You may not associate Jimi Hendrix with board gaming, but as you’re about to find out, the former (and very brief) member of the 101st Airborne Division was a fiend for military strategy classic Risk.
In an interview with Sirius (which actually took place last year, but only just surfaced thanks to some reddit posts), Graham Nash — of Crosby, Stills and Nash — got talking about some of his peers from the 60s and 70s, and when he got to Jimi Hendrix, he recalls:
Jimi would play Risk on acid, and I never — and me personally — ever beat him at all. He was unbelievable at it. He was a military man, you know, he’s a paratrooper, and I don’t know whether you know that about Jimi, but no one ever beat him at Risk.
Just in case you’ve got your doubts about the memory of a rock star from the 1960s, there’s photographic evidence to at least support the general premise that Hendrix (and his band) loved playing the game:
Crucially, we can’t see the entire board in that shot, but if we could, I bet Hendrix is laughing because he’s got Australia locked down.
Leave a Reply