SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Alan Firth, an aficionado of Risk, parker brother’s board game of world domination, revealed his puzzlement at the history of the real world.

“When you look at history, and then you model national power dynamics using Risk, it’s exceptionally difficult to understand how Western Europe came to dominate the world colonially in the 18th and 19th centuries. Anyone who has ever played Risk and attempted a European power base just gets destroyed immediately. By any normal assessment, it should be Australia, or maybe South America that would eventually dominate the world.”�

Brian Gilbert, a competitor at the Risk nationals, disagreed. “Firth’s study of the problem mistakenly assumes that a single player is attempting to spread influence from a unified Europe, which does not accurately model the history. If three or four players stacked all their armies in Europe at the beginning of the game, you’d see that rather than going head to head immediately, they would first attempt to gain continents elsewhere, such as North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Only after they had split up the relatively unprotected continents in order to gain armies and cards would they go head to head in Europe. The resulting destruction would allow other marginalized players to re-conquer lost territories outside of Europe while the dominant player in Europe struggled to unify it in order to reclaim some of it’s lost power before the end-game–which is exactly what you see happening now.”

“It’s simple, really. Alan is just not that good of a player.”