Risky Business

As I've mentioned a few times, I've been trying to play all the board games I own at least once this calendar year. And as was probably inevitable, it's mostly some real clunkers that have been saved for last.

One of them was Risk, a silly wargame that somehow rides the line between being brainlessly mass market and strangely epic (the damn thing can take three or four hours to play). I'm not sure exactly why, but I bought a copy of Risk several years back.

Well, I have a hunch why. This was a special 40th Anniversary edition of Risk, loaded with hundreds of cast pewter figures to use in your global conquest. I suppose I either thought the miniatures might be good for some other gaming purpose, or that I could possibly turn around and sell the thing at some point. Except that now, it having been in my gaming collection at the time I set this challenge to myself, I was now required to play it.

However I'd never taken it out of the original shrink wrap, and now I kinda didn't want to open it. I mean, it's not worth a small fortune or anything, but a quick check of eBay seems to imply that I probably could cash it in for two or three "real" games if I wanted to go to the trouble.

Fortunately, there was an out. I decided early on in this year-long gaming challenge that I didn't necessarily have to play my copy of every board game I own. I mean, just about everybody I know has a copy of Puerto Rico -- why drag mine over to someone's house when we could just as easily play theirs?

So then came Shocho to my rescue, loaning me his copy of Risk so that I wouldn't have to open mine. If you're wondering why I didn't just play it with him, he'd already sacrificed enough a few weeks back, playing the Lord of the Rings variant of Risk with me. (If you must play Risk, that's the one to go for, in my opinion.)

But I had a plan, another loophole in the challenge to exploit. The goal was for me to play every game in my collection, to its completion. In Risk, players get eliminated along the way. I figured that as soon as I was eliminated, I'd met the "terms" of playing Risk -- if everyone else in the game wanted to bail on it at that point, it made no difference to me.

So, I sat down with four friends last night, the five of us with the goal to play the fastest game of Risk the world has ever seen. Everybody knew the plan: attack me exclusively and mercilessly, and eliminate me from the game as quickly as possible. After that, we could pack up and move on to something actually fun.

There was a little hiccup in the plan, as one of the players had never played Risk before, requiring a quick explanation of the rules. Even as I'm explaining how one turns in sets of three cards to get reinforcement armies, I'm saying, "but if we actually get to this point, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong."

The player to my right went first; I was second. Player one attacked me in all the places he could on his turn, but only bordered me on about one-third of my countries. So then came my turn. ATTACK!!!!!

Regrettably, I did roll well enough on the dice to actually conquer a country or two. But I continued attacking as much as the rules allowed, until I had only one army in all my remaining countries. I tried to get everybody in on this bizarre experience, attacking every one of my opponents at least once so everyone could have a turn at the dice, and a hand in my defeat.

It took until player four's turn, but they took me down. Not counting the time to explain the rules, count out 25 armies for each player, and claim starting countries, I believe the game took less than five minutes.

And then we played something else.

Oddly enough, though our intent was to move onto something "fun," we actually were laughing a lot and had a great time during our quick 15 minute Risk experience. I guarantee that would not have been the case had we been having a more traditional, three-hour-plus Risk experience, but hey... it wasn't so bad after all.