Blog 5
Reed Klein
Professor Shirk
POLS 170: International Politics
5/4/22
Final Blog Post
For my final blog post, I wanted to briefly recap my experience playing risk. When I was first introduced to the board I was a bit caught off guard with how tight the setup was. Especially starting the game already at war, I feared things would be difficult. I also was not a big fan of where we started. Most of our armies were set up at the bottom of the map in Africa. I did not like this because I was worried that without any real access to continental Europe and Asia where most of the nations were that we would be screwed from the start. Outside of Africa, we had an army in Iceland that was rather worthless, one in North America which ended up being crucial, and some armies in the Pacific which ended up being rather arbitrary. Our group's plan was rather simple, try to go to war as much as possible and kick green out of Africa, this was before we realized we only needed 12 territories though, and planned to steamroll our way through Africa. I was a diplomat who had a weird sort of role in which I could create a religious faction with one of the other groups. Although I thought about doing this a little during day 1, our positioning in Southern Europe gave me the belief that I could win without doing that. Risk is a complicated game, not in its rules themselves, but in how it plays out. You often need people who are willing to compromise to make it work. Our game did not have that as people's requests were ignored. This worked to my group's favor though because we went second to last and with the last team we were allied with we were happy as our group's moves would often be final and not get overturned until far later on. This helped when we got to the end of the game on day 2. After a lot of hard work and strategizing about where to put our armies, we were able to declare war on red and control all of Africa which got us close to the number of territories we needed to win. When the green came up right before us they thought they could easily get back into Africa and save the game, but they did not know about our special power, which would allow us to repel an attack in one round. This easily won us the game as it allowed us to burst into Europe from the back of green not being able to get back into Africa. Our team debated when to use this power for a long time, as we did not want to risk using it too early. We frankly were surprised when we saw we could win and knew it was then or never. My overall experience playing risk is just like my experience in POLS 170, interesting, engaging, and eventually satisfying. The way the team was able to build itself up throughout the game was great and really thought-provoking and it is something I hope to do again in the future.
Nice blog, I think you did a good job outlining the inner workings of the game and how they relate to the bigger picture of international politics. First off, I think that your point about the close quarters of the game is very important, as it instills a sense of fear and urgency in players, who are unaware of each others intentions, and do not have measures to truly ensure compromise. Being on team green, it was clear that we fell straight into the trap of attacking Africa, immediately losing most of our progress in the game.
ReplyDeleteGood work on this post. I agree with Henry that your discussion of a "tight setup" was intriguing. The closeness of other armies definitely contributed to the hasty nature of the game. My only suggestion would be to state which risk team you were on, as I feel it would have benefitted the blog if that were made clear. It sounds like you had a positive experience playing Risk, and that definitely came through in this post. Nice job.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with your statement, "risk is a complicated game, not in its rules themselves, but in how it plays out," because the goals of each team is very straight forward, but there are a lot of different factors that may affect each team's way of reaching them. In real life, there are different barriers that countries have to struggle with to be able to reach their goals as a nation. Overall, I liked your analysis on your experience playing because I honestly had no idea what your team's goals were until the very end.
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