Why My Monday Afternoons Are More Exciting Than Yours

There are some opportunities in my life that I never imagined I'd have. Teaching middle school being one of them. Teaching 6th grade health and presenting the puberty talk to a group of giggling girls was another. But even more surprising than both of those, is that for the past six months, I have been a part of the middle school strategy games club. Well, not just a part, but the teacher sponsor. Every Monday afternoon, I spent an hour and a half attempting to conquer the world, or rid the earth of deadly diseases, or just trade two sheep for an ore so I can build a settlement with a handful of awesome middle school students.

How did this come to be?...I asked myself the other day. I used to scoff at my guy friends in high school who spent hours "settling". Trading wood and wheat and bricks and building roads and settlements just didn't appeal to me. The game "Dominion" sounded way too intense to be fun. And to be honest, I didn't really know about any other games. Except one. There was that one strategy game that my father began training me in at the age of eight. Risk.

Risk was a staple of Saturday afternoons at the Terrill house. Mom was never that into the game, but when she started dinner, Dad and Cody and I would pull out the original 1975 game board and divide up the countries. Dad advised us on who to attack, how many dice to roll, and how many men to deploy at the end of each turn. (It probably looked more like someone playing chess against themselves, but at least Cody and I thought we were playing.) After ten solid years of Risk training, I went off to college, where I played a handful of times. Several years ago, we bought my Dad the updated version of the game to play on family vacations since his was starting to fall apart. But it wasn't until I was asked to sponsor Strategy Games Club that I encountered a game of Risk like none I'd ever been a part of.

 First of all, I have learned that many middle schoolers are not as concerned with the rules as they are with other things, like winning, or the snacks. And I'm all for being laid back, but I've also developed an appreciation for the German way when it comes to following rules. Thus  a battle commenced inside me between wanting to follow the rules and force others to follow them with me, verses recognizing this was not a class I was teaching and trying to be more easy going, like the students, and focus more on the snacks.

Perhaps this was just a version of Risk that I'd never played, but we began, curiously enough, by trading. The dealer passed out all the cards and soon the boys were calling out, "Who wants Brazil?" "I'll trade Western Europe for South Africa!" I refused to trade, thereby not completely giving away Australia (every good Risk player knows that whoever holds onto Australia always wins the game). The gentlemen with whom I was playing took full advantage of the trading rule, though, and most of them ended up with a complete continent to themselves before the game officially began. We were then instructed to place ALL our extra men on the board. It was complete chaos--impossible to tell where one country began and another ended. Impossible to even see the names of the countries.

This was not a huge problem for me, and I obviously owe that to the extensive Risk training I received when I was in middle school. Yet I worried for the boys, some of whom had never played Risk. I should not have been surprised to discover, though, that most of my fellow players already knew the names of the countries. And not only that, but they had lived in several and also spoke their languages.

Teaching at BFA this year has changed my perspective on many things large and small. It's fascinating to see how the students here bring such unique viewpoints because of the various places they've lived. They look at a Risk board, or world map, with a familiarity most of us only have for our native country, because of their global mindset. My role as Strategy Games Club teacher sponsor is coming to an end as it becomes an elective the last quarter, but I'm grateful for the new perspective I'll have each time I play Risk, both in global awareness, and in the optional trading rules.

P.S. Vadim ended up winning the game that day by putting all his armies on his home country of Ukraine, and plowing through Europe, into North and South America, up through Africa and Asia, and finally conquering Australia.