by Mark Nelson
CW Heptadiplomacy is copyright © 1990 by Mark Nelson. The UKVB and NAVB may not distribute this design. It may be reprinted by zine-editors provided that they mail me a copy of the reprint.
As you can see Mark refuses to allow this variant to be distributed by the Variant Bank (the successor to both the UKVB and NAVB). Mark, if you ever change your mind let me know.
Anyone wanting to know what this variant is all about can check out the following review.
Crazy Whako Heptadiplomacy is an amalgram of ideas from Don Miller, Lew Pulsipher and Jef Bryant. It uses seven players and seven boards – either each player players (a) the same country on each board or (b) a different country on each board – take your pick (Mark recommends the former). Movement between the boards is possible either on the basis that (for example) you can move from Lon on Board 1 to Lon on any other board, or you can move from Lon on Board 1 to Wal, Yor, NTH, ENG on any other board (again take your pick). There is even the possibility of combining fleets on different boards to facilitate convoys (but as Mark admits this could be frightening to GM). To make the GMing even harder, you have to keep track of which board each unit was built on, and then the adjustment phase for each board directly affects the units built on that board. To show you how complicated this game is, there are 238 SCs and a winner requires 70 centers at the end of an Autumn adjudication. Provisions exist for 2-way and 3-way wins (as in Mercator). Draws are not allowed. Of course this will be a mentally exhausting game to pay and I wonder if anyone has ever managed to play the game to completion. Whereas Don Miller imagined a Twin Earth approach with two boards, to use seven boards you really do have to be mad. I’d put this one down as probably too unwieldly to be sustained, but I would be happy to be proved wrong.