Board game fun comes with a Risk!
In the back of my son’s bedroom closet is a family heirloom of sorts that has not been removed from its tattered cardboard box in decades. It is kept on the top shelf, out of reach of young hands, for safety’s sake.
Inside the rectangular flat box is a very early edition (circa 1963 according to the faded Rules For Play booklet within) of Risk, the Parker Brothers board game of world domination – and sibling warfare. I can tell you firsthand that Risk! can turn brothers into Cain and Abel.
Screeds have been written about the evils of video games so I will mention just one statistic here: according to the website education.com “a nationally representative study found that the average American 8-to-18 years old plays video games for 13.2 hours per week.”
In other words, about the same amount of time it takes to complete one game of Risk! or two playings of Monopoly.
I imagine one of the positive things about the arctic blast that has swept across the United States like troops of Risk armies across colored continents is that bored snowbound families have dusted off board games and enjoyed some spirited battery-free fun.
Instead of arctic air, the storm that put The Big Chill on my family’s winter break was my son celebrating his 24th birthday with the unwanted gift of mononucleosis hepatitis. Too tired to read, and never much of a TV watcher, he pulled out the old board games.
Who knew a time machine came in a long, flat box? With a roll of the dice, my son and 26-year-old daughter became 8 and 10 again. So did my wife (I’m too wise to share her pre-time machine age) and I.
I vetoed us playing Risk due to lingering PTSD from battles with my two older brothers. While our boyhood Monopoly wars were fierce and usually included accusations of cheating, and counter accusations – some true – it was a marathon Risk showdown (God probably could not complete a game of Risk in six days) that saw our Cold War go nuclear.
Risk “battles” are decided by dice, and a hot streak by one brother would inevitably result in a demand by the opposing brother to switch dice. If this change of dice did not change the losing warrior’s luck, he would often throw a tantrum – and the dice. It’s remarkable no one lost an eye.
Still, this was mild compared to what happened during one especially contentious game in the late 1960s that see-sawed on the caprice of the dice snowy day after snowy day.
The specifics of what transpired next depend on whom you ask. Jim and I contend under oath to this day that Doug ran into a record-breaking streak of bad luck with the dice at the same time Jim and I each got hotter than James Bond at a craps table. The result was Doug crapped out: his stockpiled armies were decimated by both Jim’s and my own smaller forces.
Doug cried foul, claiming that Jim and I forged an illegal alliance that defied the United Nations, Geneva Convention and Risk’s official Rules of Play. There is no way, Doug still insists four decades later, that we could not have possibly anticipated his genius strategy that was more remarkable than the D-Day invasion and the battle of Gettysburg combined.
As an exclamation mark to his accusation of our cheating, General Doug launched the entire Risk playing board across the family room as small red and black and green and blue and yellow wooden armies shot airborne like a rainbow of shrapnel from a hand grenade.
And that is how The Last Game of Risk We Ever Played ended.
By these standards, my family’s recent Sorry! battle was mild despite spousal attacks followed by sarcastic “I’m soooo Sorrrrry!” apologies and various alliances that proved more fickle than the social status of teenage girls in middle school.
In the end, The Kid With Mono snuck from dead-last to first.
He celebrated with a victory nap.
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for the Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His new memoir WOODEN & ME is available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com and Amazon.com.