Diplomacy SIG
Judge Info

The most prevalent method of Diplomacy play now is play-by-Judge. There are many, many "Judges" on the internet - essentially programs that run on a computer that know how to play diplomacy. An administrator connects to the judge and initiates a game, say "Mensa1". The game is set to have certain deadlines (every day, every week, etc.). It is told to use a certain map set, and to have a certain "press" settings. Press controls player interaction. Players could be set to all contact each other as they wish - a la the normal email style. The game could instead be set 'anonymous' so players only send email "through the judge" - i.e. to 'Mensa1/Italy'. 'Anonymous' means, even if players know each other in real life, they don't know who they're playing on the judge.

On a judge, players communicate with each other in whatever method the game was set up for. When moves are due, each player sends in a command to the judge with their moves. There's a certain syntax for the move: A PAR -> MAR, for example. The judge waits until the deadline passes, and then processes all moves it has at that time and sends out results to all players. The players can then request a postscript map if they wish, or use any of a number of programs out there to draw a map on their computer, using that judge message as input.

The judge we are using for Mensa1 and Mensa1 is the USEF judge at usef@igo.org - send it a command with the subject "list mensa1" or "list mensa2" to see how the games are going.

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