The new version of the site does not allow games with fewer than seven players. This was explained in an FAQ regarding the latest version.

Well, this ought to be handled more gracefully, at least for private games.
Either let the players vote on cancellation after the join deadline has passed and there are fewer than 7 or let the creator choose what should happen.

And in any case, this should be addressed in the current FAQ.

not that i want to encourage rules breaking, but create a second account and join your private game with it, not entering orders there will result in that country going CD.

alas it will be a randomly selected country not italy. but i think any country going CD results in a very different game. If everyone knows england is going to be CD then russia will be more likely to rush for norway, (as no-one can stop him getting that build) thus turkey will be under less pressure... france and germany will still be fighting over belguim and rushing to take england etc.

i think any single CD country from 1901 is still playable.

@mb: If you look at your "notices" you'll have received a note from the system telling you that the game had been cancelled, and that this was because there weren't enough players.

Why not try this, create a dummy account, and whomever gets Italy plays with the dummy account and enters all hold orders on his own account.

It will affect his own rating negatively, but at least you'll get to play as you wanted to.

That would still be multi-accounting, Xapi.

I have a better idea. Why don't you guys just let a 7th person join your game? You might make a new friend!

We had complaints from people who would create games but thought 5/6 player games were unfair, so we dropped them (it also simplified a few new pieces of code, e.g. country balancing and points allocation). If we re-added it it'd need another setting in the game panel, and make the upcoming variant support even harder to pull of elegantly.

In fact using future variant support to allow 5/6 player games might be the neatest way to do this, but it'll take a while

*pull off

Jamie's idea is the best one and you could recruit a played from right here on the forum. I'm sure someone would join in, even knowing you are a group of friends. Heck, it'd spice up the game because you all woud wonder who was supporting the outsider and if you could really trust your friends to crush him, even though you all said you would.

Don't worry about this, I'm going to help them nurse their way to a 6 player game, I've already sent mb an email.

Jamie/Draugnar, I actually like your proposal. Of course, we considered it, but we thought it to be rather unfair for the "outsider". Now, if someone is fully aware of the situation and still wants to join, that's fine and could make the game in fact more interesting. Maybe someone is indeed willing to join. But no Top10 player, if possible ;-) And he should be able to negotiate in German. We'll think about it and I'll post to the forum if we need a 7th player.

Ghostmaker, thanks for your help, I already replied to your mail. The procedure seems rather cumbersome to get through for a player who just joined and is not familiar with the site anyway, and I'm afraid it might cause suspicion from players who don't fully understand why we are actually forced to do that.

Actually, I have a test installation of phpdiplomacy 0.81 on one of my machines and we could even play a 6-player game there. But it's not well tested and I would be the admin with full access to the DB, so again someone might get suspicious...

Kestas: that's why I proposed to choose how that case should be handled during game creation. Not everyone thinks that such games are unfair, especially private games.

Btw, I found out that there's already an entry in the bug tracker about this: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2833266&group_id=125692&atid=703323

The entry suggests to support 2-7 player games, but probably that's a long-term goal. IMHO, supporting 2-7 player games according to the official rules and thus allowing players to play more than one nation is presumably an order of magnitude more complex than just 5/6 player games, which can be regarded as normal games with 1-2 CD countries. The current system must be able to handle such situations anyway.