Barry is Dumb and I Hate Risk Too

First and foremost, next weekend, at last, is the Hero Zone tournament. I have been looking forward to this for two months now. Here’s the info for all you lucky, lucky people:

When:
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Registration starts at noon
Tournament starts at 1 pm

Where:
The Gamers Lounge
127 E. Market St.
Sandusky, OH 44870
(419) 621-0282

Cost:
$15 gets infinite proxies

First through fourth place will split cash (50-30-10-10 if you play it out)!  100% of the entry will be redistributed, which means the more people who show up, the better the prize support will be!

Lorwyn will be legal for this tournament, so make sure you come prepared with Thoughtseizes and Thorns of Amethyst and Shriekmaws and whatever else you think you might need to be competitive in a post-Lorwyn Vintage environment. Will anyone try out Jace Beleren as a free card-drawing engine or Liliana Vess as additional Vampiric Tutors? We’ll just have to see!

Also, everyone who participates in the tournament will get a free card from the premium giveaway cards binder as a token of appreciation. Plus, top finishers outside the top four will also receive prizes And remember that anyone who writes a good tournament report that includes the name of the store, address, and phone number will get to pick another card as well at a later date!

Tchotchkes! So many tchotchkes!

Anyway, you should be there and bring your friends and relatives because it will be a lot of Vintage fun, now with eight tribes and black goblins.

Last night, after mowing down Geoff’s TMWA list with my Fish, while watching the Indians stomp the Yankees a new mudhole, I had the rare opportunity to play Risk with a couple of friends. I haven’t played Risk in probably three years, and now that I think about it, probably the last time I played was with those same friends too.

It was an idyllic, hungover time, some Saturday morning, and we appropriately listened to the band War (you may be familiar with their hit, “Low Rider”) while we played.

I guess that doesn’t really matter, though.

What I’m getting at is this: Have you ever had one of those friends who just doesn’t get it when it comes to some game that everyone else enjoys playing?

I’m not thinking of a specific Magic-related item right now, but I was thinking about this last night as I realized one of the friends I was battling for world domination just didn’t know how Risk was supposed to be played.

Here are the basics of what happened—my friends will be named Archie and Barry to avoid confusion and also incrimination.

Instead of starting off by strategically picking our starting countries, we used the house-rule of assigning them at random by shuffling and dealing the country cards. The result of this is that Archie had a good foothold in South America, I had a good presence in North America and a defensible position in Europe, and Barry started with half of the stronghold that is Australia. Asia and Africa were a mishmash of possessions that would take a long time to sort out.

Barry went first and had Australia locked up by the end of his turn.

I started booting people out of North America and took Venezuela to secure my southern border.

Archie skirmished in Asia and Africa, while increasing his presence in South America.

Actually, this is pretty much how things went for a while. Barry’s strength in Australia grew every turn, and he began encroaching on Southern and South East Asia. Archie eventually took and held South America for a number of turns while playing a defensive role against Barry in Africa and Asia. And I, having given up everything in Asia and Africa, eventually controlled all of North America and was defending my borders with an increased offensive across the Arctic in to Europe.

It was a fair stalemate. We would each trade one or two countries every turn just to get another country card and hope to break the Cold War by turning in a completed set.

Barry and Archie each had more countries than I, but my North American stronghold gave me more armies per turn than both of them combined. Still, Barry’s Fortress of Australia was the obvious launch site for a push to take over the world. To stop Barry, Archie and I would have had to actively work together, and we obviously weren’t going to do that as dictators hell-bent on controlling the world. As such, all Barry had to do was be patient and wait for one of us to screw up.

Unfortunately for Barry, he blinked first. Like a complete idiot he waited until he had turned in two sets of country cards for a total of 35 armies, and then he attempted to wipe me out.

One more quick background story: The last time I played Risk with these two, back in college, Archie convinced Barry to push all his troops in against me, saying, “Dude, I got your back,” when Barry hesitated initially.

Quick tip: Whenever someone says, “I got your back,” in a game of Risk, that person is lying.

Barry did destroy my forces in that game, but in doing so completely crippled himself in the face of Archie’s already superior strength. The game was over in two more turns.

For those of you who don’t know or remember, the defending player holds a slight advantage in Risk because he or she wins all ties. The attacking player gets to roll more dice (generally three to the defender’s two), but that’s not enough to turn the fact that every six a defender rolls is an automatic win. On defense, when trying to wear down the attacker’s forces to halt a long campaign, defenders have a 63% chance of winning at least one roll.

As such, it takes a massive force to wipe someone out while maintaining enough presence that a third player doesn’t kill you in return.

Barry was sending an army of 50 men into my territories, which, together were held by a combined force of similar size.

Good luck.

To make a long story short, after protracted battles in Iceland (where I rolled four sixes in a row) and the Western United States (where I rolled double sixes or five-six three times), all Barry could do was push me back into only Alaska (where I still had 14 units), leaving single units in each territory he’d just conquered.

Already annoyed that Barry had ruined both of our chances with a half-thought out, ham-fisted strategy, I turned in my set for 25 armies and plunked them in Alaska. I retook the Northwest Territories and drew my card, ending my turn. I had to be prepared for Archie’s follow-up, if necessary, and couldn’t attack much farther without spreading myself too thin.

Archie, now in the blatantly superior position—especially aided by the extra 30 armies he got at the beginning of his turn—stormed through Europe and Asia, stopping only at Siam, Australia’s doorstep, to gather forces.

It was over in just a few more turns as Archie wiped out Barry decisively and I retook my position in North America and Europe, and we agreed to draw and co-rule the world.

I’m sure that was far more detail than you really cared to read since nobody cast Lightning Bolt or Counterspelled anything.

My point is this: It really annoyed me that, twice now, Barry has ruined my perfectly good game of Risk—not to mention his own—simply because he sucks at strategy.

Does anyone else feel this way sometimes? Maybe in a multiplayer Magic game or even in some other game? Someone feels like their red zone has been actionless for too long, so they alpha strike, killing someone else and leaving themselves open for attack in the process? Or in a Rainbow Six or Counter Strike game someone decides that they’re bored so they run out with guns blazing, revealing everyone’s positions and gets the team killed.

Maybe it’s not even that.

Have any of you played Apples to Apples? It’s a game where the object is to match cards of nouns and adjectives together based on a judge’s ruling. So if the adjective “Evil” came up and you had a hand of “Elvis,” “Diamonds,” “New York City,” “Saddam Hussein,” and “Earthworms,” you’d probably put down “Saddam Hussein.” Your opponents might put down “China,” “The JFK Assassination,” “Oranges,” and “Hillary Clinton,” then you would argue for your noun or against other nouns to a judge, who has a completely subjective final say in the end.

Most of the time this game is tons of fun. You might get someone in the above example that, yes, “Oranges” really are evil compared to the other choices because one time she was eating an orange and it squirted her in the eye with juice, leaving her with an infection and partial blindness.

I have a friend, though, who forcefully makes up his own rules regarding what should be matched, how, and why. All the creativity is sapped from the game because he insists that, no, “Oranges” cannot be evil ever because they aren’t conscious.

Oh well, I guess I should learn to lighten up. Risk and Magic and Apples to Apples are all still games after all. Everybody has their own theories and strategies and sense of fun. Some people like to do their own thing, and sometimes even that thing can be pretty cool and fun. Maybe I just wanted the excuse to tell the “Dude, I got your back” story and the story of my friend who refuses to be open minded when he plays Apples to Apples. Maybe I just wanted to rant a little about losing at Risk the same way twice for no good reason.

Anyway, it’s nice out; I’m going to the batting cages.