I think it'd be cool to start up a game on the forums. Each week the players would PM me their moves and I would draw it out on the board. Anyone interested?
Diplomacy is a game that has caused more fights and friendship breakups of any game I have ever played. Too much lying can wreck havoc on a relationship. That being said....the game is immensely fun. Just make sure you are able to block out at least 3-5 hours or more of time for playing it.
the concept is kinda awesome, however, the map is really badly designed as its poorly balanced. You can be as brilliant as you want during the negotiations, if you catch one of the countries in the middle its basically a default loss and you might as well save your self the hassle - while GB is always a default win if it can side with either france or germany which will always be the case, same goes for the russian-ottoman alliance. It takes some rounds until you get the patterns but after you know how it works, it gets boring or frustrating depending on what side of the gun you are sitting.
I didn't try out any of the other maps which are floating around the web since I cba to actually make it look good and print it for my board game though.
Cawdor's right on the unbalanced stuff. I played some really, really weird modified version of this once, where like, almost the entire game had changed. was set in a fantasy world and there was some weird exploring element too. Not exactly sure how it was still diplomacy really.