live face-to-face game, 15 minutes per phase for negotiating, plus an optional 3 minuts for writing orders.

Everyone around a single table and with enough space to talk privately in a corner. (but people will see who you are talking to) The rush to get your orders in on time means you might make more mistakes than usual, some of these may even be intentional - and you will have 15 minutes next phase to convince your allies that you really made a mistake...

a very different expierence to this online one phase per day version.

Verbal back room communications are best. You just have to watch out for spies.

Don't see it as a drawback, it's part of what makes f2f so much fun.

The one thing you can't avoid, and the one thing that is a huge part of f2f, is knowing basically who is talking, and who isn't. If no one wants to talk to you.... then you're in trouble and you know something is up. It is much more difficult to send an unsolicited private message to an enemy without everyone else knowing that's what you're doing. But it can still be done. Get creative with notes and texts and all other forms of communication. Anything goes.

One time someone even stole someone's orders sheet and showed it to me, and slipped it back before they noticed. From my understanding of the spirit of the game, that's not cheating. It's only cheating if you invoke things outside the game, like, if you don't ally with me then you have to pay me for lunch... stuff like that.

Or even the more crass, "If you don't do it I'll punch you." lol.

i don't know about outside things, i read recenly about the Germany who knew France was 'recieving clandestine favours' from englands wife, and upon threatening to tell england france rolled over and did whatever germany wanted. (though that might make for a less interesting game, mainly because it would have been too easy for germany...)

Glad to see this post. I do alright online so i went to a FTF tourney several months ago but I got creamed!!!!!!!! Supposedly the phase length was 15 minutes but by the time we read out the orders, usually only12 minutes were left. It was about as fast as a 10-min phase live game online here. Hardly time to chat with everyone and write in your orders. (But I do have plenty of practice now the these live games, so I might be better at the next FTF tournament!) One additional problem was that if you wanted to talk to a player and they were in conference with someone else, you had to wait your turn and that used up a lot of minutes. Altogether FTF was exciting, my heart was pounding like a live game on this site.

We always played limited time for negotiation, but unlimited time for order writing. But, of course, during order writing no talking allowed. So, after the negotiation phase, everyone must start writing orders.

The advantage is that there is no panic rush for order writing. Of course, it is what the players like. I have small gaming group, but we never like that things in a game goes wrong, because of misunderstanding of the rules or rush etc. For any game we play.

Lucas

Also, if there are any newby players, we explained the game a few days before. Otherwise, you have some boring hour before the game for the other players. For the newby players the countries we are already chosen, such that the game was explained together with their country.

Finally, orders of new players were always revealed first, giving the possibility for correcting.

Lucas

For me, it's not the actual game that finds itself to be the more difficult, rather it's trying to get 6 other players to spend a whole day only playing Diplomacy.

ftf is a different beast... its the 'pure' game and loads of fun... the 15 min time means you REALLY have to think fast and cant sit there to study the map for hours to make the *best* tactical moves...