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"I built Diplomacy for the browser. Come play." — the story of thirty
years with the game and the launch of dip.kestrelsnest.social, with
screenshots and the Chromatic board as the Open Graph image.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

content/posts/2026-09-30-i-built-diplomacy-for-the-browser/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,67 @@
+---
+title: "I built Diplomacy for the browser. Come play."
+date: 2026-09-30T00:07:00-04:00
+draft: false
+description: "Dip is free browser Diplomacy with no accounts: play with friends at any pace, or against house players who negotiate in plain English, remember every promise, and sometimes break them."
+images:
+  - /posts/2026-09-30-i-built-diplomacy-for-the-browser/dip-chromatic-board.png
+tags:
+  - projects
+  - games
+  - diplomacy
+  - programming
+---
+
+*Dip is free, runs in your browser, and needs no account: **[dip.kestrelsnest.social](https://dip.kestrelsnest.social)**. Play it with friends, or against house players who negotiate, remember your promises, and sometimes break them. Here's why I made it.*
+
+{{< img src="dip-uv6g-final-board.png" alt="The final board of a Dip game: Austria's red armies and fleets stretch from Norway and St Petersburg across Warsaw, Munich and Vienna down through the Balkans, Turkey and southern Italy, while France holds the west and England clings to Britain and Sweden." caption="The final board of my last game. Red is me: Austria, 19 centers, from Norway to Smyrna." >}}
+
+## My history with Diplomacy
+
+**High school.** Ryan, one of my closest friends, made contact with a similar friend group two towns over who played this game called *Diplomacy*. No dice, no luck, just seven people sitting around a map making deals while trying to take over Europe. It can take a whole day to play. So he worked out a time, and he and I and our mutual best friend Scott drove over to play. It felt so grown up to go to another town on our own to play games, and the game itself captivated me from the first turn. I don't remember who won (but I do, weirdly enough, remember stopping for lunch and getting sandwiches from Subway, which seemed so urban; there was no sandwich shop within a half hour's drive of my very rural house at the time), but I'd had my first taste of the game and I was hooked. I think we played a couple more times, but I can't even be sure of that. By the following year I had moved across the country for college, so I never got to develop my skills with Scott and Ryan, much less the folks from two towns over.
+
+**College.** My friend group loved board games. Our go-to was Wiz-War, brought by Jason from California, because we could fly through two or three games in thirty minutes and have a riotous good time doing it. Our college (and the town it was in) was very small and the nearest game shop was about two hours away, so we founded a gaming club and landed a budget from the student association to stock a closet full of games. Diplomacy was one of the first I bought (along with Civilization, another all-day affair that was much more complicated, with tons of fiddly bits). I don't know how we found time for all the gaming we did, but we probably played hundreds of games of Diplomacy. The obsession never let go, and… I got quite good. I'm an introverted autistic fellow, but something about the coordination and talking and planning and strategy and execution complemented my brain and personality exceptionally well.
+
+My school, New Mexico Tech, was one of the country's premier research universities, and its location in central New Mexico (including being home to the Very Large Array radio telescope, the thing that brought me to the school) put it right on the backbone of the young internet. Newsgroups (essentially single-topic bulletin boards) caught my attention, and one I spent the most time in was dedicated to Diplomacy. There was a whole world of folks who loved the game as much as I did (and some so much more), and I soaked up analysis of strategy, discussions of alliances and gambits, and virtually met a ton of people who loved the game, but sadly I could never play them.
+
+Except I could! Of course there were people running play-by-mail games, but I'm a horrific pen pal and that kind of dedication was out of the question. But Ken Lowe, a programmer in Washington State, had written software that could automatically process emailed orders, coordinate communication between players, and adjudicate turns: a "judge." It ran on Unix systems just like the one at our school, and his system needed to wind down, so a handful of other judges were being set up around the world to pick up the slack. I happened to get hired at the computer center and had enough access to install and set up the software, so in March of 1993, USNM went live as the fifth or sixth judge. I was its maintainer (and learned the basics of sysops and Unix programming that keep me employed to this day) while I played countless games on the others. At one point I was playing a dozen games at once, which wasn't all that hard considering most had 48 hours between turns. The software supported variants of the game on all sorts of maps and settings, including one I helped get running on my judge that became my favorite: Chromatic, five Italys arranged around a central Switzerland like spokes on a wheel. Of all the maps, it was the only one I printed out and laminated to a board so my local group could play in person. I wasn't just playing a game I loved; I was contributing to a worldwide hobby in a way that was brand new to me.
+
+{{< img src="dip-chromatic-board.png" alt="The Chromatic board in Dip: a circular map where five colored, Italy-shaped peninsulas radiate like spokes from a shared center, ringed by seas and small island supply centers, with red armies spread through the middle of the wheel." caption="Chromatic, the map I once laminated to a board, now in the browser." >}}
+
+One fun anecdote: my judge only ever hosted fifty or so games at any given time. It was one of the smaller judges, and I kept it that way on purpose. It had a reputation for being maybe the fastest to process mail, thanks to our spot on the backbone, and positions in games there were highly sought after. I wasn't a system administrator, but I did have maybe more access than my help desk position warranted, and I didn't exactly ask permission to install the judge. Surely one little program that just sends and receives email could fly under the radar, right? One day word got back to me that some friends who *were* system administrators were trying to track down some unusual traffic on the network, and they'd traced it to my judge. I went to let them know it was harmless and just running Diplomacy games (I'm certain every one of them had played with me at a real table more than once), and they were fine with the concept but incredulous at the amount of email it was consuming and sending. I don't recall the number they threw at me, and it didn't seem like all that much, until they told me it accounted for 10% of all the email going in and out of the university. That put it into perspective, and I limited the games it could host even more. A few years later, as I graduated and lost the access I had, I spun it down altogether.
+
+In 1997, I moved to Athens, Georgia. The night before I drove the moving truck out of town, I was with a big group of folks at one of our regular bar hangouts, and one of the craziest things happened. A fellow came up to me, someone I recognized but hadn't seen in years. He told me he'd been living and working near Albuquerque since leaving Socorro. All that was going well, but he was excited to tell me about a gaming group he'd started. He'd introduced these folks to Diplomacy, and they'd been playing it regularly for a year or two. He was training them, he said, to really understand the game, to get them ready for one goal he had. And now, he thought, they were really good, and they were ready. They were ready, he said, to play me. Now, he had to be pulling my leg. Had to have. Sure, I may have been obsessed, but it's not like I always won; I wasn't some Diplomacy champion. His whole setup remains one of the most absurd things I've ever heard, but he told it dead straight. I had to break it to him that in just a few hours I was driving with all my things to Athens for good, and he acted like I'd mortally wounded him. It had to be a setup, it had to be, but it was one of the best acting jobs I've ever seen. And if it wasn't? Just incredible.
+
+I expected to keep right on playing when I landed in Georgia, but for whatever reason, it never happened. Even though Athens is something like a hundred times the size of Socorro, I never could find a gaming group to get in with. I didn't have a car for my first few years, my social outlets became community theater and live music, and to this day I have never played another in-person game of Diplomacy. I have a box of the game on the shelf, and a few years ago I finally threw away my handmade Chromatic board.
+
+That's not to say I haven't played at all. Every now and again I would get on a judge and play a game, but one by one they went offline. A few successor systems with live map interfaces instead of email are here and there, but I drifted away. In 1999, Avalon Hill released a PC version of the game, touting both "hot seat" multiplayer and computer personalities you could play against, negotiations and all. Its release date was Black Friday, and even though I had pledged to honor Buy Nothing Day, I caved, found a way to the mall that housed the town's only software store, and bought it so I could play all weekend. I felt guilty doing it, and the guilt only grew with my disappointment in how absolutely terrible the computer players were. I didn't have any humans to play with, and I was so hopeful this was my chance at challenging solo play, but it was just awful. I don't know that I ever played it again after that weekend.
+
+So that's my history with the game: a decade-long obsession in which I inserted myself into the inner circle of a global hobby, followed by decades of barely playing at all. I love it, it remains my favorite game, and I miss it.
+
+## So I sat down and built one
+
+It's called Dip, and it's at **[dip.kestrelsnest.social](https://dip.kestrelsnest.social)**. It's free, it runs in your browser, and there's no account to make. Your seat lives in your browser, and if you want to pick up a game on another device, it gives you four words to carry it over.
+
+You can play the way I first learned: send a link or a four-letter code to six friends and settle in. There are no deadlines. A turn resolves the moment everyone has submitted, so a game can take an evening or a month. Talk can be public, or private to any power you choose, and anyone with the link can sit in the Peanut Gallery and watch. You write orders by clicking units on the map or by typing them the old way ("A Par-Bur"), and the adjudicator follows the Diplomacy Adjudicator Test Cases, so the corner cases come out the way the rules say.
+
+Or you can play the game I wanted in 1999. Fill the empty seats with house players and they'll carry on private conversations with you in plain English. They make truces over a province, trade supports, propose alliances against a common enemy, and divide up the spoils. They remember every promise, yours and theirs, and the table keeps a ledger of every one that's kept or broken, even when the culprit won't own up to it. Each has its own temperament, and some keep their word better than others; figuring out who is who is half the fun, so I won't spoil it.
+
+In the game I just finished, playing Austria, I offered to support one neighbor's fleet from the Aegean into Constantinople. It answered: "Constantinople is held too strongly, Austria; with one support I would only bounce. Bring another, or cut one of theirs." That same neighbor and I kept a truce over Venice and Trieste for six straight years, renewed every year with "You kept your word about Venice, and I kept mine about Trieste. The same again in 1904?" When I won, its parting word was: "Congratulations, Austria. The board is yours, and you earned it. You kept your word to me, and I will not forget it." Another neighbor promised to support my army into Warsaw and didn't: "I did promise to support your army in Galicia into Warsaw, Austria. Plans change."
+
+{{< img src="dip-uv6g-press.png" alt="Dip's press panel. At the top, the Agreements ledger lists what's between me and the other powers: “You have broken a truce with England. You have broken an alliance with Russia. You have broken a truce with Turkey. You have broken an alliance with Germany.” Below it, my private conversation with Italy (The Attaché). Me: “I can support aeg to con.” Italy: “Constantinople is held too strongly, Austria; with one support I would only bounce. Bring another, or cut one of theirs.”" caption="The house keeps score. Up top, the four promises I broke on my way to winning; below, the Attaché doing the math." >}}
+
+None of this is a language model, either. The house players are old-fashioned algorithms and decision trees, working from the board and their own record of every promise. They're not grandmasters, but they bargain, they hold grudges, and every so often one of them will stab you in the back and mean it. That weekend with the PC game would have gone very differently.
+
+And yes, Chromatic is there: five powers around a central Switzerland, the map I laminated to a board all those years ago and finally threw away. Choose it when you open a table.
+
+A few smaller things I'm fond of:
+
+- A link to a finished game shows the final board, so you can brag properly.
+- You can pick your own colors for the powers in Preferences, including a colorblind-safe set.
+- If something surprises you, there's a button in every game to tell me, and I read every report.
+
+{{< img src="dip-uv6g-game-over.png" alt="Dip's game-over card: “Austria has won,” with 19 supply centers. A bar chart shows Austria's centers after each Fall from 1901 to 1910, rising 5, 6, 7, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16 and 19 and crossing the dashed 18-center line. A table lists the final standings: France 11 centers, England 4, Italy 0, and Germany, Russia and Turkey eliminated." caption="Send someone the link to a finished game and this is what they see first." href="https://dip.kestrelsnest.social/join/UV6G" >}}
+
+Dip is part of **[Kestrel's Hall](https://gamehall.kestrelsnest.social)**, a little collection of games I've built (yes, Wiz-War is there too, the same one Jason brought from California).
+
+It's been thirty years since I last sat at a table and made a deal I didn't intend to keep. Come sit at mine.