“Before starting the actual play of the game, players should study the board, which represents a map of the world. The sizes and boundaries of the territories are not accurate, but have been set to facilitate the play of the game.”
-Risk, Rules of Play
Lucy Hallmark opens by occupying Afghanistan with blue. She has never played Risk before. 
I take Alaska with Black. It is my third game.
She occupies Siberia, China, India. I take Yakutsk and she laughs at her own joke before saying “Bless you.” 
She closes the initial scrum by taking Japan. At this point, I have only briefly summarized the rules, choosing to save the dice rules for when it becomes pertinent.
I open by asking the what her biggest fear was as a child. Lucy takes Siam from India and tells me she does not remember. 
She loses a tie attacking Egypt from Southern Europe, across the Mediterranean. She claims I have not previously mentioned that aggressors lose ties. I have not, but history has, so the loss stands.
Lucy says if she could communicate backwards to a past version of herself, she would remind her how little she knows for sure.
“I always had a strong sense of self,” she says. “I always knew who I was.”
I interrupt to announce a troop movement into Siam, ending my turn.
“But I relate it to when you’re writing an argumentative essay, and you get into the research, and you realize you could go either way. There were beliefs I had there were once 100% concrete, and now they are not.”
Lucy picks at my armies in Western America. Thousands lay dead in Nevada. 
When I ask for an example of a no longer concrete belief, she offers many disclaimers about religion: how it makes conversations complicated, how she wants to avoid offending people’s beliefs, how she wants to avoid hurting the feelings of those who have been hurt by the church.
She pauses a moment and says, “As I get older, some things with God have become fuzzy.” She passes a turn without any troop movements.
Lucy gives off the impression of someone waiting for a race to start. When I ask why a previous relationship of hers ended, she tells me, “I didn’t want to wake up years from now and realize I missed out on feeling something more.”
She speaks excitedly about a future in medicine. She tells me that, this winter, she shadowed a surgeon. She consolidates troops in Ural. She tells me of the inflation of the body cavity for a laparoscopic gall bladder removal. She loses thousands in a campaign to retake Siberia. She tells me she could feel the gall stones like BB-pellets through the purple flesh. Blood paints the white north red.
“The first thing everyone says when I tell them I’m going to med school is that I’m allowed to give up. They’re like, ‘That’s really hard, you know, you’re allowed to switch majors, you know.’ That’s not what I want.”
I ask Lucy to call her parents and best friends on speaker. I tell her to ask them to describe her in three words. Before, I make her guess what they would say, and she somewhat reluctantly admits they might think she is funny. Everyone who picks up uses decisive or determined. She looks away like one might when people are singing happy birthday to them.
I move troops out of Alaska, across the Bering Strait, abandoning North America, and go on a strong run across all of Asia.
Tomorrow, Lucy is interviewing me for her article. I tell her it feels good being absolutely certain what you want to do with your future. She breaks reporter mode, lowers her eyebrows, dead serious for a moment, and says, “I have that, too.” She sits up straight and asks me how where I pull inspiration for my writing.
Lucy consolidates power in the Northwest, and digs into Alberta for a final stand. “I make decisions quickly, but I’m not impulsive.” 
She abandons Ontario, then the Northwest Territory. Alberta gains thousands in neat lines.
She tells me the break up happened between 8:10 and 8:25, because those were the two times she saw when she got in her car.
“It only took 15 minutes?”
“It took, like, five. The rest was small talk and the drive over.”