I Like Risk, but...

Posted my George Milton.

Last night some friends of mine gathered to hang out while one of them was still in town. Eventually they decided whose house they would go to and their host, let's call him Lenny, decided they would all play Risk. I was instructed to call Lenny to work out where I should go to meet them.

"Here's the plan, George, the rest of them are going to Curley's house to get the game and then we're all coming here to play it," Lenny told me.

Curley had hosted a Risk night months earlier. Here's the thing, Risk is a good game, but it takes about fourteen hours to play. Six or seven hours into it, those of us remaining decided to call a truce and split the world up. I wonder how many games finish where anyone wins. Sadly, Lenny couldn't make it to that, so he enthusiastically suggested another Risk night be organized. The responses he got were mostly reluctantly negative. It's not that nobody wanted to play, just that they didn't want to play again: not for a while anyway.

So I told him, "Look, Lenny, I'm sorry you couldn't make it to the last Risk night, but it's not going to happen. You're not going to manage get the game or get people to play it."

Lenny hung up. A few minutes later, Slim called from Lenny's phone to give me an update. It turns out they couldn't get the game from Curley, so Lenny and Slim were going to go buy one. Afraid that Lenny would actually assemble enough people to play, I decided to sit the night out because I didn't want to be up until five in the morning trying to conquer the world.

As I learned later, it was actually a pretty good game. Maybe I missed out.