Risk Analysis: No strategic depth?

Last weekend was rather busy, so I have moved that week’s post to this weekend instead.

“There is little opportunity for interesting decision making due to a lack of meaningful choices and strategies.”

Is there really no so called “strategic depth” in Risk? Strategic depth can be described as the amount and variety of choices the player can make regarding his overarching plan to solve a problem (i.e. strategy), as well as the way these decisions interact with each other. In Risk, there is one goal, and one problem to solve: Global Domination. The only way to win is to eliminate all other players, and how is that accomplished? By slowly taking more and more of their territories until you produce and control more armies than your enemy, thus increasing your chances of taking more territories faster.

This long war of attrition is really not that much fun, but suppose we mix it up by adding other objectives in the game? This has been done in newer variants of Risk, by introducing so called Mission Cards. Mission cards are dealt out to the players at the start of the game, and if one player completes his objective, he wins. This is a good way to shorten the game to a more manageable length. However, the drawn out, boring battles still exist, since the objectives are all about conquest: eliminate a player, conquer a certain amount of territories, et cetera. Adding peaceful means of victory would probably not be very appreciated in a wargame; we must therefore make sure combat contains more planning and strategic manoeuvres and less dice rolling and odds calculation. Combat will not be addressed here, as that would be  too much text for one post (and I am tired).

To add more strategic depth, one has to add more elements to the game, and thus increasing its complexity. Still, we cannot let the game become too complex, as Risk is a family/light wargame at heart. We therefore have to make sure we add as little as possible, while making sure the new elements and mechanics interact with each other and the ones already in place. We also have to integrate these new features by making them at least somewhat similar to the old mechanics of Risk. One such example are fleets. Fleets can act as the buoyant equivalent of an army, moving between different sea zones, and thus share many of the same rules. Fleets main roles would be to support land attacks through bombardment, protect supply lines (I will detail my thoughts on supply in a future post) and protect/intercept transports. Transports would simply be armies that are moving across water, with no ability to fight sea battles and thus would be easy prey for an enemy fleet. Adding a naval aspect of risk would increase complexity a bit, and would also make the board less rigid, with naval invasions a possibility (or danger!).

I will propose and evaluate more additions and rule changes in future posts, which will be relevant to less general topics than today’s.