June 27th Megagame: Super-Diplomacy
The evening of Saturday, June 27th, 2026, some friends and I—including Walid from Dead Letters and ty from OVER/UNDER—are running a megagame version of Diplomacy, which we call Super-Diplomacy.
The game runs for four hours for thirty-five players at boshi’s place. The doors open at 5:00 p.m., orientation and tutorial starts at 5:30 p.m., and the game starts at 6:00 p.m.
Tickets are $20. You can get yours here.
Super-Diplomacy Poster
The core rules are, basically, just Diplomacy, the same ones that Allan Calhamer wrote in ’59. The seven powers write down their orders and submit them simultaneously at the end of each turn; armies and fleets march around a map of Europe (and adjacent regions), fighting each other in diceless battles; at the end of each year (every other turn), powers recalculate the sizes of their military based on the supply centers they control.
Regular Diplomacy has thirty-four supply centers and seven powers, with one player controlling each power. In Super-Diplomacy, we keep the same thirty-four supply centers and seven powers, but this time, we have thirty-four players, one for each supply center instead of one for each power. At game start, twenty-two players belong to the seven powers (three per power, except the Russian Empire, which has four), and the remaining twelve players are independent.
From its member players, each power elects one commander-in-chief, who is responsible for writing and submitting orders for all of the power’s armies and navies. A commander-in-chief, on paper, has sole discretion over their power’s movements: they can, should, and will listen to the other members of their faction, but they are not strictly required to listen to them. When a commander-in-chief submits their power’s orders to the referees for the turn, those orders are final.
Naturally, this may lead to some animosity within the power, so power members have a method of recourse: the vote of no confidence. If a majority of members of a power vote against their commander-in-chief, that commander-in-chief is removed from power, and a new one must be elected. But! if no member of the power can secure a plurality of votes in the succession election—if every member of the power votes for somebody different—the power dissolves, and each supply center becomes independent. Without a clear plan to follow, a vote of no confidence is a dangerous, dicy maneuver. But perhaps necessary, if your commander-in-chief begins to blunder the war.
Independent players are in a precarious position. The basic objective of the game has not changed: the power that controls eighteen of the thirty-four supply centers on the board wins, and everyone else loses. Ideally, an independent player will manage to stay afloat and free long enough to pick the winning power—more practically, though, they’re likely to get snapped up by a neighbor, regardless of that neighbor’s odds of victory.
All of this, notably, still occurs as the game clock ticks onwards. We’re aiming to make it through four turns per hour—quite a clip, even by the standards of regular Diplomacy—which means that all of this politicking needs to happen in a timely fashion. If you spend a half-hour quarrelling over a vote or the terms of an alliance, that’s two turns and an entire year of in-game time that has flown you by. A successful power needs to manage the relationships of its own members, the other powers, and the independent players, which demands delegation and trust. Fail to do this and your commander-in-chief could end up flying blind, diplomatically speaking, making even a large power easy pickings for an alliance of its enemies.
There’s also one other role I haven’t mentioned: thirty-four players get a supply center, join powers, and tussle for control, but there’s one other, the thirty-fifth. This player is, in effect, the news. They don’t get any soldiers or supply centers and so cannot directly alter the board. Instead, they get a laptop and access to the projector at boshi’s place, allowing them to display text and images for the entire game to see. Does that give them any actual power? It’s hard to say for sure, but I suspect a clever news-player could find ways to make themselves very influential indeed.
With all these elements running into each other—the board, the politics of each power, the independent players, the news, and all the alliances and deals between them—the game is, in all likelihood, going to be chaotic. A bit of a pear wiggler, if you will. Many moving actors and elements all clashing and crashing into each other, resulting in political outcomes that none of us can predict. I have run and played in-person megagames before, but this is a particular stripped-down model. Where many megagames involve a lot of overlapping currencies, components, rules systems, and fictional elements, Super-Diplomacy tries to winnow all that down, relying instead on persuasion, cunning, and psychology.
It should be fun! If you’re in New York, we’d love to have you come play.
Super-Diplomacy is happening Saturday, June 27th, at boshi’s place. Doors open at 5:00 p.m., orientation at 5:30 p.m., and the game begins at 6:00 p.m., running for about four hours. Tickets are $20, available here, as supplies last.
See you on the battlefield!
