Saturday, September 22, 2007

Risk, take it eaasy

Yours truely just woke up about an hour ago and as punishment for having fun last night with a couple guys, mrs str33n demanded a ride to work.

Well it's okay. Last night started with a brilliant idea. I had just watched Sideways on tv and felt like having some red wine. I know i know that's quite the cliché to get excited about wine after that movie, but I didn't care. So I msn:ed Janne and we started brainstorming. We came up with the idea of playing some boardgames and drinking some wine. Classic

It's quite un-finnish-like to drink wine, Finns usually drink beer or vodka over wine so I caught a bit of flak for the idea of having a wine evening.

Janne came over with a buddy of his who looks quite a bit like Captain Haddock from tintin. Thats actually his nickname ... I think ... sexy ^^. We decided to play Risk, and for those of you who aren't familiar with the game I'll try to explain it a bit. It's one of those games that takes forever to play to the end, kinda like monopoly. Risk is a world domination type of game, where each player is his own "nation" and tries to invade the whole world and battles are decided by rolling multiple dice, it sounds simple, and while it sorta is, for me at least it's very addicting. Maybe I just like the thought of being a mighty conquerer.

Since there were only three of us playing, it makes for a very long gaming session. We only had 4 hours of time to play but I was confident we could finish at least one game.

We opened a bottle of Pinot Noir, oh come one, it's what they really like in Sideways so I just had to buy it, and started battling.

I got off to a good start and was doing quite well, unfortunately Janne and Haddock seemed to band together a bit to take my empire down and that meant the beginning of the end for me. In my control was half of North America, parts of Asia, and the whole of South America and Africa. I tried some excursions into Europe and towards Austrialia but they didn't work and I was eventually driven out of North America and Europe by Haddock and almost totally crushed in Asia by Janne.

At this point I tried to ally with Janne against Haddock, and while the idea started out pretty well with Haddock losing some terretories, that treacherous wannabe-hitler suddenly betrayed me and attacked into my almost completely unprotected flank.

My troops were no match for his battlehardened little plastic men.

After this the whole game was downhill and my best friend turned out to be that bottle of Pinot Noir while I watched my lands get invaded turn by turn with Haddock and Janne battling for world domination between one another. Dammit!

Now while this may not seem that big a deal, it still gets on my nerves. Now I believe I have learned to cope with defeat a bit better than I have when I was younger, but for those of you who don't know me too well, i still dont take it too well.

Normal Finnish people don't have a very high competetive streak, I mean sure a lot of them want to do well in anything they do, but they're not like American men who have had competition drilled into them since age 5. Now since I was in an American school as a kid, I caught up with competition myself, and it hasnt left me. I MUST win in everything. This hasn't left a very good path in my wake.

For example I have had to change keyboards about once every two years just because I usually end up pounding them after losing pointless games of NHL 06 or Pro Evolution Soccer. After clanmatches that we have lost, I have demolished headset's and also my gamepads have received alot of damage. I have prolly spent on the better side of 300 euros on replacing broken equipment just because of my competetiveness.

Oh well....

At least I didn't demolish the Risk board. Although it did go through my mind.

More tommorrow

No comments: