Ohai! I bet you thought I’d forgotten about Risk and all of its glory. Nope! I just… set it aside. For… the opportune time. Which is now.

[Gently coughs into palm] Right.

The last time we met, we discussed the tactic of play favored by douchebags across all varieties of gaming media: Rage quitting. Any time your host has dropped a match on X-Box Live, it’s probably because of rage quitting. Any time that dick Dungeon Master freaks and cancels D&D meetings because you’ve seemingly created an invincible, all-powerful character to blow through his carefully-planned campaign, it’s probably because of rage quitting.

But now, I’d like to turn our attention to a happier time. Specifically, I’d like to talk about one of the funnest games of Risk I’d ever played, one that took place in early summer in Canterbury, just before dissertations had to be handed in, soon after shooting ended on The Attack of The Weretimberwolf-Hybrid and right before half of Woolf College started going on benders.

It was one of the nights I’d decided to cook up a batch of jambalaya and subject my friends to klezmer and the sort of spice that only three habanero and six chili peppers can provide. The players were:

• Myself
• Flynn –  aka Emperor Palpatine
• Claire – Impressionable and essentially putty in the hands of Flynn
• Kyle – An American who spent much of the game with a look that said, “What the Hell am I doing playing this game?”
• Tuna – Who, I believe I’ve mentioned is The Most Interesting Man In The World
• Giannis – Who grew quite bored early on and left to go to The Venue.

The game was momentous, as this was the first time Kyle and Tuna had played Risk. I found this shocking, since Tuna is one of those people who seemed destined to either rule the world or die trying–and since he had a history of playing Dungeons and Dragons (see Deeandee), nerdery was nowhere near out of the question.

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