Hypocrisy's a Pleasure in Diamond Trust of London

One of the unique qualities of human beings is their ability to be hypocrites. With the coming of sapience to our homo forerunners we gained a remarkable ability to say one thing while doing the complete opposite. Jason Rohrer's Diamond Trust of London, a turn-based strategy game for the Nintendo DS, gives a pinhole view of this quality, drawing out the contradictory desires of wanting to be moral while at the same time hoping to be competitively productive. Neither trumps the other and both can be honestly felt at the same time.

The game is set in 2000 during the days before the United Nations Kimberly Process Certification Scheme, rules that ensured diamonds were not connected to conflict areas, went into effect. It's presumably a rush to get as much loot out of the country before the new limits are in place, but you won't find any specific references to this in the game. You can play against an AI for training purposes, but it's intended for two players, like chess. Each person controls a company extracting diamonds from Angola. The game lasts nine rounds and whoever has more diamonds at the end wins.

The game board is a map of Anglola, divided into six individual regions. Each region has a diamond icon in the center representing how many diamonds are available for extraction and more diamonds are added with each round. Players start in respective home bases--London and Antwerp--and can move their three "agents" onto any region in Agola. You make your plan to move all three agents with no knowledge of where the other player is moving.

There are two variables to consider before you send your players out: how much salary to pay each agent, and how much to pay the diamond guide they will need when they arrive in their chosen regions. If you've chosen to send an agent to a region your opponent has also chosen, the diamonds will go to whichever person paid their guide the most. Agent salaries matter because if you land in the same region as another player's agent you can both try to bribe each other. To be successful, a bribe has to be more than the salary the agent was collecting. A bribed agent will tell you his moves in advance, both where he's going and how much he's paying his guide, which can be invaluable as rounds progress.

A final wrinkle to this system comes in the form of a single UN Inspector, who visits random regions with each turn. If the UN Inspector lands on a region you've put an agent on he'll block your ability to collect the diamonds there and, if you're carrying diamonds from a previous round that you hadn't yet deposited at your home base he'll confiscate those. The UN Inspector can be bribed as well, and the player who successfully does so will be able to choose where to send him next.

You'll start the game with two diamonds in the bank and $18 to work with. After every round you'll earn another $18. If you want a little extra edge you can sell off a few diamonds to raise extra money, but this mechanism is also dependent on what your opponent does. No matter how many diamonds you choose to sell you can never get more than $24. If you choose to sell one diamond in a round and your opponent sells none, you get $24. If you choose to sell three and she sells none, you still only get $24. However, if you both choose to sell, the $24 is divided between you according to the number of diamonds you each sold. If you both sold the same amount, you both get $12--an even split. If you sold three diamonds and your opponent only sold one diamond, you get $18 and she gets $6--or one-third of what you chose to sell. If you've bribed the other player's agents, they'll also reveal their plans for selling diamonds between each round, otherwise you'll just have to guess and gamble. The more diamonds you sell mid-game the fewer you'll have in the final tally.

The game's visuals are minimalist. The map of Angola is given a crumpled construction paper overlay and each region filled in with pastel. The agent sprites are simple, a step above stick figures. The game also has a wonderful score by Tom Bailey, of the electro pop band Delcroy and Rohrer's longtime friend. The score contains 10 song loops, each with three different sections. As you make new decisions the music randomly combines loops to give each round its own subtle character. The tunes are all subversively upbeat, encouraging thought between moves and helping to soften the blow when a big gambit is blown by a bribed agent or a flip-flopping UN Inspector.

After each finished game there is one visual flourish, the pastel-tinted overlay fades away and reveals a NASA satellite image of Angola beneath the playful borders. It's a simple but unambiguous reminder of the historical roots of the mechanics. Since becoming independent in 1975, Angola suffered through decades of civil war, fueled by American and Soviet support for the opposing sides. Fighting has killed more than 500,000 people and more than a million have been displaced. Leftover land mines have killed another 100,000 and maimed left 15,000 people maimed. The diamond trade played an important part in both financing both sides of the war and has contributed to the country's environmental decay.

It's impossible to see any of this through the cheerful construction paper overlay. The transition to a satellite image of the real country doesn't really contain any of those contextual histories either, but it does provide a last twisting reminder that all systems have both theoretical and personal contexts. When viewed through the lens of purely competitive strategy, it's easy for hypocrisy to emerge, bending one's moral principles in order to win a round, or simply to prevent the competition from winning.

Diamond Trust of London has been in the ether for several years now. After some publisher-side complications, the game has been picked up by Zoo Games' IndiePub label and will be released as a cartridge in the next two months. A specific release date has not been announced, but Rohrer says it will be before the end of the year.

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