Risk, how I hate thee: let me count the ways

Thanks to my friend Heidi’s prayer in our family room last week, I announced that before we had a single minute more screen time in our house, we were going to play every single game on our game shelves.

For the record, Heidi has since apologized to the children.

Sam thought he was exempt from this rule and tried to sneak in a little screen time while he was stretching, but I put the kabosh on that.

Instead of interpreting it as a punishment, the children seem to see it as a challenge.

So we’ve been playing.  Candyland. Dixit. Timeline. Stratego. Battleship. Checkers. Chess. Mancala.  Life (happily the children offered to play that one without me). Then we came to Risk.  Man, I hate that game.

My brother loved Risk, and I have (too) many memories of waiting and waiting and waiting my turn.  There’s a new version with more complicated plastic army figures, but as far as I can tell, the essentials of the game are still the same.

Roll dice and watch your armies get wiped out.  It’s like Yahtzee, only not any fun.

After conquering Europe on my first turn and then watching my children roll dice for twenty minutes before my turn came around again, I remembered the strategy that I used as a kid: try to get wiped out.  Use your two-man army in Scandinavia to attack countries with lots of armies.  Like Russia.

Finally, I bribed Moriah to attack Jonah in Asia from her stronghold in Indonesia and Australia.  I gave her 10 minutes of staying up past bedtime for each region she conquered.  Mercifully, she also came to Europe and knocked me out.

And what did we do with her up-past-bedtime time?

We played Scrabble, of course.  Now that’s a game I can get into.