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Stephen Rochelle
United States
Huntsville
Alabama
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Earth 5224 is the copy of Risk Legacy I'm playing with a group of boys from the youth group. I'll be in a play group of Legacy with my usual gaming pals once a buddy's Christmas buying prohibition passes, but I'm looking forward to this game for several reasons.
It's an opportunity for me to introduce gaming as a social construct to the boys. Huizinga's "magic circle" is, as I understand it, applicable to this sort of thing. Separating the player within the game from the person outside the game is an important benchmark of emotional maturity, and that capability pays dividends far beyond the scope of cardboard and dice.
Learning to balance prescribed authority with oral tradition (that is, what do the rules of Risk say, as opposed to how the rules of Risk have been passed down) is also, I think, an important life skill. This is not meant to condemn "playing the way you learned"; far from it! Rather, I think there's great value in understanding where and why you choose to differentiate something from what came before it - particularly since Risk, like Monopoly, is the sort of game that is commonly learned via oral tradition.
This point of prescription versus tradition may not seem to have immediate real-world parallels. Particularly as this is a church group, though, consider: when I encounter a new and unfamiliar theology, how do I go about determining whether it is "wrong" or merely "different"? How do I learn that "good" and "different" are not orthogonal but in fact perfectly capable of coexisting? Of course, in the real world, there's also the issue of distinguishing inviolate prescription from tradition, and of interpreting exactly what that prescription means. For Risk, though, I'm OK with accepting the printed rules as a given instead of moving into metaphysical navel-gazing about whether a Daviau exists or what form he might take.
Further, we're going to be playing this in the shared space of the local library, and so I'm pleased about the opportunity to evangelize the hobby in the various ways that setting affords. Plus, the local library is cool with me bringing in pizzas, and the independent public space nicely fills the requirements of the church’s ethical guidelines.
Finally, I'm pumped because Legacy looks really, really cool! I'd've never guessed a Risk game would build this much personal anticipation. I've been as active as I can be in the game forums without hitting spoilers, and I'm ready to see this journey begin.
As for this blog: from here out, spoilers will exist in the clear (albeit below the cut), except for posts tagged otherwise in the title. I've decided to take this approach because, in addition to the people who have already seen the content, there's a large component of the community that wants to see the details spelled out. I'm still absolutely advocating playing the game cold – but if you're determined not to, maybe this will be of use.
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