Dozens and Dragons

Diplomacy in FKR and open-strategy matrix games

Using language and persuation instead of rules and dice

2025-09-22

Contents

  1. Diplomacy
  2. Hyperdrift Stories
  3. From Wargames to Matrix Games
  4. From Wargames to Free Kriegspiel
  5. Conclusion
  6. Appendix: Floor Games
  7. Links and Resources

Diplomacy

My boy Villainous Nate was just telling me that he’s playing his first ever game of Diplomacy, which is a strategy wargame notorious for its freeform negotiation phase: ostensibly the point of the game is to move your military units and occupy spaces, but you can only really be successful by negotiating and making promises, and through alliances and betrayals.

This is in fact the main part of the game. All the meaningful bits take place off the board, and there are no rules for how they should take place. It requires the players to make demands and compromises of each other using nothing but language and charisma.

Nate said he found it very stressful! The lying and backstabbing and trickery can be hard to stomach if you value directness, honesty, and cooperation.

Hyperdrift Stories

I have never played Diplomacy.

But I did play a game once that was 100% negotiation, scheming, and alliances, with few to no rules, and which was therefor very much Diplomacy-like in nature.

In 2022, Sigve over at Revenant’s Quill ran an experimental game he called Hyperdrift Stories.

He ran two games in parallel:

  1. An opentable game of space combat/exploration/trade oneshots using “Cosmic Highway” from Jacon Tocci’s 2400 series as its ruleset, plus some additional rules that Sigve tacked on for ship to ship combat.

  2. A “social matrix” game to create the political factions and the “situations” that the players in Game 1 get to respond to. This followed the rules of Chris McDowall’s “Sunrise Expansion Open Strategy Game”

I played in Game 2, the matrix game. It was a really neat experience in that it was even more diplomacy than Diplomacy, which requires at least moving some pieces around a map at the end of each negotiation phase. This game, while it did have a map, instead had no pieces. Only political clout and imagination.

I played WOLF-359, a distant star system within the players’ galaxy. Each turn I (and each other player in this game) submitted to the referee three things:

  1. ACTION: I can do pretty much anything within the fiction that I can justify

  2. OUTCOME: What do I hope to accomplish through this action?

  3. LEVERAGE: Why do I think I would be successful at it.

And the referee would either just make a judgment to decide the success or, if the outcome is uncertain, may roll some dice.

And that’s it!

You can talk to other factions between turns all you want to create alliances, make promises, etc.

Here’s my turn 3 from the game I played:

WOLF-359 Turn 3
Action:    Withdraw delegates from the TSU congress 
Outcome:   Weaken the TSU and establish the United Federated Outer
           Systems
Leverage:  Support from Outer Systems Alliance, Ross-123, and Tua
           Ceti. Potential support from Groombridge.

I had done enough politicking to convince several of the outer systems to withdraw their delegates from the Terran Systems hegemony and establish our own outer systems congress, thus destabilizing the political power of the inner systems and strengthening our own.

This was a huge highlight of the game for me!

From Wargames to Matrix Games

In [wargames] you compare lists of statistics and peer at complicated books of rules containing someone else’s idea about what things are important, before rolling a dice. It takes a long time and can be very difficult to explain to a newcomer. Instead, in a Matrix Game you simply use words to describe why something should happen, the Umpire decides how likely it is, and you roll a dice. If you can say “This happens, for the following reasons…” you can play a Matrix Game.

http://www.mapsymbs.com/wdmatrix.html

Chris Engle developed a style of play in the late 1980s that he initially called “verbal analysis wargaming” and which became known as matrix games because the playsheet originally contained a “visual representation of concepts” called a “verbal matrix.”

What [a verbal matrix] is, is a format in which small phrases are grouped together in a meaningful way

Verbal analysis wargaming, NUGGET 44 May 1988

…or as I like to call it, “words.” It replaced rules and mechanics with words and arguments and language.

The actual, physical matrix of small squares in which players are meant to write down their representation of concepts was eventually dropped from the game. But not soon enough, because “matrix” and “verbal matrix” are overly technical and confusing terminology. But by that time the name had stuck.

Matrix games were an evolution of traditional wargaming, the purpose of which was to simplify and expedite gameplay.

From Wargames to Free Kriegspiel

A hundred years prior in the 1870s, like-spirited sentiments in the German wargaming community lead to the Free Kriegspiel or “Free Wargaming” movement which similarly tossed out thick rulebooks and lengthy turns in favor of a trusted Referee or Umpire who was empowered to adjudicate as they see fit based on their own experience, expertise, and common sense.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, the spirit of this movement inspired some old-school D&D players to apply the same concepts to their games, and collaborate with each other as part of the “Free Kriekspiel Revolution.”

Conclusion

This is the context in which Sigve started Hyperdrift Stories, a high-trust, rules-light FKR game with a social matrix companion game.

One FKR touchstone is “play worlds, not rules.” And running a parallel social matrix game is a brilliant way to create a vibrant world full of situations for the players to address and respond to. To say nothing of how satisfying it is for both styles of play to reconverge after independently branching from overly complicated wargaming traditions and trying to solve the same problems.

Appendix: Floor Games

In a document titled “A couple of Matrix Games,” Chris Engle provides some imagined rules for the style of play described by HG Wells in Floor Games.

For some players and designers, one objective of FKR is to recreate the experience of childhood play through the elimination of complex rules and the elevation of consensus through persuasion and agreement. Consequently, I expect a certain kind of FKR player to salivate and go absolutely bananas over these “Rules for Floor Games.”