What do I honestly remember about Cambridge University’s DipSoc? Nothing, save for one fact which grabbed my mind then and has never released it since. There was a guy with a relatively distinctive surname (a military rank, for what little that mattered). This wasn’t what struck me as being endlessly fascinating at the time. Nor was it his being a Wykehamist, something he patiently explained to each new member, and a state of being he bore neither as burden nor triumph. But as a fact which nonetheless needed to be carefully related in every instance to everyone. No, what was so distinctive about him was that he was old.

Tom (let’s call him Tom Major) could easily have been in his late twenties. So past an ancient like even a PhD. Thus old, incredibly old, aware of arcane things from the mid-80s and not just from books. And still living in early 90s Cambridge. And still coming to DipSoc. There then was something to think on: for what manner of game could bring such a man to sit with the likes of us, if there was nothing to it?

In my mind’s eye, he has the Gen X slacker’s uniform of long at the front, short at back, lank, dark hair, but maybe that was me? Affable, bored, cynical, but committed to Diplomacy being properly played. “Because,” as Tom said, “why else are we here?” 

The chief interest was my Total Edwardian Naval Procurement Theory of Everything

Here was the CU Diplomacy Society. Which appears still to exist, but now inclusively encompasses all, or many, board games. None of which I’ve heard of. The online league tables suggest DipSoc now also encompasses women, something it certainly did not do in 1992 (where in the outside world NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia was in its foothills). I had heard of women at school; I had heard of Diplomacy. Having arrived at university with an uncluttered mind in relation to either, Avalon Hill’s board game, with its admirably lucid rulebook, and stern disavowal of chance (no dice!) easily settled that contest in its favour.

I see now, or at least in the charmingly period 2017 website, that there are women in DipSoc these days. A handful of very select women, I feel sure, for whom a board game casting you, and the men otherwise playing it, as one of seven European great powers in the run up to the Great War has convulsive appeal. And why not? What wasn’t there to like?

The game centres round the off-board negotiation you have between rounds of formal warfare. When the actual game play happens, it does so simultaneously for all players. Thus, unlike, say, Risk, where you unrealistically take turns, in Diplomacy you each write your “movement orders” at the same time, after the off-board diplomacy has finished. These then are executed at the same time. Or they attempt to be! Because during the talking one of you might have lied to another, or been betrayed, or messed things up. But whatever happened, the talking and the mistaken thinking could so easily, so realistically, have rendered your ambitions for your fleets and armies just so much unrealisable folly. Therefore exactly the sort of lesson you should have been getting from your history degree.

A brief word about mine. Had Wikipedia existed forty years ago, I’m not sure I would ever have read a book. My chief interest in anything as a teen was how much it, however tangentially (and I’d be the judge of that, thank you), brought me any closer to realising my Total Edwardian Naval Procurement Theory of Everything.

Which was not a theory that would explain everything, and certainly not anything in the present. But was instead a simple question to myself: what would I have done if I had found myself doing what I can only assume a majority of boys in the 80s also wanted to do, and had to secure support for an Edwardian naval arms race?

Not, good God no, how might one have pretended to fight a war at sea. Unworldly as I was, I knew even then that there were other boys, and men unlike other men, who had many sided dice. Who wargamed. But be it the Fulda Gap, facing Soviet tanks, or orcs doing whatever they did, or, indeed, dreadnoughts in the cold wastes of the North Sea, that sort of thing didn’t interest me at all I’m afraid. For what was war — maybe Tom said this? — except the failure of diplomacy? No, Diplomacy’s charm was the talking, not the fighting.

In supervisions, the technical point of being at university (and always, I felt, a foul waste of the time of those supervising me), you could talk to men like early 90s atheist Niall Ferguson about how the great problem with, say, then famous real world thing, the American Empire, was how their elites lacked any commitment to going whole hog and actually putting their backs into being proper imperialists.

This was probably insightful, interesting and pregnant with possibility. But it told you damn all about whether Tom Major playing France was going to stitch you up in favour of Italy. Ultimately academe can only teach us so much. Eventually real life has to intrude. I’m glad it still seems to at Cambridge; this Christmas once again I shall try to make the case that, “whatever the extension pack, and we’re so glad you’re enjoying it, darling, for Half-Life 2 is offering you, there’s a world beyond Gordon Freeman, son. And it starts with realising just how much fun Turkey truly can be”.