Is there any interest in getting a game of Diplomacy going here?

For those who are not familiar with it, Diplomacy started as a boardgame.
The only major problem being, how often can you get 7 players in one place at one time with 5-8 hours to spare?
It has a long & distinguished history of being played by post or email, which I think does the game more justice than rushing through it before you miss the last train home!

The game is played on a board that (Very) roughly approximates a map of Europe in the early 20th century.
The 7 "Great Powers" of the time kick off in a massive power grab reminiscent of World War 1 (If your "World" stretches from UK to Turkey!!).

Game mechanics are very simple to pick up.
The bit that makes this game Great, is that you really need to make allies to have a chance of winning, but will probably have to double cross them to actually win ;-}

Here is a link to a great site for learning the basics:
http://www.diplom.org/index.py

And I have attached a copy of the game board, so you can see what will be at stake.

If there is enough interest, I will start to run a game here.

So far we have:
1) Spindown
2) Reaver
3) Elbaz
4) Ubivis
5) Warg
6) Frederickson
7).....


EDIT:

Militarily speaking, all pieces are of equal strength.
So 2 players going head to head will probably stalemate each other (unless 1 person is a complete bonehead!)
Therefore you need allies to either support your attacks or open a second front to distract your enemy.
You need to control over 1/2 the strategic areas of the board to win, so you will either have to grow faster than your allies by quite a long way, or more likely, stab them in the back & steal their areas.
It IS possible to win without double crossing anyone, but it's much harder....

EDIT 2:
For those worried about how much investment would be required.
The only absolute requirement would be 1 PM to me each week.
Of course you are likely to want to talk to the other players, but how much is entirely up to you.

Game 1 has now started
People interested in Game 2:
1) Landerill
2) ? Quadralien ?
3) Jonhman
4)
5)
6)
7)

sounds nice, and I would love to join in... unfortunately, as I don't have enough spare time, my game (Stranded) has not even the attention it needs :)

I anticipate, given the need for players to communicate acreoos timezones, orders would have a 1 week deadline.
For those that might prefer a faster game, the turn would be processed once all orders are in, even if a few days remain to deadline.

I would use a thread here for posting results & any public threats, anouncements, boasts, whatever.
I would expect players to conduct private communications by PM.
If they want to swap email addresses, phone numbers, naked pictures of themselves, etc, that's between the players concerned.

Isn't that against the Geneva Convention?

That is just too cruel at war :)

The negotiating tools you choose to use are at your own discretion.
If they backfire on you, you only have yourself to blame.

Pity, I really suck when it comes to betraying people. I've just got a way too honest and weak heart for that. *thinks about Galimatias in maiden costume 'cleaning up' a nude Ubivis, then flees in panic and tries to prevent nightmares*

sounds interesting. I think id be interested though ive never heard of the game, I will google it :-D

sounds similar to creed

I am raising my hand for round #2, if there will be one... I will be on holiday shortly, because of that it wouldn't make sense to take part now :)

I've never heard of Creed.
The negotiation phase is similar to a Mafia game, but you only have to convince the person you're negotiating with, rather than everyone at once. As I said, I would be aiming at deadlines 1 week apart.
If most people feel that this is not enough, I can look to extend it.
I estimate that with 1 week deadlines a game will take 2-5 months to play to the end.
I am cautious about people's attention span & staying power, which is why I would end the turn once I have everyone's orders, regardless of how much time we have left.

I guess it largely depends how long it takes to find 7 people interested.

I have enough free time now to run it, but I'll have huge amounts of free time on my hands in about 3 weeks so I hope to have at least 1 game on the go by then.

Added some more information on the game mechanics to the first post.

Yes, yes, yes! I haven't played Diplomacy in years (as Rodzaju noted, it's virtually impossible to collect 7 like-minded friends together for a significant amount of time these days). I'm very much interested.

So far we have:
1) Spindown
2) Reaver
3) Elbaz
4) Ubivis
5) Warg
6).....
7).....

Added a further note to first post.

Alright... even I am on holiday soon, I would join... sounds like fun :)