Meeple is me

One of my professors claimed last night in class that you can tell the personality of someone by playing a few games of Risk with them. He argues that you'll quickly see if they're cowardly, collaborative, courageous or cut-throat. You'll know if you can trust them by whether or not they honour their bargains and allegiances and if they consistently win at the world domination variant, you'll have an idea of how ambitious and aggressive they are. He says that the best dating insurance, then, is to play a board game night with your potential beloved and pull out Risk. Play a few rounds. See how they play.

He was counselling this because he'd broken up with his girlfriend that morning and he argued that if he'd taken his own advice and played Risk with her, he might have known about all of her much earlier and saved himself quite a few months of effort.

This made me laugh rather hard...and then pause.

You see, I'm a boardgame geek. In fact, I'd have to confess they're a bit of an obsession for me. I blame it on my parents, who had an entire board game closet available to my brothers and I. Many an early Saturday morning was spent playing and fighting over Monopoly, Trouble, Battleship...you name it, we played it.

Since then, I've played literally hundreds of games. For those who know the 3D me, this is no surprise at all. And Risk counts among my favourite games of all time.

Parties and drinking be damned -- my favourite social evening involves a good dinner, a few nice beers and a half a dozen hours spent playing any of my current favourites like Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan, Carcassone or any of the many silly but cutthroat versions of Munchkin. But I also like standard card games, including Wizard, Joker Rummy or Canasta

I even belong to a social club here in Montreal based on board games. We get together on Saturdays now and again and we play all kinds of games, though most tend to be the kinds of games you can only buy in stores like Montreal's Le Valet de Coeur or online. My biggest current obsession is Puerto Rico, and I'm finally grokking it. Though this past weekend, Kelly's 13 year old daughter trounced me rather badly. She's a very good player. Will have to schedule a few re-matches.

Apparently this obsession of mine means I'm a Meeple, an avid game player. And I now badly want this Meeple hoodie take on Settlers of Catan. *drool*

Oh! so..yeah..what kind of a Risk player am I? Put it this way...I'd rather play world domination Risk over mission Risk anyday. I've figured out how to win even without starting out in control of Australia or Africa. I've proven you can dwindle to a half dozen armies and still rally back to win the game. I honour my alliances but make them rarely. And I'm known for pursuing an ailing player hard to try to kill them off and grab their card sets.

It would be interesting to play Risk with my professor. Not sure I want him to see that side of me though. Cutthroat? That's me. Aggressive and enigmatic? Yes, check.

Think if I wupped him in Risk, he'd still give me an A+?