Free Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras Page B

grace. The paragraph is one of the most effective in the
Histories
. Herodotus knew that the stories people tell are important because they convey their sense of themselves in a way that documents and the (inevitably) tragic toll of battles cannot.
    There was something else that appealed to me in the story of the Lydians. I liked the fact that they did not attribute the invention of games to boredom or to philosophical idleness, but to suffering. The Lydians did not play games because they had nothing better to do. They played so that they would not perish.

    In a sense, Risk is a direct descendant of
tawla
. In both there is a board, a pair of dice, there is a goal (conquest), there are rules and a logic to the game (strategy) and the more cunning the player, the closer he comes to victory. The chance element of the dice is crucial, but in this battle strategy has to make chance an ally.
    The West’s contribution, what we add to the strategy and tactics, is the art of war. The board is no longer divided into geometric, purely abstract shapes, it is now a planisphere. The world map, more figurative than realistic, imitates the style of ancient cartographers. And the political boundaries add to the anachronistic feel of the game. The United States does not exist as a nation; instead there are a number of independent states: New York, Oregon, California. Russia refers to a large European state while its Asian territories are divided into states: Siberia, Ural, Yakutsk and, of course, Kamchatka.
    Every player is represented by pieces of a single colour – I liked to play with the blue pieces – and is given control of X countries, depending on how many players there are. Up to six people can play, and every player is given a secret goal, for example:
Occupy North America, two territories in Oceania and four in Asia
, or,
Destroy the red army, or, if that proves impossible, the army of the player on your right
.
    Wars between the armies are settled using dice. If I’m attacking, I have to roll a number higher than the defending army. If I win, then the defender has to withdraw his armies and I get to occupy the country he has left empty.
    My favourite variation was the simplest. Me against papa: papá against me. The whole world divided in two: papá was the black army, I was the yellow army. Our goal was not remotely secret: we were trying to destroy each other, to wipe each other off the face of the Earth (the Earth as it appears in Risk).
    I don’t remember how it started, whether I brought the game home or whether papá bought it. (I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Kamchatka.) What I do remember is that papáalways beat me. Every single game. It happened every time. He would beat me hollow, or – when it was obvious there was no way I could win – we would call the game off.
    That first night in the
quinta
was no exception. After a promising start, papá set about undermining the morale of my armies and began routing them one by one. From time to time, mamá would wander past and look at the board. At one point she clapped papá on the shoulder and said, ‘Why don’t you let the kid win for once?’ And papá gave the same answer he always gave – it was one of the scenes from our family drama which was played out every time we sat down to a game – ‘Are you crazy? He can win when he’s able to beat me,’ and his inexorable victory march went on.
    Over time, the idea that I might beat papá grew from a vague desire to a need, until finally it became a categorical imperative. The law of probability was in my favour, I figured. Sooner or later it would impose its implacable mathematical laws, raise me up and make me victorious. Now that I was Harry, luck had to turn in my favour. Harry was a name that had never known defeat!
    Herodotus continues the story of the Lydians: according to his account, the famine continued and King