A New Perspective on Board Games
I’ve never been much into board games. However, last year that started to change. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older. Maybe it’s because my activity was limited for several months due to an injury. Maybe it’s because I suddenly realized the genius and utility of sedentary entertainment options for spending time with your kids.
Whatever the reason, I’ve broadened my willingness to participate in board games and even come to like a handful of them. Chess has always been on the table (as it were) but now Shut the Box, Dragonwood, Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader, Sorry, and Yahtzee are too.
Special note to all my siblings: don’t worry I’m still serving my lifetime ban from playing Monopoly.
Over the Christmas break, on one of those days where it was 20 degrees and unacceptably cold, I thought it would be a good day to play a long board game with the boys. Honestly, I needed to kill time and also distract the boys from their multidirectional excitement about Christmas day so I turned to my newfound friendship with board games to bail me out.
As I looked over the large collection of games we have in search of a game that could accommodate at least five players I stumbled across a game we’ve had for over a decade but never played: Risk.
Or, to cite the full title on the box: Risk - The Classic Game of Global Domination. Yes, that sounded like the ticket.
I had never played Risk in my life, and frankly had always been intimidated by it. However, having no fear of playing a long game in the warm house on such a Minnesota day, I brought it out. The box said for players 12 and up but I offered all boys six and up the opportunity to play.
This worked out surprisingly well with the exception that the 7-year-old turned out to be a Napoleanic conqueror and, with all the bravado and smugness associated with that name, successfully captured three continents to my zero.
As a matter of fact, I lost a tremendous amount of territory in just a few turns and at one point only possessed two of the 42 territories. This is not at all a comfortable position to be in with little Napoleon rolling triple sixes every other turn.
Nevertheless, I hung in there and more importantly Risk got the job done. We played for hours, paused for lunch, and then played some more. There were some interesting dynamics to watch develop including seeing if the 6-year-old was going to get bored and quit (which to my surprise and his credit he never did).
The 11-year-old trapped himself in the Land Down Under and then parlayed with the 9-year-old and convinced him to form an alliance. The 9-year-old then got out paper, put the details of the non-aggression pact in writing, and asked the 11-year-old to sign it. The geopolitical intrigue of the game rose to an even higher level though when the 11-year-old amended the document that said he would never attack the 9-year-old’s armies by adding, “except if forced to” before signing it.
Somehow this was agreeable to the 9-year-old but even more astonishing was the fact that their alliance lasted the remainder of the game. Whether that was because the 11-year-old was never “forced” to attack or didn’t have the forces to attack remains one of the unknowable mysteries common to all endeavors of global domination.
If, like me, you’ve written off board games as boring, maybe 2023 is the year to give them a try again. And if you’ve never played Risk that may be a good one to start with. Just don’t invite the 7-year-old to play.