When we were kids, everybody liked playing board games to one degree or another. Let’s eliminate word games like Scrabble (or today’s variation known as Wordle) and party games like Trivial Pursuits and Pictionary, not to mention Charades. If you also ignore the generic and purely abstract games like Chess, Checkers, Mancala, Rummicube and Backgammon, the other most popular games that have more or less gone global to some degree are Monopoly, Clue, Life and Risk. I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that everyone reading this has heard of or played every one of those games (even the somewhat obscure Arabic game of Mancala played with stones or beads). They all tend to share the common element of competitiveness and some degree of strategy and aggression. Monopoly is about gaining real estate advantage in whatever locale your game board lays out (historically Atlantic City, but every town in the world has a version of Monopoly available, it seems) to accumulate money and power. Clue is a sleuthing game to solve a mystery and prevail over the small audience of participants. Life is about fantasizing about how we might make our life choices most optimally to get to a more balanced, but nonetheless superior place of success in life (combining money, fame and happiness). But Risk is the game that always seemed most serious. You wouldn’t play Risk unless you had a big chunk of time available and the patience and endurance to see it through. It was always a very much more strategic game than the others and also seemed to appeal to people who were devious and conniving by instinct since it required making and dissolving ad hoc alliances with the overall objective of global domination. That all takes a certain type of person to embrace those somewhat antisocial elements.
I guess human beings have an imbedded need to contemplate global domination because I doubt that nature would make us like playing a game that was not in some ways connected with our natural instincts (lesser though they might be). I can’t remember the last time I played Risk, but I very clearly remember the look and feel of the game and it had everything to do with laying out a large handful of pieces of a consistent color (the up to other five players each having a different color of pieces) in some pattern that represented your aspirations geographically. There are six continents and 42 territories to work with. Note that they try to keep real world political designations out of the game by calling them territories rather than countries. The truth is that for this sort of world domination exercise, its probably best to call them mere territories to highlight the notion that geopolitical boundaries are things of man, not of God as they say. The aggressive nature of the game has everything to do with stripping down nationalistic tendencies in the face of power.
Risk reflects and differs from actual geopolitical dynamics in several ways. The importance of geography is the first of these. Just as in real geopolitics, Risk emphasizes strategic locations and chokepoints. Control of continents like Australia or South America, being more geographically isolated as they are, provide players with bonus armies as a reward since they have inherent strategic advantages due to their isolation. All we have to do is consider the current rhetoric that one of America’s great strengths is that we have oceans separating us from most of our historic combatants. This also means that “artificial” geographical connection features like the Suez Canal, Panama Canal or even the Strait of Malacca hold strategic value as chokepoints or pathways.
There are also strategic alliance dynamics. Players often form temporary alliances and then break them when it suits them based on perceived strategic necessity, which is just another way of saying that they are most often used for self-interest as needed and not for any higher peace-loving purpose. Unfortunately, this too is much like our real and constantly-shifting multi-faceted international alignments. The game does a good job of capturing the inherent instability of global alliances when power dynamics and cultural sensibilities change.
The primary vehicle for change in the game is a combination of military buildup and deterrence (that would be offense and defense in normal sporting terms). Accumulating armies in Risk serves both offensive and defensive purposes. This mirrors how nations build military capabilities (internally and through conquest) to project power and deter aggression while perhaps ignoring the subtleties of how armies are gathered, organized, peopled and maintained. This starts to give us the window on how Risk, the game, is an oversimplification of real geopolitics in important ways. To begin with, economic considerations are completely absent. The game focuses purely on military power, ignoring economic interdependence, trade relationships, and soft power that shape modern international relations. Today, many would say that economic might is a bigger part of the equation than military might, but as we have seen in places like Ukraine and Gaza, it does still devolve down to military issues at some point. The game also tends to have what we would consider binary outcomes. You either win or lose. Conflicts in the game of Risk always result in total victory or defeat, whereas real military engagements often end in stalemates or negotiated settlements (again, look to Ukraine and Gaza for these subtleties). And worst of all, the game has very limited diplomatic tools. While players can negotiate and suggest and/or feign alliances, they lack many diplomatic options available to real nations like economic sanctions, international institutions, or cultural influence.
You may be wondering what would make me think of the game of Risk all of a sudden and the answer is probably obvious to some of you. It started with President Trump’s call with the Prime Minister of Denmark. Mette Frederiksen Has been the PM since 2019 and therefore has interacted with Trump before, even specifically on the topic of Greenland, which was the topic of this early call in the Trump presidency. When thinking about what could interest Trump about the independent territory of Denmark that has 57,000 inhabitants and mile after mile of ice and tundra, Frederiksen suggested expanding access to defense bases and positions in Greenland in addition to expanded leases of strategic minerals and/or oil leases. Apparently that did not appease Trump, who became very upset when Frederiksen discarded any notion that Greenland was for sale. You see, the only reason Trump wants to buy Greenland is so that he can brag about it and go down in history as one of the modern age great expansionary presidents who knows how to wrangle a deal at any cost. There can literally be no other reason. Same for the Panama Canal. Panama will make any change including throwing out the Hong Kong port manager, but Trump wants a showy win. As for Mexico and Canada, our two largest trading partners, Trump wants to create a sense of American dominance and he seems to want to own the continent like he was playing Risk.
Our modern era of nuclear technology, drone-driven warfare, economic sanctions playing off global connectivity, and total information inter-connectedness through overlapping internet and social media webs, makes strategic geo-political games much different from when the game of Risk was invented in 1957 during the height of the Cold War. It’s called Risk for a reason, but that seems to have eluded Donald Trump as he barrels forward to play his version of the bullying board game of his youth.