Diplomacy Sets

Item	Homemade Diplomacy set
Owner	Soeren Pedersen
Description: This Diplomacy set was made by Soeren Pedersen in the 1980s. Most of the raw materials were scrap wood — the only items that were purchased were the paint, hinges and nails. The board is roughly .85 X .75 meters (approximately 33 X 30 inches) on each side. The gameboard includes a drawer that holds the handmade pieces, rules, conference map, etc. The set itself is hinged and folds in half, as can be seen below, making the game more easily transportable and also serving as a lid for the drawer so that it does not fall out when carried. The set is used at tournaments (mainly the Danish Championship) as well as for a friendly game now and then.
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Item	Large homemade Diplomacy set
Owner	Craig Purcell
Description: This large Diplomacy set, made by Craig Purcell is roughly two meters (approximately 78 inches) on each side. The board is made of wood and is hand painted with the Avalon Hill bookcase edition map. The armies and fleets are made out of painted wood, with metal hardware accents (hex nuts for the wheels on the armies and rivets for the masts of the fleets). The set is used at tournaments and club games in New Zealand.
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Item	Magnetic wall-mounted Diplomacy set
Owner	Unknown
Description: I came across this item listed for auction on Ebay. This is a hand-made oversized Diplomacy board. It is designed to be hung like a picture. The board is made from a scanned image of the original Waddington’s version and is assembled from smaller, individual printouts. It is mounted on a 1/32″ sheet-metal backing that is in turn mounted on veneer and framed in cedar that has been stained and finished. The pieces are custom designed high-gloss printouts mounted on 1″ magnetic squares. There are 8 army and 8 fleet pieces for each country. The armies are represented by 3 stars and the fleets are represented by an individual warship type. Each country’s flag is also represented in the background of the respective counters. The board measures just over 3’x4′.
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Item	Magnetic conference map Diplomacy sets
Owner	Various
Description: Small magnetic Diplomacy sets made by mounting a conference map onto a metal sheet with colored magnetic pieces for units are a handy way of keeping track of play-by-mail or play-by-email games at home, or for use as updateable conference maps for negotiations in face-to-face games. These “cookie sheet” sets first became popular in the mid-1990s thanks to Eric Brosius. He may not have been the first to make one, and was certainly not the last, but they became more common at that time because Eric was making in quantity to sell them to Diplomacy players. Also, his sets were the closest thing to official items, since he had a letter from Avalon Hill granting him permission to sell them as long has he didn’t do commercial advertising and used genuine Avalon Hill conference maps.
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Maps of Interest

Item	Embroidered Diplomacy map
Owner	Larry Peery
Description: Larry Peery commissioned Claire Brosius to make a needlepoint Diplomacy map. The image below was created from a full page-sized hardcopy image that was scanned and reduced. As a result, some of the detail is lost. Because you can’t seen any of the individual stitches, you might be tempted to think that the image reduction improves the image by hiding detail, and that if you could see the detail, the shading and geography would look much coarser than they do in the image. This is true, but only to the slightest extent. The quality and smoothness of the map, even on the original image, is really excellent.
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Item	Very large Diplomacy map
Owner	Larry Peery
Description: Possibly the largest Diplomacy map in existence, Larry had portions of a map printed onto large sheets of paper by a CAD plotter for the 1989 Wien Spielfest in Vienna. Fully assembled, the map is approximately 3 X 4 meters.
Images: None available

Item	Mounted 1958 map autographed by Allan B. Calhamer
Owner	John Quarto-vonTivadar
Description: This is an enlarged copy of the original 1958 Diplomacy map (different from today’s map), mounted on a foamcore backing and autographed by the creator of the game at WDC X.
Images: None available

Item	Conference map autographed by Henry Kissinger
Owner	Larry Peery
Description: I won’t repeat the story of how Larry came to get it, but if you ask him he’ll probably tell you.
Images: None available

Publications

Item	Swedish Diplomacy Rulebook
Owner	Various
Description: The Swedish translation of the rulebook was done by the amateur Diplomacy hobby (specifically Björn von Knorring) in Sweden, and not by a commercial game company. However, the translation of the rulebook was sanctioned by Avalon Hill, who gave permission in 1995 for the translation to be distributed provided that it was distributed free of charge, and only to people who had purchased a copy of the game. The Swedish hobby has worked hard at respecting those guidelines.
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Item	Swedish Diplomacy Gamer’s Guides
Owner	Various
Description: Swedish Diplomacy players have been active in supporting the hobby in Sweden. In addition to the “unofficial but sanctioned” rulebook shown above, the hobby has also published collections of articles on Diplomacy. The first edition of this book shown in the first image below was published in 1995. “Spelet vid f�rhandlingsbordet” translates to “The game at the Negotiation Table”. The second edition (second image below) was published in 1999, and replaced some of the articles with new and/or better ones. These books are essentially the Swedish equivalent of the Avalon Hill’s Gamer’s Guide to Diplomacy, only much more comprehensive. The second edition is almost 150 pages long, and contains articles on strategy, variants, Internet play, Swedish hobby history, and more.
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Item	An Introduction to the Strategy and Tactics of Postal Diplomacy
Author	Larry Peery
Description: Larry Peery self-published this 300+ page book back in the 1970s.
Images: None available

Miscellaneous

Item	Diplomacy Power ID Pins/Buttons
Owner	Several
Description: This item consists of a set of 7 pins/buttons, each of which has the name and flag for one of the seven powers of Diplomacy. The intent is that players in a game would pin the button of the power they are playing on their shirt to make it easy to identify who is playing which power at face-to-face games (particularly at tournaments where many of players at a game may not be familiar faces). Pitt Crandlemire gave a few of these sets as gifts to friends.
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Item	Oil painting by Magnus Lindström
Owner	In the possession of Roland Isaksson, but he considers it to belong to the entire Swedish Diplomacy hobby.
Description: This painting was painted by Magnus Lindström in 1995… truly a piece of art. An image of the painting was used for the cover of the Swedish translation of the rules to Diplomacy (see next item below).
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