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| Photo by Medium |
Yes. I know. In my first post, I said that I would only blog about European Style Boardgames. Well, I’ve started to run out of eurogames to blog about. So this blog post is about an American-style boardgame which you've probably heard of (even though it was created in Europe): Risk.
Risk was created in 1957 and somehow became one of the world’s most popular board games, but now it is starting to become forgotten. I even forgot about it, until I saw a website about it while googling for boardgames to blog about. Here are the details:
Designer: Albert Lamorisse (a French Filmmaker)
Publisher: Hasbro
Players: 2-6
Setup Time: Around 25 minutes
Playing Time: 1-8 hours (!!!)
My Rating: 55/100
Overview
In Risk, each player is the leader of a faction which seeks to conquer the world, one territory at a time. The board of Risk consists of 42 territories, divided into 6 continents. Victory is attained when your troops control each and every single one (which as previously mentioned, could take up to eight hours), or if you control the most territories when everyone decides to stop playing.
Your army consists of three different types of troops: infantry (soldiers), cavalry (horse-mounted soldiers), and artillery (cannons). One infantry represents one military unit, one cavalry represents five military unites, and one artillery represents 10 military units. The amount of units which a player has represents their army size.
A player’s troops are placed in the territories which the player controls. At the start of a player’s turn, the player gets a certain amount of new troops to place, based on how many territories they control. After all of the troops are placed, it's attacking time!
The mechanics for how attacking works has changed over the years and is different in different versions of Risk, but it mainly consists of one player’s troops in a country attacking enemy troops in a neighboring country. Both players role dice based on how many military units (not troops), they have. The player with the higher dice role wins, and one soldier from the opposing army is removed from the board (in case of a tie, the defender wins).
When you knock out all of another player’s army in a territory, you conquer that territory. You then move as many troops as you want from your old territory to the new territory (leaving at least one behind), and draw one card.
There are three types of cards which you can draw. One has a picture of a soldier, one a horse-mounted soldier, and one a cannon. Each card also has a picture of a territory, but that doesn’t have any function except for determining starter territories. When you get three of the same type of card, or one of each type of card, you can trade them in for troops. It is a good idea to hold back on this for as long as possible (you can have a maximum of 5 cards), since as the game progresses, trade-ins give more and more military units.
As previously said, different versions of Risk have slightly different rules (some of which may go against what I have said), so when playing a game make sure that you follow that version’s specific rules. There are also many “house rules”, or rules that are unique to a group of people. Because of this, before playing with a group make sure that you all agree on the rules.
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| Photo by Target |
My Review
Pros:
In my opinion, Risk is an okay game. It has some yet not too much strategy, is exciting, can be entertaining for short periods of time, and is fun, however, the list ends there.
Cons:
There are many things which I feel could be vastly improved in Risk. These include its playing time, level of strategy vs. luck, depth, how interesting it is, and how well it plays with groups.
First off, the major problem about Risk is that it takes way too long to play. Most people don’t have the 8 hours needed to play the game (actually, I got the time 8 hours from Wikipedia, as I haven’t actually ever finished a game of it).
Moreover, the playing time creates another problem, how interesting the game is. Risk starts off interesting, with players vying to conquer the most territories the fastest, but an hour or two of declaring an attack, rolling the die, losing, and then waiting for another player to complete their turn while you do nothing, can get very boring, very fast. That’s not to say that there won’t be any exciting moments (there will be plenty; whenever a key territory is close to being lost). Nevertheless, a game of Risk will generally be a bore.
Another major problem of the game is the balance between strategy and luck. The entire game depends on who conquers the most territories, which depends on dice rolls. Consequently, as I like to say, “You can have the best strategy and the worst of luck and still lose, whereas a person who had the worst strategy but the best of luck, will always win.”
A third problem is the depth of the game. There really aren’t that many features in the game, just attacking and gaining territories, and earning and trading in cards to earn more troops. This can quickly make a player wish for a more in-depth game.
The final problem of Risk, which may just be its greatest, is its social aspect. Throughout the game, you will constantly be trying to grind your opponents into the dust, and will have only one thing on your mind: victory. Because of this, Risk can get really competitive and players will often have arguments. This led my group of friends and I to stop playing the game altogether (until we forgot about it).
Spin-offs:
There are surprisingly many versions and spin-offs of Risk, which range from 4 Star Wars spin-offs to a Chronicles of Narnia one. Some of these such as Risk: 2210 AD, have become more popular than others. One worth deserving mention is probably Risk: Legacy. This was the first legacy-style boardgame (you can read about what a legacy-style boardgame is in my post on Pandemic).
There has also been multiple video game adaptions of Risk, which have been published on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox 1, the iOS app store, and on android-operated devices. Some of these are the same as the boardgame, while others have the same basic rules, but their theme is quite different.
Final Thoughts
In my opinion, Risk isn't that good a boardgame. It has many faults, barely any pros, and is quite bad overall. Even though it isn't the world's worst boardgame ever, it definitely doesn't represent what a boardgame should be: entertaining, well designed, and most importantly, fun. For these reasons, I don't recommend Risk to you.
Thanks for reading this post and if you have any questions or comments about Risk, please comment below.
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