One of the games that defined my childhood was the classic game of global conquest (TM?): RISK. It was a simpler time, when there just weren't that many awesome innovative board games out there ... and you had to know about those that were. Today, let's start talking about RISK: the good, the bad, and the fixable.
RISKy Business
Why do I like RISK? It's just as interminable as Monopoly, but with mini soldier figures and death instead of bankruptcy! Huh, the games of my childhood really taught you the life lessons of America. Unlike Monopoly, RISK has actual strategy. Until you look at the map of the good old planet we keep warming up, and you realize that the most valuable continent is, in direct contrast to actual history, defensive stalwart Australia. When the game depends on who starts with the most countries in the Outback and can consolidate them, maybe something is wrong.
The part of the strategy that makes RISK fun is having to decide--do you strike out for one more territory now, thinning your forces for the inevitable counterstrike, or hunker down and attempt to weather your foes' assaults? Not only that, but having to decide, and then leaving your fate in the hands of capricious dice. The basic RISK rules are actually exceptionally balanced for this: the defender has a slight advantage in straight-up rolls, but the attacker gets to roll more dice. If you work out the probabilities (I have degrees in math and physics, don't @ me), you lose slightly fewer battalions in attacking than you do in defending. In the long run. If you trust the dice are not tilted against you. Which they always are. So what do you choose: attack, or defend? (If you have Australia, defend, defend, defend, you already won and everyone else is on their phones, and this was before Steve even dreamed up smart phones.)
The problems with RISK are many. Farmane would recommend bullets, which are thematically appropriate!
- Combat gets boring. The number of dice you roll is almost wholly prescribed, except for when you have to attack the bottom of South America and you don't want to leave Napoleon's grand army stranded in Chile. Actually that sounds like an awesome alternate history. More choices would be nice.
- Players get eliminated. This is a big gaming no-no, and Monopoly has the same problem. Getting wiped out sucks. Getting wiped out by your brother really sucks. The strife this causes is unrivaled. Teach children cooperative games first, RISK is actually a bad idea, stop reading now. Or at least don't kill off your relatives' armies so indiscriminately. Actually, this is the goal of the game, why is the goal of the game to be such a dick?
- It takes foreverrrrrrrrr. Five players enter, two die quickly, then Australia and North America fight back and forth over the decisive choke point Kamchatka while someone holds desperately to the corners of Africa. Like real history? (By the way, how messed up is it that Africa, despite being the second largest continent physically, gives you 2 fewer armies than North America or Europe? Systematic racism, man.) Find a way to end the game earlier (missions are okay ... just okay, they're kind of boringly predictable too).
- How come when you are attacking, your armies can rampage over half the world, but each turn you get one piddly free move to get Napoleon halfway to Bolivia when his army is needed all the way up in Irkutsk it's going to take forever to get him there I quit just send him to some island already at least he's got one Get off an Island free card? Sorry but the free move restriction is the absolute worst.
- None of this is very realistic. Like not even close. If the strategy and the tactics and the gameplay felt more aligned with real combat, you could have a lot more fun with this game. Most war games have this problem (see: stacks of doom in Civilization IV).
Why are you complaining so much? If you don't like it don't play.
This is the Internet I can complain all I want, second-person rhetorical questioning device. I have spent like fifteen years trying out other versions of RISK, and experimenting with my own modifications to the rules. Future posts will explore the twisting path that led from the classic, simple, actually-kind-of-lame war game through themed versions that actually lend a lot of complexity and replayability, to the development of a full-fledged alternate, initially set in everyone's favorite Murderverse (no, not the DC movies, the OG series from George R. R. Tolstoy) and finally set in our own alternate fantasy landscape (damn copyright infringement laws). Hold on to your meticulously arranged army of RISK minis!
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