To summarize the variant, it is where two players, after being assigned their home countries, are given a treasury and can use it to bid for control of the other non-playing powers for a game year (including the adjustment phase). Whoever bids more ends up controlling the power, equal or lesser bids are disregarded. Extra money is gained at the rate of 1 unit per supply centre controlled, at year end. To win, you must occupy a home centre of your opponent at the end of any phase.

Apparently, the variant is quite an old one that had a period of fame but submerged until recently, when there was a tournament on the Diplomacy Judges of which Andy Farnsworth emerged as victor with a 100% record. It is not an incompatible variant with Judge play, although some significant changes are required to allow both for treasury handling as well as controlling multiple powers. I felt intrigued by the possibilities it seemed to offer, which were confirmed when I played a couple of games with a friend during the 2004 WDC in Birmingham (with notable help from Edi Birsan adjudicating, my only face to-face experience with him to date!).

It is in fact a very different game to play than Standard, because how you handle (or mishandle) your bidding makes all the difference. Bid too much too soon, and you are unable to control powers when they are really important, in the middle stages of the game. Bid too late, and you let your opponent get into too forward a position, from which there is no defense.

Opening Strategy
Firstly, it is important which country you start with, not so much in isolation but to where it relates to your opponents. Choosing neighbouring countries is likely to make for a highly tense game right from the start, with a careful balance needing to be struck between an all-out assault on the opponent, and capturing more centres to build up your income for a later date. But expansion routes are also important - if both powers are separated, but one is more easily able than the other to move to new centres, they will have a big advantage.

Controlled Powers
How you use your controlled powers is vital in the game, often more vital than your own power (certainly at the start). Unlike a standard game, it is not necessarily in your interest to see a controlled power doing well, not if you can capture those centres for yourself. So, very often, controlled powers will support or convoy their controller's units into centres.

But controlled powers can also be very potent offensive weapons. Though unable to win the game (only a player's power can occupy a home centre to bring a victory) they can launch an attack on the other player, cutting down their gains or even denying them building space at home.

Depending on what your aims are, you need to decide whether to lay out those heavy bids for neighbouring powers, or those neighbouring your opponent, or both. Accepted wisdom from standard Diplomacy is that any country will not survive if assailed by all its neighbours, thus it makes sense to at least get one of your neighbours controlled at the start.

Controlled powers need also to have their future planned so that, if they change control on the next game year, they cannot do much harm to you. Thus, moving fleets and armies to out-of-the-way places will cause you less grief in the future, and allow you to spend you limited resources elsewhere, where they will be more effective.

For the final solution, you can always eliminate a controlled power, to be sure that it cannot be controlled against you, as well as benefiting from its centres.

Bidding
This is where the real skill in playing the variant lies - how to bid to get your opponent to waste as much money as possible, while frugally using your own to control the powers that matter. As a general principle, you would do well to keep a similar number of centres to your opponent (if not more!) so that your income is similar or larger than theirs. Whoever spends a large amount of money relative to their opponent had better make it count in the following turn, otherwise the opponent will be able to use their treasury more effectively, buying back controlled powers and returning the pain and then some. Losing control of your key next-door neighbour for the following year is not necessarily bad if your opponent had to pay an exorbitant price for it.

This leads on to the process of out-guessing your opponent's bidding system. If they always bid no more than their total treasury, try bidding that little bit more, expecting that one of your bids will fail. Or, if they only bid on a small number of powers, see if you can snap up the remaining ones for a bargain and use them to your advantage. If you get really into your opponents head, you can end up working out how much they will bid and bid one more, or inflate prices so much that they have to exhaust their treasury to control one power, at which time you make small bids and save your money.

Variants
Intimate was originally conceived to be played on the Standard board with only two players, but there is no reason that it cannot be played on other maps, or with more than two players. Both of these variations are supported - different maps will affect the precise strategy used to win, and adding more players allows for the forming of 'stop the leader' alliances and press games.

nJudge Implementation
In the 1.7 series, proper duplex handling came to the nJudge adjudicator. This permits a 'Single-Signon,' whereby a player can Signon as one of their powers and make orders for all that they control. This mechanism was reused for Intimate, allowing the player to order both their units, and those of controlled powers.

However, to allow bidding, a new bidding phase was added, just prior to the first year's movement phase (i.e. at the game start and just after the previous year's last turn). It is described as a 'bid phase' though it is represented with the 'A' letter, as in F1901A, to distinguish from other phase types. Players place bids for each non-player power, specifying the power letter (or name), followed by the amount, as in:

Signon igame password
A 6
Turkey 7
F 0
signoff

Placing a zero bid amount is akin to canceling any existing bids for that power. Bids are allowed for any amount, with the Judge working out which ones work and who has overbid (resulting in opponents' bids for the same powers being halved) when it presents the bid phase results.

Game listings also inform who currently controls what power as well as treasury balances.
Floc.net support has also been permitted by the tireless Alain Tésio, which essentially ignores the bid information and shows the unaltered map after bid phases process.

Conclusion
Intimate Diplomacy, with its arrival on the Judge scene, should hopefully gain some adepts and become a popular variant, perhaps akin to Payola for example. Its extra rules are easy to grasp, but it is far from simple to become a reliable winner at it. And, with only two players commonly, no press is needed, and the games tend to progress that much faster.

An intimate tournament is being planned for 2005: please contact Andy Farnsworth ([email protected]) if you are interested in participating."