Russia, Ukraine, and The Game of Risk
Letter from Away — March 3, 2022
In The Game of Global Domination points of attack change and the names on the map alter to suit those in power.
The first time I saw the word Ukraine on a map, I was a preteen child playing a board game with my cousins.
Wikipedia calls Risk a game of “diplomacy, conflict and conquest.” The board is a simplified political map of our world with six continents divided into 42 territories and the playing pieces, originally brightly colored wooden cubes and later plastic soldiers and cannons, are called armies.
Designed by French film director Albert Lamorisse — the writer, producer, and director of The Red Balloon — the game’s first version, called “La Conquête du Monde” was released in France in 1957. American toy and game maker Parker Brothers bought Lamorisse’s concept and reinvented it for a Cold War American market, releasing it in 1959 as “Risk: The Continental Game.”
That was a rather benign description of a game where the playing pieces are called armies and the goal is to take over as many continents as possible, but it persisted until 1975. That’s when any pretense at an educational mission was left behind and Risk officially became “Parker Brothers’ World Conquest Game,” a title it kept until Hasbro took over in 1991, eventually re-branding their edition as “Risk: the Game of Global Domination.”
Someone must have recognized the new description as too accurate for a juvenile audience. Two years ago, in yet another marketing remake, Hasbro changed it to “The Game of Strategic Conquest.”
In the course of Risk’s first half-century, the maps that define its world changed. Some game boards show an ability to cross bodies of water that others do not. Continents are indicated as swaths of a given color and, depending on the version, North America could be a variety of shades of pale pea green, a blazing sunset, or warm brown. Africa is usually in shades of brown, and is gray on one version of the map.
And, in a way that would bring a smile to today’s seekers of either continental understanding or global domination, the names of the regions also change with the times. Canadian regions, once designated simply as Western Canada, Central Canada, and Eastern Canada, are now labeled Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. Congo has also been called Central Africa, Siam is now Southeast Asia, and of particular interest at this moment in geopolitics, the region that game players knew from Risk’s inception as Ukraine, was renamed twice.
The area initially designated as Ukraine spent a short time on the game board as Eastern Europe until Hasbro took over ownership of Parker Brothers in 1991, the year Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union. The last version under the Parker Brothers label was made in 1993. When Hasbro reissued the game under its own name that same year, they decided to call the European region on the Asian border by a different name — Russia.
Now the game is off the board. Diplomacy has become strategy, conflict is incitement to violence, and conquest a step toward global domination. It would all be kind of funny if it didn’t involve so much real world death and destruction.
By the time this column reaches you, it is possible that the fatal game being played out along the Russo-Ukrainian border will have ended. Possible, but so very unfortunately unlikely.
The players are power mad; to them, the pieces are just bits of wood or plastic. Armchair quarterbacks the world over cheer for teams, wave flags, applaud the wins, and mourn the losses, as if the losers themselves were not also humans like us.
Meanwhile, the diplomats try to gauge the amount of economic distress required to compel sanity without making our own lives less comfortable. Ukrainian citizens held hostage to the price of a gallon of gas.
Seeing news from so far away, reading online posts with the uncertainty endemic to that medium, we watch the players roll the dice.
Shlomit Auciello is a writer, photographer, and human ecologist who has lived in Midcoast Maine since 1988. Letter From Away has appeared online and in print, on and off since 1992, and is published here on a weekly basis.
