Family Game Night - Week 1
Dave on July 11th, 2008
Last night was the first night of Perry Family Game Night. My daughter, the Tiny Dancer, has been planning for this for some time, and we finally decided to put things aside and block off one evening a we
ek for it. For night one, we chose a time-honored classic. Risk: the Game of World Domination.
Tiny Dancer picked it out, and she put herself in a tough spot right from the start, and not only because my wife and I have been looking at maps for way longer than she has. There are dark secrets the Tiny Dancer doesn’t know about her parents. Her mother, for example, is competitive to a degree rarely seen in a cul de sac. This applies to any competition, but it applies doubly to Risk. Kathy does not lose at Risk. I’ve never seen it happen. Her father is even worse. Not only am I competitive, but I am also bad at Risk, so I am not above picking on a child.
The game began with the recitation of the rules and the random choice of cards for territories. Then came the child abuse. Kathy targetted Tiny Dancer’s forces in South America; I targeted them in Australia. Tiny Dancer was using the purple armies, so she couldn’t have expected any less. Plus, the sooner she was done, the better chance we had of getting her to bed on time. [Protip: Do not start a game of Risk at 8:00 p.m. on a Thursday.] But the kid is resilient. She can roll a pair of white dice like nobody’s business, and she held off army after army with her at-will sixes. Still, competitive parents can’t be held off forever, and once Kathy finally mopped up Tiny Dancer’s armies in the Americas, she looked up to see that her position was bad. She had South America and most of North America, but I had worked my way up from Australia and taken over Asia. I was going to beat her at last! This, of course, is when she got tired and decided to go to bed. I still haven’t seen anyone beat her at Risk, but I’m claiming victory because I had more armies on the board when she bailed out on me.
Next week, Kathy gets to pick the game. I expect to be humiliated.
