Once1, years ago, I convinced my girlfriend to humor me by playing a round of Risk2. As unsatisfying an afternoon as the two of us had ever spent, our nominally two-player game began with my 30-minute explanation of the basic rules and gameplay3, and proceeded from there with me reprising this explanation several times at length while moving all of her pieces around the board as well as my own4.
Like absolute pitch or ambidexterity, an interest in Risk seems to be the sort of thing that can usually only be acquired in childhood. After the onset of puberty, there are simply too many distractions, and almost any other activity5 is guaranteed to garner more social status and attention from the desired sex than spending five hours learning the rules of a board game that takes ten hours to play, particularly when the other players are basically assured also to be maladroit adolescents.
But for those who've grown up unable to distinguish the Korean Peninsula from greater Mongolia and continue to think of Asia as a large greenish region, the game still possesses a long reach. On more than one occasion, I've been part of a group of strangers at a party who, noticing the world map hung decoratively on the host's wall, have fallen to discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various points of attack, all agreeing that it is virtually impossible to hold Europe in a competitive game6.
However, while the game is a popular topic of conversation on these occasions, the inebriated make very poor Risk strategists. Due to the great deal of math involved, actually attempting to play a round in the presence of alcohol is a very difficult enterprise7, another factor which limits the game's appeal among most college-aged adults.
For a dedicated minority, however, Risk continues to be a reminder of a – meh, I quit. This is boring.
Yakutsk to Kamchatka? E-mail your roll to Matt8.
Notes and Errata
1 The amount of persuasion required, coupled with the one-sided nature of the resulting game of conquest [a] made it unlikely that the scenario could be repeated without risking grievous injury to the relationship.
a. See note 2 and sub.
2 Popularly, ""The Game of World Domination"" or, alternatively, ""The World Conquest Game"" [a].
a. Reputedly (and vexingly) marketed as ""The Game of World Liberation"" in Germany, in an attempted show of sensitivity toward some of the grimmer parts of the country's history – an attempt greatly undermined by the Orwellian tone of the amended title.
3 In a nutshell [a], Risk is a turn-based board game centered on a simulated global war carried out by a variable number of players and factions across all six inhabited continents (New Guinea and the islands of the East Indies being grouped together with Australia). These are divided into smaller territories that can be occupied, attacked and defended as each player tries to build up their army and conquer more of the world map. Forces are represented by tiny plastic figurines [b] and attacks are carried out according to a detailed procedure that involves calculating troop strength and then repeatedly rolling six-sided dice to determine different outcomes. The game is over when one player occupies all 42 territories [c].
a. Granted we'd have to be talking about the mother of all nuts, here.
b. Not least among the game's challenges is the fact that the pieces are small enough to be carried off by dust motes or inhaled by curious house pets. Because of this, a complete set of Risk pieces is rare and the armies in a well-used set are often bolstered by ranks of Monopoly, Clue or (in especially lean times) even Scrabble pieces.
c. The premise of all-powerful generals commanding vast armies to dominate the world might seem like violent male fantasy, however the game's 20 pages of rules (which no one can seem to agree upon, ever) and the excruciating tedium of gameplay seem to suggest a more complicated moral message along the lines of, ""War is best left to socially maladjusted and virginal teenage males.""
4 ""Okay, so it's your turn now. So what you're probably going to want to do is put your troops down on Siam [a], so go ahead and put down three infantry there. Good. Now, you're probably going to want to attack from Siam to Indonesia, so roll the three red dice. Okay, so you just lost two infantry, so go ahead and take them off the board – no, I'll just do it. All right, so do you want to keep attacking or stop? You should probably stop attacking now. Okay, so now it's my turn.""
a. Modern day Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and others.
5 As complicated and overlong as Risk can be, it bears mentioning that there do exist, of course, games even more complex and hostile to widespread social acceptance, e.g. Axis & Allies or the fanatically revered Dungeons & Dragons, the purified heroin of nerddom.
6 One of these impromptu war councils might spend 20 minutes detailing strategies for dealing with this difficulty, just to give you an idea of a Risk convert's depth of psychic investment. Depending on the volume of the party's background noise and amount of alcohol consumed, these discussions may feature emphatic pointing and hoarse (though rarely angry) shouting.
7 An illustrative conversation between intoxicated Risk players, approximately 18 years of age, June 26th 2004, 2:13 am:
Matt: John, it's been your turn for like an hour already.
John [a]: I'm thinking.
Matt: You're not even playing good [b]. This is stupid.
John: [choked sounds of vomiting].
a. (narrowing his eyes in concentration while carefully arranging his pieces in an elaborate parade formation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean).
b. [sic].
8 (hunziker@wisc.edu).
