This past Saturday, my Bible study group had a Guy’s Night. It was your typical guy’s night - we devoured a Beast pizza, snacked all night, slayed each other in Halo, and tried to take over the world. We played Risk, the game of World Conquest.

Risk certainly can be a fun game - if you’re winning! It’s amazing how this board game can turn the most civil of people into ruthless and cutthroat generals. No matter who I’ve played with - friends or family, guys or girls, people I’ve known for years or people I’ve just met - the game always turns out to be ultra-competitive. It starts out innocently enough, as each person tries to build a stronghold in some part of the world. Once the positions have been established, though, watch out! As soon as someone threatens your territories and messes with your plan for world domination, the gloves come off, tempers flare and friends become mortal enemies. The games can drag on for hours, which certainly doesn’t help the situation. Thankfully, a few hours, or days, after the game ends, usually everyone is on speaking terms again.

Diplomacy is a key part of my game plan. My strategy usually involves establishing my position in a continent, creating alliances and making truces to limit fronts, building up my forces, then smashing through undefended and forgotten territories while the other players are focused on each other. After I’ve made some initial truces, I’ll try to encourage the other players to attack each other, to clear out some territories or weaken armies that will benefit me later. Of course, other players will try to bend the ears of their opponents as well, so it’s interesting to see who can play the mind games better, who can make the stronger case.

Sometimes my strategy works…sometimes it doesn’t. Last night, it worked to a certain extent. It all falls apart when the other players don’t do what you think they should, though. If a player owns all of North America and Australia except for one very lightly defended country in each, I would certainly assume the player would go after those territories to gain the extra armies, especially since the territories in question were very easy to defend and an essential location for domination into other continents. However, we had a rookie playing with us… Rather than do what most people probably would do, he instead chose to anger a previous ally by loading up Greenland with armies at the beginning of a turn and smashed through my empire in Europe. You can’t defend against that! Rookies!

We called the game after midnight, with no clear winner. Probably best for our friendships.