Giant real-world game of Risk played on college campuses
Ivan sez, "Some friends started an awesome company that's all about making a real-world version of Risk, where they cut up college campuses into territories, and folks need to coordinate offline & online to take over the map over a few days. A new game for Stanford just started." Link (Thanks, Ivan!)
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Actually, in a related case, I carved up a map of the Caltech campus into a game board appropriate for Diplomacy, a board game similar to Risk. Colored spaces are the starting territories for the various factions, dots represent supply depots, white spaces are unaligned provinces, and light blue is water.
I haven't yet played Diplomacy on this map, and frankly arranged the provinces primarily on guesswork, but I think it came out pretty well.
If you are into strategy games, Risk looses its challenges around age 13. I would certainly put Diplomacy, the old war horse that it is, as much more challenging than Risk.
#2: So it gets more difficult after age 13, where the challenges are unleashed?
What do you want to bet that this will somehow be spun as a threat to public safety--like the stories of FPS levels designed around the floorplan of someone's high school?
I thought the same thing as zippyspincycle...
or that in a few months, you'll hear a story of a campus being shut down because security mistakes the map as some kind of terrorist planning utility.
We should start a pool.
Late last year, a hack at MIT turned campus maps into Risk boards, the Media Lab into a Scrabble game, and this grassy area into the island of Catan.
Hehe. My alma mater, Juniata College--a tiny liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania, is 'famous' for playing giant Monopoly every 20 years, starting in the 60's. Not giant Risk, but still a fun take on an overplayed strategy game.
1967 - the first Giant Monopoly at JC
1987 - the second
2007 - the third
I wish I could have been there last year
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A la trimeta above, a friend of mine took the map from the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, NZ) and divvied it up as a Diplomacy map (or Axis and Allies -- one of those gmaes that has troops, territories, and whatnot). It worked great. The scenario was that, due to overcrowding, the administration created OPUS, the Open Plan University System, where faculty and doctoral students could have offices anywhere. This resulted in a mad dash for power and territory. It was a good game.
This has been done for the last several years at Yale, online, first with Old Campus risk and then with a student-led company called Go Cross Campus which is a couple of Yalies and some other ivy kids who are deploying their version both at Yale and at any other school interested... Stanford's does look cool, but not as original as it might first seem!