In this episode the guys kick off a pub crawl and dive deep into the variants Modern Diplomacy and Sopwith, while also talking other Diplomacy stuff.
Kaner talks about a recent Fog of War game he's finished (Blind War + Less Draw) that he's animated - and won!  Kaner rambles off a few players' names much to Amby's amusement.  (0 mins 57 seconds)




Kaner acknowledges he had a bit of a hollow victory with many disbands much to his advantage. He discusses while under the "fog of war" he got many surprises along the way as he explored the map (3 mins 0 seconds)

Modern Diplomacy 2 variant
This is one of the few variants on both webDiplomacy and vDiplomacy (5 mins 40 seconds)
Kaner takes Amby off on a tangent by asking whether he's going to the face-to-face PoppyCon tournament in Melbourne, Australia in December (6 mins 40 seconds)
The guys outline the gameboard and context of this variant set in 1994 created by Vincent Mous and adapted for webDiplomacy and vDiplomacy by Carey Jensen and Oli. This game has ten players and you need 33 supply centres to win. It allows building new units in any open supply centre  (8 mins 10 seconds)
Kaner starts talking about a Modern game he's playing at the moment as Egypt and is getting totally destroyed in (9 mins 35 seconds)
Then we get onto a Modern game recently played by Amby over at webDiplomacy where he was part of a draw - see "Real Debate for All 2" (10 mins 30 seconds)
This was a public press only game which complicated communication with its subtlety. Kaner says he finds public press as a bit of a nightmare.  Amby talks a little about how with a 10 player game in public press it was a fair number of messages to read, but was manageable (11 mins)
He outlines his strategy for making a strong alliance with Germany. Which wasn't very smart with Germany frequently NMRing (lingo for new players = No Moves Received). Compounding this Amby decided to not stab Germany despite the reoccurring NMRs.  (13 mins 30 seconds)
As a result France and England took over a lot of Germany. Amby ended up then becoming buddies with France, who was getting carved up by England (15 mins 55 seconds)
England was being played by Dagabs0 who is one of the best players over at webDiplomacy, ranked 14th from a total of over 13,000 players. Not surprisingly he was on top of his game. However Turkey was the superior player on the board for this game, forming a "tighter than a monkey's arse" alliance with Ukraine, even though later on Turkey was eating Ukraine's SC's up (16 mins 45 seconds)
Amby, playing as Poland, describes how he got into a fight early on with Russia after forming an alliance with Germany. Russia got smashed quickly by Poland, Ukraine and Turkey. Amby says - after some entertaining pronunciation attempts - how he offered Murmansk to England (18 mins)
Kaner asks about what Egypt was up to at the time as he was "doing a Kaner" dying. Amby explains how while Egypt was doing well at the start, however the Turkey-Ukraine alliance gave Turkey the opportunity to move south, wiping out Egypt.
Italy had a really bad start with France attacking him from the game's opening, while England similarly attacked Spain and took him out quickly (19 mins)
Amby explains how it probably wasn't the best move to stab England by taking Murmansk and sending a bullshit excuse to him. But despite this Dagabs0 came back with a beautifully constructed diplomatic response (20 mins 30 seconds)
As a result Amby was at war with Ukraine and now England and at this time Germany started NMRing. Not looking good for Amby, so he tried making peace with Ukraine by ceasing military operations against him. But of course that didn't happen with Ukraine continuing to fight. (21 mins 15 seconds)
Meanwhile with everyone fighting each other Turkey was "gobbling" up the board. This caused Amby, England and France to push Ukraine hard to break ranks with Turkey (22 mins 40 seconds)
The guys get into their second - or maybe third - pronunciation fig