It shows a bunch of international Diplomacy sets (from the private collection of Edi Birsan)--French, Italian, Dutch, German, and a bootleg Brazilian set that adds a supply center in North Africa.

It's a graphic depiction of a point I neglected to make in my first post: the Diplomacy community is not just a community--it's an international community. As was vividly demonstrated to me: I posted a link to my blog on rec.games.diplomacy, the main Diplomacy newsgroup, and ended up getting visitors from six continents--from Spain, France, The Netherlands; South Africa; Australia; Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay; Canada and Mexico; Japan.

The Diplomacy community worldwide is divided into two parallel worlds: the e-mail game, and the face-to-face game. Via e-mail, I've played with people in 7 or 8 different countries; face-to-face, it's much harder to connect with people in distant lands. Still, it's comforting in a way to know that there are people all over the world with whom I have one non-trivial thing in common.