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.