Game Night at the American Language Center in Damascus is an eagerly anticipated annual event. Each classroom offers a different game, with a volunteer to explain the rules, supervise play, and arbitrate potential disputes. A day before the event, my co-worker Tanisha informed me that I’d be presiding over the board games Risk and Monopoly. The choices were purely coincidental. But the juxtaposition of games offered an unintended comment on American culture. “Have fun,” the language center seemed to be suggesting to its students, “and gain first-hand knowledge of two things Americans have excelled at over the years: accumulating wealth and invading other countries.”
As the students poured into tiny classroom seven, I discovered that both Monopoly boxes were missing dice and game pieces. The Risk game sets were also incomplete and required about five minutes to assemble. But I enlisted two students, Tarek and Amer, to separate and stack the perforated sheet of game cards while Nawras and I made the dice by placing tiny stickers onto the uneven surfaces of three black plastic cubes. Amer’s brother Alaa and a reticent female student named Noor sorted the plastic armies according to color. As we set up the game, I explained the rules. Game cards are distributed among five players, with each card representing a particular territory on the board. The students must distribute their armies according to whatever cards they receive. The purpose of the game is to occupy territories and attack adjacent countries, while the ultimate goal is to eventually conquer the entire world. Armies are lost by low rolls of the dice. The reward for conquering a territory is a game card, and these cards can eventually be exchanged for additional armies.
Ten minutes into the game, his position on the board already virtually indefensible, Nawras’ cell phone erupted with a popular Arabic tune. “Joel, I have to go,” he informed me moments later, and headed for the door. In the absence of newcomers, I decided to sit in. My presence seemed to spur an instant, politically motivated enthusiasm in the other players. This newfound interest was confirmed by Amer and Alaa’s two brothers who entered the room minutes later. “Where are you from?” one asked me. I pointed to the west coast of North America on the game board. “We are four Iraqis,” he laughed, and the rest of the room laughed with him.
Veterans of Risk understand that the game is won and lost by ephemeral alliances that form between players. Essentially, you can’t win without the help of other players, so you try to persuade them it’s in their interest to attack someone else instead of you. Tarek and I were friends outside of class, so we formed a non-aggression pact out of mutual self-preservation: I wouldn’t attack him in Europe if he left me alone in Africa. But the common enemy of the four brothers from Baghdad is obvious, so I decided to find out if Noor could be persuaded to do my military bidding. I gestured for her to overwhelm Alaa in Asia from North America. “Come on, Noor,” I said. “If he holds onto Asia until next turn, he gets an additional seven armies. You can’t allow that.” But Noor, who is Syrian, required no convincing from the Iraqi brothers to join their anti-American alliance.
I plotted my next move. Apparently inspired by the sight of my unintentionally serious countenance bent over the board, Noor lobbed an insult in my direction: “You look like George Bush!” My mouth dropped open. “I was joking,” she assured me a moment later, and all was forgotten except for the job at hand: to gang up and attack me in successive turns. Amer in particular was clearly delighting in watching his American teacher erased from the board. As we fought over South America and Africa, denying each other armies by pushing into each other’s territory, his brothers plotted my eventual destruction from behind the scenes. Whenever Amer won a roll against me, he gleefully exclaimed, “See you!” before removing my plastic pieces from the board.
Tarek, languishing in Europe, was the first to be eliminated. Just before he was attacked by Amer’s brother Alaa sweeping in from the territory labeled “le Moyen-Orient” (the Middle East), I intervened ineffectually on his behalf. When Alaa eventually decided to attack me in Egypt, I responded with mock incredulity: “Come on! Mubarek wants peace! Can’t we all just get along?”
Other students came in and gathered around to watch. Amer’s brothers continued to whisper strategy to Noor, making sweeping motions with their hands—like a conductor motioning for a crescendo from the tympani section—over my weakly held territories in Africa. It was Amer who was rewarded with the task of finally finishing me off—a moment of sweet justice denied his country in the real world. I began to wonder how the game would end. Noor would be the next to go, I reasoned. But would Alaa and Amer eventually have the fortitude to attack each other? Amer, however, had a more benevolent plan up his sleeve—a harmonious alliance of Christian and Muslim brothers controlling the world with no unilaterally aggressive American army in sight to foul it up. As soon as I was off the board, he proclaimed triumphantly, “Now we can have peace!”—Joel Hanson
