Risk Analysis: Movement

You can “surge attack”, making it possible to move troops and conquer land unreasonably quickly.

Risk’s movement rules are pretty weird. When attacking you may move any army as far as you like provided that you win the battle, but when moving troops into friendly territory, you may only move armies from one area into another. Trying to find the real-world counterpart for these rules is pretty hard, and for me it involves imagining berserking warriors that smell so bad that the supreme commander himself has to go to a province in order to force the soldiers across the borders of a territory. Abstracting actual army movement and supply chains is fine, but the original Risk movement rules actually do not make sense and therefore are harder to learn and somehow are less fun.

Risk Analysis: Luck, Chance and Risk

Seems I am somehow on a biweekly schedule.

“There is too much luck involved.”

Chance is a common element in many games going far back in history, such as playing dice for money.  There are many ways chance can affect a game, though I will only concentrate on a few of the more significant ones. First off, we have the excitement factor, even though it rapidly diminishes over time, and makes way for a sense of lack of control from the players’ part. This excitement stems from the fact that neither the roller of dice nor the observers know the outcome of a roll. This uncertainty will eventually lead the players into creating “certainties” by probability calculation. This can be seen in many games that are skill games but actually have a great deal of “luck” (such as Poker, but Poker also has a great deal of psychology and game flow understanding as well). It is somewhat present in Risk, when a player is deciding whether or not to attack. More strategic decisions such as when and where to attack also involve some probability calculation, but really these choices are more intuitional.

Risk Analysis: Game Length and Elimination

So much for a consistent schedule… Here is today’s (or two weeks ago’s) topic:

“The game can stretch out for a long time, and often players are eliminated and thus left out of the game.”

Every time someone suggests playing Risk, the picture that forms in my mind is one of a board full of plastic pieces. I know the game has progressed quite far, only two – maybe three – players are left. The other players have been eliminated or given up after hours of tiring tug-of-war, and if there still is a third player left, he is being chewed up by his two larger adversaries. Soon the final battle between the titans will stand – who wins seems more determined by chance now that the differences in army production are so small. Even combinations of Risk cards will not tip the scale noticeably, even though early in the game they decided which players were going to be eliminated. Just before I start to panic, I snap back to reality; and we decide not to play Risk, ever.