I'm tired of you youngsters whining and complaining about the doggone Classic map. Classic, pah! Like that thing was Classic. It was too shiny and weird when it first came out, and it was the deathknell for the original game of Risk. Plastic counters, "dice"... who needs that crap. Nothing beat the imagination of young boys huddled round whatever they could gather up and throw at each other.
Back in my day, we had to walk backwards through the snow for 10 leagues just to play Risk. We had clumps of dirt for armies, and sticks for dice. If you rolled triple burr, you got an extra leaf, or, as they call it now, cards. Leaves were the best part of that game. You had brown leaves, and green leaves, sometimes there were red. You had to trade in three leaves of the same colour in order to get 'blimmock' which you whippersnappers now call 'bonus armies'. I remember Jimmy Haddock used to try to trade in leaves that were burlap with leaves that were tan - that raggamuffin. Ah ol' Jimmy, he certainly tried his hardest. Pity he died pulling that entangled chain out of the harvester. Still, that was what we did for an honest days work back then. Take your age, add 3, and that's how many hours you worked a day. Not like these slackers nowadays with their pee sees and in the nets. Anyhow, where was I? Oh yes...
For the board we had an old tyre, and if you managed to fit your clump of dirt in what was left of the tread, everyone had to buy you a soda when you ambled back to Walt's De Luxe Corner Shoppe. Those soda's were the best, they had just the slightest hint of Government Issue Lemon Powder in them, which was a luxury in the day. This was back when we were still fighting the English, damn those dogs. It was an outrage when they made that fangled god awful board with Western and Eastern US... West and East! Dammit, North and South you curs, and what the hell is Oceania? Last time I looked on a map, it was dragons and sea serpents, and a bunch of goddam yellers runnin around and... where on earth are my pills?
