Playing Risk Made Cold-War Kids Masters of an Unruly Globe
A board game showed us that alliances have limits, odds don’t predict the future, and it’s fool’s work to invade Ukraine.
A certain kind of brainy kid will reach adulthood with a few general rules for foreign policy: Don’t mass your troops in Asia, stay out of New Guinea, never base an empire in Ukraine. It is the wisdom of Metternich condensed to a few phrases and taught by the game Risk.
When many of us think about Europe, it isn’t a CNN graphic that we picture. It’s the Risk board, which taught us nearly everything we know about geography and politics. If we’re unsentimental on the subject of war and peace, blame Risk, which imparted a simple lesson that shapes how we read the news: In this world, it is do or get done.
War is less like an equation than like a room with two doors: You know where you will enter but can never know where, or into what landscape, you will exit.
Risk was created by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse in 1957. Lamorisse was born in Paris in 1922, meaning that he was 18 when the Nazis turned his world of cafes and charming streets into an armed camp, with threats everywhere. Lamorisse’s invention can be seen as a way of reordering and controlling this new reality, turning a national nightmare into a game with rules.
Its first version, sold as “The Conquest of the World,” was released a year after Lamorisse’s short film “The Red Balloon” won top honors at Cannes. It is amazing that the same mind created such radically opposed appeals to children: “The Red Balloon” is a visual poem set almost entirely in the sky, while Risk is a hard saga set almost entirely in the grime of a war-scarred earth.
Parker Brothers acquired the rights to the game and released it as Risk in 1959, the peak of the Cold War, when chasing conquest with chits and dice in basements and rec rooms and on back porches gave the anxious youth of America a sense of mastery over their fate.
The game could be played with up to six players, each representing their own would-be empire, and could last hours. The competition could turn ugly, stressing friendships, but we all came away with the same few lessons.
First, generalities: In the end, no matter who you call an ally, there can only be one winner, meaning that every partnership is one of convenience. If you are not betraying someone, you are being betrayed. Also: No matter what the numbers suggests, you never know what will happen when the dice are rolled. (Risk is played with five dice, three for offense, two for defense.) War is less like an equation than like a room with two doors: You know where you will enter but can never know where, or into what landscape, you will exit.
Then there are the particulars: Regardless of technological advances, America will always be protected by its oceans. It is a hard place to invade. What they say about avoiding a land war in Asia is true. It is too big and desolate to control. Ukraine is a riddle (wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma), stupid to invade and tough to subdue because it can be attacked from so many directions, making it seem, to the player of Risk, like nothing but border.
A Russian version of Risk was released in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Vladimir Putin was too busy shredding documents to learn its most important strategic guidance: Never assume you know what will happen, never depend on the odds, never believe your own bluster.
The best players ask themselves what they really want, which means seeing beyond the board. I learned this from my father in the course of an epic game that started on a Friday night and was still going when dawn broke on Saturday. His troops surrounded the last of my armies, crowded in Ukraine.
I begged for a reprieve.
“What can I give you?” I asked.
He looked at the board, then at me, then said, “Your Snickers bar.”
“My Snickers bar? But that’s not part of the game.”
“Lesson one,” he said, reaching for the dice. “Everything is part of the game.”
Appeared in the January 7, 2023, print edition as 'Playing Risk Made Cold-War Kids Masters Of an Unruly Globe'.