When I was young, I once played Risk with my dad. For those of you unfamiliar with this game, the object is for you to defeat your friends and take over the world. Successfully taking over continents yields rewards in the form of additional troops to continue your campaign. Young and stupid, I immediately set my sights on Asia, which yields the most troops but is nearly impossible to hold. My father wisely took over Australia, which yields the least troops but is easy to hold. Predictably, my loving father destroyed me. Thus, I learned my first lesson in strategy: avoid it if possible.

But unfortunately it is not always possible. My friends happen to love Risk. I don’t know why; my best guess is some combination of high intelligence and self-loathing. They thrive on the game, the strategy, the victory. Meanwhile, I hate Risk. I mean, you stare at the board, sometimes for hours, carefully concocting a fool-proof strategy. Then, when you finally make your move, you realize that you forgot about your opponent’s enormous army in Kamchatka and get wiped out on the next turn. I don’t know who designed this game, but I would bet he or she was a pacifist: I have never believed so strongly in the power of negotiation to resolve conflict as during Risk.

A while ago, I went to a friendly get-together that involved Risk. I put on a brave face, told myself it wouldn’t be so bad, and joined in. The game lasted, by my watch, three or four millennia. But don’t worry about me: I got knocked out perhaps half way through. If I had been a sporting, strategic, self-loathing Risk player, I probably would have stayed at the table to watch how the game played out. I wasn’t, and I didn’t. I retreated to the other room to play solitaire on my computer and nurse my surviving brain cells back to health.

Before I got eliminated, I had a chance to observe Risk players in their natural habitat. In a word, I would describe them as “intense.” They all stared at the board as if it would unlock the secrets of the universe but only to the victor. When it was time for one of them to play, he would stare even more. Occasionally, he would motion toward random places on the board and mutter something to himself under his breath (“must protect my flank; those musketoons in Siberia are getting hungry”). Meanwhile, the other players would speak to each other in hushed tones like golf commentators, making predictions about movements that were 84 turns away.

When it was my turn to play, I tried to imitate my companions. I sat there and stared at the board, only to arrive at the simple conclusion that I had no idea what to do. So I would try to listen to my competitors’ comments fluttering around me like an Art of War manuscript in a cyclone. It never worked. So I would make some random move, only to see my competitors shake their heads and wonder what I was doing and why I didn’t I see the threat 12 turns away. Twelve turns later, when the threat engulfed what was left of my armies, I still didn’t connect it.

Obviously, I wasn’t there for my strategic brilliance. So I decided that I would try to contribute humor like some sort of board game court jester. I would periodically make highly intellectual (dumb) jokes (“Germany is attacking Russia; better hope it’s not winter”). In what was, I suspect, an effort to shut me up, a good friend of mine finally knocked me out of the game.

So oddly enough, I had stumbled onto the perfect strategy.