Life May Be Hard, But Board Games?

Jan 24, 2010 by winjaw

We, the Sons of Thunder and I, are in the hunt for a couple of games.

For once, something that does not need booting up, plugging in or charging up. Read: no electricity.  A key search ingredient is  factoring in age-appropriateness.  Nothing too easy, boredom will set in quickly. Too difficult, and we’ll lose the younger Sons within seconds. A Goldilocks-sorta thing.

Just a simple board game.

Why is every friggin game tied to some cartoon show.  I understand marketing as well as anyone, but I’m sitting there staring at Buzz Light Year, ICarly, Star Wars and Sponge Bob Square Pants. I get enough of them from the television, I do not want them joining us at the dining room table.

And then I see it. A game from my youth – “The Game of Strategic Conquest”  aka “Risk.”

Ta da. Mission accomplished; a game even the Little Black Dress will play.

We get home and I eagerly tear open the box. 

What the whatever.

Where is the game? Because the contents of this box have way too many new pieces. And the instructions are no longer a simple sheet, but a manual; a manual complete with various tabs. Each tab corresponding to a very specific move – like attack, defend, move, place, etc. And each tab’s instructions are on the front and back of said tab.
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“Risk,” at least when I was growing up, was pretty simple. The board consisted of a map of the world, with the continents divided up into regions/countries. Players picked different colors and you took turns putting a small round tile piece on a country. Once all the territories had pieces on them, war commenced. You picked a country to attack and rolled the dice. Highest number wins, ties went to the defender. If you wiped out the other guy’s pieces, you got to take over that country. You got bonus tiles (men) for controlling all the territories of a continent. You got to add men when it was your turn by counting up the number of territories you controlled. One tile for each territory.

Pretty simple.

But now we have the “new and improved” game. And there’s not one, but three different versions you can play. And now they’ve added a deck of cards. And major objectives. And minor objectives. And cities. And capitals. And you add tiles by adding up your territories, but then you have to divide by three.

And let’s talk about the tiles. As noted, it was simple with the old pieces. One tile equaled one soldier/unit. But now the tiles represent either one or three units. This means there’s even more math involved. Say you control China and you’re attacking Japan. You’ve got two tiles, each representing three units. You roll and lose one tile. The problem is you’ve got to exchange the three-unit tile for three single units and then take off one of the said single unit pieces.

And you’ve got to add up all your territories, then divide by three to see how many men you can add. Then you have to add up your cities – each one gives you another unit. And then you’ve got to add up your capitals, again, each one is one unit. Oh, and if you take over a territory, you get a card and the card tells you how many more units you can add.

When you need a calculator simply to figure out how many units you can add so you can take over the world, the game starts becoming too complicated. You know that latter point is solidified when the eldest Son of Thunder finally looks at you and says, “I give up. Let’s go shoot squirrels.” The eldest Son never gives up.

Honestly, all I wanted was world domination. How hard can that be?

Why, in an effort to “simplify,” do we so often make things more complicated?