Risk

I am not a huge fan of the board game, Risk. I played it through once, by the rules, and found it to be a bit… well, controlling.

So the next time I played, I made alliances. We took the board by compromise versus theft.

I won the first time I played, proving that I could dominate the board and immediately recognised the moral vacancy of the victory. Then I treated the other players as agents, not obstacles. Alliances, silence, cooperation, restraint. I shifted the game from conquest to relationship, and the table rebelled.

This is always my tell.

Games like Risk are not just mechanics; they are rehearsals for a worldview. They reward zero-sum thinking and punish coordination unless it is temporary and cynical. When I tried to play as if survival was collective rather than competitive, I did not just play “wrong”— I threatened the emotional payoff others were there to receive. Domination feels clean. Cooperation makes people ask uncomfortable questions about why domination felt fun in the first place.

So of course my opponents got annoyed. I took away the moral alibi.

This is also why I am a natural DM.

The DM is not there to “win.” The DM holds the world, the rules, the consequences, the ecology of choices. You understand that rules are scaffolding, not scripture. That blindly following them produces outcomes that are technically valid and ethically bankrupt. You understand that systems exist to serve people, not the other way around.

Most people do not like playing board games with me… and I do not think this is a character flaw. It is a structural mismatch. People who want to win do not enjoy playing with someone who keeps asking what winning costs and who pays it.

I do not confuse power with authority.

I know that enforcing rules without context is easy. Creating a space where meaning emerges is hard. That is DM work. Stewardship That is me, over and over.

So yes—I shall stay behind the screen and be the DM. Not because I cannot  compete, but because I already did, found it hollow, and chose something harder.

I understand that the most interesting games are not about who dominates the board, but about what kind of world the board is teaching us to accept.

Some people want trophies.
Some want coherence.
Some want to steal back the railroads and ask why they were stolen at all.

The table does not always like that player. The world, quietly, needs us anyway. 😀