I think this is the right category, and the right place, to talk about this. Years and years ago I got sucked into a game called Diplomacy, which I mostly played online. Being a kind of game-mechanic grease-monkey (at least, at the time) I was sucked into the variants (of which there were many, almost all of them catalogued somewhere on the web). Of course, most of those variants had never been played, or otherwise put through their paces (some have, of course, and I got to try a few of those over at dipbounced.com).
Nonetheless, something grabbed hold of me and said DO THIS after flipping through a few pages of variants, and this came out. This has been sitting on my wiki for several years now, and I've had no place to really talk about it, especially since the person who helped me with the map kind of faded away from the internets (so, uh, the map needs updating, obviously):
Anyway, I would love to see discussion, critiques, et cetera on this little work of love (either the "basic" boojum, or the "advanced" bits down near the bottom). Would anyone oblige me? :)
I'm eminently biased when it comes to Diplomacy. In fact, I suspect that I'm insane, I have some sort of diplomaticitis in my head that influences my game design thinking when it comes to Diplomacy and only Diplomacy. It makes me judgmental and conservative. So don't take this too seriously:
To my eye it seems that you're just adding supply centers on the board, and little else. This will increase troop congestion and thus the number of stalemate lines, making early, wide-based draws more likely. Making Switzerland passable helps a bit with that, of course. Also, it seems that your variant is more ahistorical (in an extremely abstract game, of course), but even worse is that it doesn't change enough: the Calhamer board has value as a well-known and understood scenario, so I'm naturally biased against any variants that just tweak it a little bit - you lose the familiarity, the opening theory and the end-game theory and don't gain much in exchange. I'd understand this if there were some objective flaw in the Calhamer board that you were trying to fix, but as I understand it, you're just adding more supply centers for novelty value.
Could you tell us a bit about what you're trying to accomplish with this variant? Were you just bored of the basic board, or did you see some problem with actual play that you wanted to address? Or is it more fun to play when you have lots of troops?
There is a tradition of twiddling with the Calhamer board in the manner you're doing here, and I appreciate that you're not the first or somehow stupid for doing it. I just don't accept the premise that the board can be somehow miraculously improved by minor changes.
I'll admit my initial goal was, when looking at 7-island-diplomacy (the variant mentioned at the start of my article), I reacted negatively, thinking "what the hell? no, this is horrible. but I like the idea!" So everything since is kind of a fix (with perhaps some other inspiration/cannibalization of other variants: moving a unit from venice to sicily gave me a great 'fleet rome' excuse, and addressed the "austria/italy's biggest weakness" discussions I kept reading in theory articles way back when I started this). the southern atlantic ocean was mostly added for aesthetics (mao I always felt was too large and "unrealistic") and as a kind of a way to address the addition of Morocco (Africa was *always* important, turning it into 'NAF' just made me sad). my motivations for every other change (I think) should be noted on the page (or for the "Advanced" stuff, explained in the referenced article, or in the notes below).
and believe me, I don't feel like I'm at all improving the Calhamer board (although I stand by the mao/sao split and morocco, which I think go hand in hand) - I feel like I'm improving the half-assed "7-island-diplomacy" variant. and I DO feel like I'm creating a new little toy that should be fun to play with (at least as fun to play with as... Crowded or 1898 or one of the Shift variants, which seem to be fan-favorites on dipbounced). mostly what I'm trying to accomplish is: a more-or-less balanced position for the 7 nations (balance through imbalance seems to be the Dip motto, unless you're futzing with the Five Italies), while being not-exactly-unrealistic and keeping the more open vistas. Ideally an odd count of supply centers on the board (as in the original game, this way you have a decisive win, variants with an even count run into weird half-or-more-than-half adjudication issues).
Into the silence, I toss yet another variant. This one is more inspired by the article that led to the creation of 'Abstraction' but still has some of the elements that I toyed with in the last variant. I really would like to hear opinions (and analysis) on these variants from eyes that are not me.