Hasbro's Risk and its focus on Europe

Risk is a board game that allows its players to control certain parts of the world and fight other players via game pieces for control of different regions. This is a fun strategy game that I myself have played several times. Something that I never took into consideration, though was the Euro-centricity throughout the entire game. It is known or can be assumed that the game is inspired by some of the themes in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The most direct relation that is important is the constant fighting for ownership and control over the land and people in different regions, with the goal to take over the world.

The map for the game is just a regular map of the world but dividing the continents sans Antarctica into 42 regions. We can already begin to see the game placing a focus on European areas with the number of armies each continent gets. South America get two and Africa gets three, while North America and Europe both get 5. Asia tops it off at 7, but that is because of its land mass. Europe is way smaller than Africa and should have less regions/armies in comparison. This puts Europe on a pedestal already and creates more difficulty for someone to take land from Europe if someone already has the region. Now, of course that means there are more regions in that area to conquer, but it is still rather unfair for the other much larger countries, especially since the game is a game and not really portraying the idea that its based of off population or any other statistic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r7T60r4f3c

This focus on Europe definitely has to do with when and where it was made (France, Europe 1957), but as the game progressed and began to draw from Tolkien, there is no doubt that the Euro-centricity in his work crept its way into that of the games. This is because it allows habits of whiteness and; therefore, makes it normal that Europe was the center of all things in the middle ages. In a chapter by Helen Young, she explains that although, Tolkien doesn’t exactly recreate a modern European map to place Middle Earth, but it does lay in the corresponding part of the globe that Europe is on and it is of similar size (Young 29). This is just more evidence that Tolkien drew from the idea of Europe being the “center” of the world.

http://sun.menloschool.org/~dspence/arda/maps/maps_evol.html

With this, it can be pretty well understood that the game, although maybe even not intentionally, put a major focus and reward in Europe by allowing the region to have more armies despite its smaller size. It can also be understood that since the game does seem to take ideas from Tolkien’s Arda, it probably took some of the Euro-centricity with it and created another misinterpretation of the middle ages to allow justification of a whiter, more Europe centered medieval.