The Battle for Middle Earth

by Jinryu

I got a group of coworkers to do something last night.  We went to an all you can eat galbi place. I invited people that I pretty much never had gone out with before, including my counselor.  It was fun– nothing like unlimited, delicious meat to eat and a few Chilseung 사이더’s (literally “Cider”, though it’s actually non-alcoholic and pretty much exactly like 7up) to really just socialize.

I think one of the great things about Koren food is that so many of the meals are based on the idea of socializing.  A lot of it is as much ‘beer food’ as it is nourishment, in the sense that it’s meant to be a social food.  It takes time to eat.  It’s bite sized, or meant to be taken in morsels, not like heavier North American food.

Anyway, after that, we headed over to one of my co-workers’ place and broke out Risk: Lord of the Rings Edition.  It was all going so well for me until my luck ran out and in a climactic battle, my army of 14 was decimated by an army of 13.  I managed to kill one enemy– Dan managed to roll over all fourteen of mine without more than one loss.

Which leads me to believe that Risk has nothing to do with strategy, it has to do with how good you can roll the dice.

On another occasion, in my deffense of Helm’s Deep (in the Lord of the Rings version of Risk, a deffending party stationed at Helm’s Deep adds +1 to the highest dice roll of the deffender) I managed to kill 31 troops and lose only 4.  I sucessfully deffended helms deep with 6 soldiers over the course of a 4 turn seige.

Helm’s Deep really is impenetrable.