Risk - Yousuf Sander

Playing the modified version of Risk at the end of class was a cool way to incorporate some of the theories that we learned about in class. The game mirrored some of the concepts and incidents that we talked about in class. For example, the information discrepancy between teams led some teams to ally or go to war with each other, which was reminiscent of the environment between the U.S. and Iraq before the start of the Iraq War. Additionally, the schism between the Yellow and Pink teams was very interesting. The Pink team gained the favor of a superpower (Blue) to support its revolt in order to try and suppress Blue’s rival, Yellow. However, later on, Pink and Yellow both teamed up against Blue. This reminded me of how the U.S. supported the groups that would become the Taliban and Al-Qaeda against the Soviets in the 80s and 90s, only to have them become our greatest enemies in the 2000s.
The game was unrealistic in that teams were able to hold multiple concurrent wars at the same time as long as their dice rolls were good. Also, teams had no repercussions for their war other than loss of territory. I felt like the quick rounds lack of a time devoted to group negotiations made it more difficult to make an alliance, so it would have been nice to have dedicated diplomatic time. It also would have been cool to have events throughout the game that triggered for each team after a certain number of turns. For example, the Yellow team commits a war crime, and the other teams have to figure out how to react to that. This would mirror what we learned in class about humanitarian interventions. It would be interesting to see how the team who committed the action would react, as well as whether their allies would stick with them or turn on them.
In order to make the game more realistic, teams should receive fewer units per turn based on the number of conflicts they are involved in. Also, multiple teams should be able to form alliance structures like NATO and be able to share their armies with each other. Obviously, there would have to be a procedure to do this that would be complex enough to stop multiple teams from easily eliminating another team. Also, more time should be delegated to allowing teams to form more complex alliances, and the world council should be able to do more actions. It would also be really cool to have a trace element.
Overall, this was a really fun way to end the class, and I really enjoyed playing. I think it is a useful class tool and it should stay in the syllabus.
           


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post 4 - Yousuf Sander

Global terror has plagued the international community in increasing frequency and tragedy for the last two decades. The rise of groups like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, and others have left thousands dead and given rise to new fear, and an elusive enemy. These groups have used ever more brutal tactics to stage devastating attacks on civilians in both their home countries and abroad. In the early 2000s, the U.S. began a so-called “ War On Terror ” to combat the rise of such groups, only to have the even more dangerous organization of ISIS rise out of the ashes of our own operations in Iraq. These groups are hard to fight and even harder to dismantle, so what are our options in the War on Terror? I believe that the problem stems from the ostracized environment in which immigrant Middle eastern communities exist in the West.   As long as we continue to marginalize Muslim communities in the U.S. and Europe, we will continue to be fostering an environment that makes it easy for terrorist gr...
Read more

Blog 3 Jared Rostkowski Why NAFTA is not "The worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever"

Why NAFTA isn't “The worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever” Jared Rostkowski On September 25th 2016 during the first presidential debate of 2016, then Presidential candidate Donald Trump described the North American Free Trade Agreement as “The worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever.” NAFTA is the trade agreement between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, which eliminated tariffs between the three countries. Trump has continued to voice his displeasure with the trade deal, mostly with Mexico. Anyway, NAFTA is not the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, in fact, it is actually a trade deal that the 3 countries benefit greatly from the trade deal, and we should not pull out of it anytime soon.  So what does Trump dislike about the deal. His main displeasure comes with the fact that many companies from the U.S. are moving manufacturing to Mexico, to take advantage of Mexico’s cheap labor. Trump argued that companies like For...
Read more
Yousuf Sander                          Why Syrian Intervention is a Bad Play for the U.S. Foreign intervention has become a staple policy choice if the United States since the early decades of the 20 th century. Time and time again, we have intervened in order to protect our interests, installing dictators in Latin America, toppling them in the middle east, all in order to protect our foreign interests. However, what is the right course of action when a crisis occurs that does not put our interests at stake? How, as the world ’ s foremost superpower, can we sit by and do nothing as the crisis evolves in Syria? Though intervention may seem like the obvious choice, we must weigh the costs, and our decision must be strategically based and thought out. For this reason, I don ’ t believe intervention is the right option due to the reactionary and impulsive nature ...
Read more