Ok, so I've always liked board games. Your run-of-the-mill Monopoly, Boggle, Othello were standards in my house, especially in the summer. Then there were others like Black Box, Dark Tower, the Lord of the Rings board game, the Star Wars board game. But Risk was always up there on my list. I mean, who can resist the chance to acheive complete global domination? And plus you had those cool roman-numeral plastic pieces. The problem was finding enough people who were willing to commit to a marathon session, especially after the age of 12. (Although I do remember a Purple Crayon tour [Seattle?] where we seemed to do nothing put play Risk and Monopoly, and invented a sort of hybrid where you played both simultaneously, and could use your Monopoly money to buy armies. You couldn't, however, billet your soldiers in the hotels.)

When Hasbro came out with its PC version of Risk, I was tempted -- but after all, what's the fun of beating a computer at global domination? They're going to take over anyway. Then they advertised that you could play online, which sounded cooler, but I was still too cheap to buy it. So imagine my pleasure on finding Dominate, an online Risk game programmed in Java by a very nice Dutch guy named Emiel.

At any particular time, it seems, there are at least 50 guys in Holland just waiting to take over the world. (Does this say something about the role of Holland in the European wars of the last century?) Of course, this makes for some interesting negotiations since I now know 2 words in Dutch (hoi = hi, spelen=press the start button already, or something like that. See, surfing the Internet *is* educational.) But by and large it's a faithful adapation -- same countries, continents, etc. The cards aren't as important as in the regular version (they don't go up in value as the game progresses, and you don't get the cards of a player you've killed), which is fine by me. There's also an option to either place armies at the beginning of each turn (the "American"version) or to have a choice to place armies *or* attack (the "European" version), which I find to be a more elegant and strategic game (meaning, I win more often that way.)

As we approach the post-Napster age, it's a pleasure to find such blatant examples of copyright violation. (I guess you really *can* do anything in Amsterdam.) So head over to www.bruijntjes.net and enjoy it before the cops shut it down.

M E-L posted this on February 24, 2001
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