You should look into A Game of Thrones: The Board Game. It's very similar to diplomacy at it's core, but has a bunch more going on. The people who just play the game mechanics tend to lose, and the people who build alliances, make deals, and break some of them at the right time are the ones who win.

It makes it to the table with my group of friends because it takes much less time to play than Diplomacy.

Just like Diplomacy, you may not want to play it with people who take the board game backstabbing stuff too seriously.

Then when you find new friends, you can play a game... and you will need new friends again.

There's no such thing as friends, only people you haven't yet played diplomacy with.

Counter: There is not such things as enemies... only people you haven't played Diplomacy with.

that is soooo true.... I've seen chairs flying thanks to diplomacy...

We used to play this in single day marathons with 30 minutes of negotiation per turn. It was glorious.

I was quite successful and lots of people hated me for having backstabbed them in previous games but that only made my game better. Having an opponent dead set against me was just barter for my trades with other people.

There is no other game like it, although I'm told Intrigue gets a little bit of the double cross feel.

Look for online play. Much better that way anyway.

In the time I spend writing e-mails for one turn in an on-line game I probably could play most of a face-to-face game.

But don't you miss the face to face interaction? Watching everything play out...

Not a bit. You'll get to watch the playing-out in your email, or on the board. And the level of secrets makes the playout so much more interesting!

If you're playing face to face and you see Russia and Germany go talk for ten of the fifteen minutes, it's no secret that they're working together. Online, it's much harder to tell.

The face to face meetings add another dimension with false signaling, too. Hey France, next round I'll talk to Germany and get that army moved out of there for you...

Oh man, the emotional investment in this game is just never replaced by online play, imo.

It's also amazing to see how emotional simple emails can become. It really does break people. Now I'm getting the itch again...

Or you might not want to mix the people you play Diplomacy with and your friends. :-)

I love the game in theory, but I felt too bad after backstabbing people. (So if we ever play, trust me! :-) )

It was shocking to realize how wimpy I really am.

I lost my best friend for several years after backstabbing him in a game of Diplomacy.

Seriously? Why do people take it so seriously...

There's a comment in the article about how the game brings out people's "true" personality. I disagree with that, as I think that optimizing your score in a game needn't/shouldn't have anything to do with personality, but for whatever reasons it's a common reaction people have when playing the game. "Oh, this person is truly truly horrible and I never realized until now." That kind of thinking generally leads to unrecoverable breakdowns in real world relations.

I think that's more or less it. I was just playing to win. Although the manner of my betrayal may have been a factor. While we were allied, my friend insisted on being the one to deliver both of our orders himself. When I broke the alliance, I allowed him to deliver the orders that we worked out together, but then I secretly delivered a separate set of orders for my own forces with a note saying that they were to countermand any other orders that might be received. It was kind of underhanded, but so was his insistence on delivering my orders (since doing so would allow him to unilaterally betray me), so I figured he had it coming.