Not Shown: Conniving Older Brother.

Board games are strange.

We really still don't have much notion of what makes one board game a perennial hit and what sends another to the depths of forgotten obscurity. What's more, even people who design and sell board games for a living often don't know. Parker Brothers, for instance, famously turned down Monopoly on first look, citing it as being too complicated and having “too many rules” to be interesting. It was only after Charles Darrow, the creator of this version of the game, started selling every copy he could make, that they had a second look, and the rest is history.

I maintain that one important aspect of a game is that it should be fun to play, even if you lose, and lose big, and lose constantly.

I can speak to this with some authority, as I had older brothers growing up, and, as any youngest child can tell you, to live in a house with older brothers is to become exquisitely familiar with the short end of the stick. (To live in a house with older sisters, as I also did, is to experience a completely different level of weirdness, but that's another story entirely.)

One older brother in particular was famous for his skill at any sort of game. His method was simple. The first time he played any new board game that we got (and, as a suburban family of the 1960s, we had loads of them), he would play to lose, and lose big. Somehow, in losing, he would invariably spot the weak point in the game's design, and adapt his strategy accordingly, and never lose again.

Ever.

This was, as you might imagine, kind of a pain for the rest of us.

But he was also generally around, and usually willing to sit and play a board game with me, notwithstanding the twelve-year difference in our ages.

So I learned a lot about losing, is what I'm saying. This stood me in good stead some years later, when I began playing the more adult games, such as Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, Office Politics, Lose All Your Stuff In The Divorce, and the ever-popular I Know This Chick Is As Crazy As A Rat In A Coffee Can But I'm Going To Move In With Her Anyway.

Which brings us to Risk, invented in 1957 by French film director Albert Lamorisse. (For special bonus points, create your own “What would a Frenchman know about world conquest joke” and email it to us. Maybe we'll send you a button or something. If it's funny.)

Most geeks, nerds, dorks, and other various subphyla of overweight guys with “FRODO LIVES” emblazoned on a Spencer's Gifts custom T-Shirt play some sort of board game, either fiddly Avalon Hill-type military strategy games with a million rules and impossible-to-remember turn and movement sequences, or fiddly RPGs with a million rules and a power-mad DM who just makes stuff up on the spot, or fiddly collector card games with a million rules and some nasty cut-throat little twelve-year-old bastard who kills you every time because he gets all four or five of his grandmas to take him to Wizards to pay forty bucks for the one ultra-rare card that can kill you every time.

But I'm willing to bet that all of us who fit the above description, at least all of us of a certain age, started out playing Risk, and continue to play it to this day. All the basic features are there: world conquest; small, easily-lost pieces (our set was one of the originals, with painted wooden cubes and prisms, not those plastic Roman numerals), a deck of cards, and special dice.

The rules are, by comparison to later global-domination-scenario games such as Diplomacy, reasonably simple, so much so that I can remember playing at the age of eight. Each player gets so many armies to start, places them on his countries, then starts whaling away on the other nations close at hand. It's actually remarkably similar to the rules for Brockian Ultra-Cricket, if you think about it. At the end of each turn, you draw a card, which are collected into sets that may be traded later for more armies. At the beginning of the next turn, you are allowed more armies, based on a relatively easy formula. I think also that another reason this game has remained popular is that, as you get older, you can drink while playing, as the rules are easy enough to keep in mind even if you have a couple cans of Schmidt in you.

Battles are won and lost by the expedient of rolling dice. Some people have a problem with this, as they claim that it reduces the strategy and tactics of great battles to nothing more than pure luck. I was one of these people for many years, until I began studying battle plans and game theory myself some time back. I realized that, yeah, it's pure luck, but luck is always an aspect of any military campaign. What's more, the element of chance in the game offsets some of the wilder stylizations, such as the fact that there are no mountains, no seasons, and no navies or air fleets with which to deal. What's even more more is that it's a game. Relax and have fun with it.

Another point to the dice-rolling was that you could actually simulate the bravery under fire of your defending troops.  In the event that the attacker and the defender rolled the same, the victory always went to the defender.  In this way, you could possibly hold off your attacker for another turn, or at least make their victory so expensive that you might have time to send in the reinforcements.  This was a very simple and elegant way to add some excitement to the battle phases.

Some of the rules are more like truisms, really. Everybody knows that one of the best ways to win is to start by taking Australia, for instance. This is, incidentally, completely counter to just about every known strategy in real-life game theory. Another truism is that taking Europe first is a recipe for disaster, as it's too hard to defend.

I've played with people over the years who like to modify the rules or create new ones. My favorite were the guys in college who included the Nuclear Option, which meant that, at any point in the game, any player still active could shout “NUKE!” and slap the underside of the table really hard, spilling all the pieces and effectively ending the game. This was a good option if it was late, the game looked to be going into overtime, and you were running out of beer.

But by and large, I have always preferred the standard game. It opened up a whole new world for me in junior high, as the friends with whom I played moved on to more complicated stuff from a little company called TSR, and dragged me along with them. (“It's like 'Lord Of The Rings,' but you playit,” one school chum said, which captivated me.)

And, every so often, at Thanksgiving or Christmas, my older brother would drive with his family down from Bellingham to visit, and we'd play a game of Risk, and I would really enjoy myself.

Even with the losing.

Here is the Wikipedia entry, and here is the official Hasbro home page for the game. I guess they own Parker Brothers now. (They own Wizards of the Coast, too, don't they? And Avalon Hill...)