A top-ranked board game player has said President Trump’s geopolitical rampage through the Western Hemisphere looks just like a popular strategy in the game of Risk.
Michael Olivol, a grandmaster and former world number one player at Risk, revealed that the game’s most advanced players often attempt to control all of North America before moving on to easier targets like South America in their quest to rule the world.
Risk is a classic strategy board game where players battle for global domination by conquering territories on a map, building armies, rolling dice to fight enemies, and forming sneaky alliances.
Coincidentally, three of the key spaces on the game board are Greenland, Central America, and Venezuela, which the 32-year-old accountant from New Jersey described as major ‘choke points’ that keep enemies from invading your territories.
‘You need those territories, as well as Alaska or Kamchatka [Russia‘s closest point to the US], to safely hold the North American continent,’ Olivol told the Daily Mail.
Since taking office for a second time, Trump has not only lobbied to buy Greenland and Canada and take over the Panama Canal, but the US has also launched military strikes against alleged drug traffickers in Mexico and Venezuela.
Trump has also touted the massive supplies of natural resources, including oil and precious metals, that the US would have access to by gaining more control of both continents.
Olivol noted that Risk players gain shockingly similar advantages, being showered with more ‘armies’ (or resources) as a bonus reward for controlling more nations on the board.
Michael ‘OliveXC’ Olivol (Pictured) became the number one-ranked Risk player in the world in October 2021
Risk debuted in 1957 and has evolved into a popular strategy game mainly played online in the 21st century
In Risk, controlling an entire continent gives you a big troop bonus every turn, which snowballs your advantage and allows you to invade other parts of the world more quickly.
Holding North America, which includes the eastern and western US, Alaska, Greenland, four territories of Canada, and all of Central America, has always been a major prize for champion players, awarding the second biggest bonus behind only Asia.
Making it even more appealing, there are only three ways in or out of North America on the game board: Alaska, Greenland, and Central America.
‘My personal preference actually is North America. It has a very high generation of troops, and it can only be attacked from three areas,’ Olivol revealed.
In real life, Trump has touted US control of Greenland as a major piece of his defense plans for the country.
‘Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,’ the president said on January 4.
He has also accused Central American drug traffickers of killing anywhere from 250,000 to 300,000 Americans each year, blaming it on the cartels’ influence and fentanyl trafficking.
In the White House’s latest ‘move on the board,’ Trump revealed this week that the US military was moving to secure the region below America’s southern border and stop the flow of drugs into the country.
President Trump (Pictured) has lobbied for the US to own Greenland, which is also a key territory in the popular board game Risk
The Trump Administration’s tactics in North and South America, including the military raid on Venezuela’s largest military complex, has been compared to a popular Risk strategy used by expert players
‘We are gonna start now, hitting land about the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico, it’s very sad to watch and see what’s happened to that country,’ Trump told Fox News Thursday night.
In another parallel to real-world politics, Olivol, who goes by OliveXC in the gaming world, explained that the path to victory through North and South America was simpler than on a continent like Europe, where diplomacy was key to surviving.
‘Every position requires diplomacy. I think Europe requires the most, because you can be attacked from so many areas,’ Olivol noted.
Just like in Risk, Europe has been engulfed by recent conflicts, particularly the war between Russia and Ukraine, which is an actual territory on the board game’s map.
Olivol stressed the need to forge alliances while playing the game, which allows you to focus on attacking your enemies while trusting that a friendly neighbor won’t invade your land.
‘Risk is a game about making your opponents not hate you, and hate each other,’ he explained.
‘If your opponents are wasting resources on each other and not you, you will accumulate more resources and win the game. So knowing how to manipulate other players’ emotions is key.’
On the real political stage, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer told his French and German allies that NATO must ‘step up’ their operations in the Arctic as they try to stop the US from seizing Greenland.
Meanwhile, Trump has been forging his own alliances in South America with the three other nations that also appear on the Risk board: Argentina, Brazil, and Peru.
In December 2025, Bloomberg reported that the White House intended to designate Peru as a major non-NATO ally, a formal alliance status that boosts military cooperation and shared security priorities, including anti-drug efforts.
Two months earlier, Trump and Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, met in Malaysia for diplomatic talks focused on global trade and US tariffs on Brazilian goods, with Trump touting ‘pretty good deals’ emerging from the summit.
As for Argentina, the Trump White House has remained a major supporter of President Javier Milei and his policies of government reform in the nation. Milei even attended Trump’s second inauguration last year.
Following the strike to arrest Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, Trump has literally become involved with all four territories on Risk’s South American continent, a parallel that hasn’t been lost on social media.
‘Anyone concerned that Trump’s approach to military conquest and world domination looks like a casual game of Risk with his buddies?’ a social media user asked.
‘Risk: The board game where you pretend to invade countries… unless you’re the US president, then it’s just called January,’ another commenter posted on X.
