Risk Analysis: Rolling and Downtime

This week I will be super efficient and cover two topics (although I have already touched on dice rolling):

“The game is full of dice rolling.”

AND

“There is not that much to do while other players take their turns.”

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Sitting around waiting hardly qualifies as fun, yet in many board games (and to a certain extent, some video games) it is absolutely required. If the game has a turn-based structure, like Risk, every player but one is left idle with usually nothing to do. In board games the term for the time spent waiting is “downtime”, while multiplayer video gamers might use the term “spawn time” or “round time”. There are two simple solution to reducing downtime: Reducing time spent “out” of the game, or giving the player something to do during downtime, in effect removing it. Extensive dice rolling is somewhat related to having long turn times, since a long battle takes a lot of time, while players not involved are only interested in the results.

So, in what way can we minimize downtime in Risk? The first step is to make the turns shorter. The fortification, or move phase is as short as it can be, and if a per-unit movement system is used instead, the fortification phase vanishes, and the whole turn is spent moving each army one step. This could take time if we were dealing with the quantities of armies of standard Risk, but this is remedied by simply lowering the amount of armies a player can build, via a population cap of sorts, and removing the ability to create armies with Risk Cards. By not allowing the player to move an army more than one territory, the attacks are much shorter, since each front only sees a few battles at most.

Still, with fewer armies, battles can be too long, especially for players not involved. Switching dice for cards would probably not significantly alter the length of a battle, but the amount of dice rolling would still need to be decreased. Also, a too short battle can seem like an anticlimax for the careful planning of a large campaign. The rounds featured in vanilla Risk would have to stay, since they make the battle feel more “epic” as well as allowing a losing player to retreat when they see the tables turn.

It seems how much we try to limit turn length, there is still a minimum turn length needed to allow for players to have some kind of impact on how the game unfolds. In Risk II, a computer version of Risk, a mode called SameTime Risk is introduced. In it, each player move their pieces on one, common turn, preceded by a phase where each player “writes down” what moves they will make. The orders are then carried out semi-simultaneously. While this may work for a computer game or a more “hard-core” board game like Diplomacy, it may not work as well for a more casual game like Risk.

Thus we must find some way to engage the player during other people’s turns, other than building tower of their game pieces. As mentioned in the diplomacy post, diplomacy makes people care about what happened at other players’ borders. In addition, by trying to focus on each player planning ahead, they will react to what happens on the board that might interfere with their strategy. The problem is if the strategy is to simplistic, the player can quickly invent and adapt strategies, and spend the rest time waiting to execute their plan. On the other hand, a necessitation for more complex strategies can leave some players in a state of indecisiveness, prolonging their turn.

Making the player feel interested in the game at all times is important, but will also prevent the player from taking a “break”, relaxing a bit and maybe talk with other players or fetching something to drink. The balance between requiring high intensity and allowing the player to “rest” is a difficult one, and hardly one that can be discussed in one post.