Once again, it is time for the Defector staff to go into seclusion for our annual company meetings and fall frolic. This year we are gathering in Atlantic City, America's abandoned playground. We decided to hold a mini theme week to keep the site robust and full of blogs while we're in meetings. This year's theme: Risk!
I consider myself a risk-averse person in almost every fashion. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but I will overthink every move I make, whether professional or personal, and either pass on anything that might go badly or wait until every other option has been eliminated. (One notable exception led to the website you're reading right now, but that's been talked about a lot at this point.) So when Justin asked me if I wanted to write something for Risk Week, I froze. We batted around a few ideas—if you wanted to read me writing about the 2009 Patriots-Colts 4th-and-2 game, sorry—but every idea I had was either boring or stretching the theme of "risk" to beyond its limit. Then I remembered, well, Risk.
As much as I loathe risk, the concept, I love Risk, the board game. I have found that this is not a popular opinion, and I get it. Risk is a relic of a previous era, one that predates the 2010s rise in board games—powered in part though not fully by the proliferation of Settlers of Catan—by about 60 years. The core gameplay loop is simultaneously a slog and simplistic, and sometimes the effort of setting up a game and explaining all the rules is not worth the reward of stalemates up and down the world map. And yet, I have not found a board game that quite scratches the itch for adversarial dice rolls quite as strongly as Risk.
For the uninitiated, let me try to describe Risk: Up to six players get assigned various territories on a world map—there are 42 total territories in a standard Risk map, split across six continents; these numbers change drastically around many of the themed variants of the game that exist, such as Game of Thrones Risk or Lord of the Rings Risk—and then slowly but surely attempt to conquer enough territories to reach a predetermined win condition. Often, that's just a number of territories, though certain games also include faster ways to finish a game, such as a randomly drawn ceasefire card. (I don't like those.)
Conquest is accomplished by moving little army pieces into neighboring territories and rolling dice to decide the outcome of "battles." To give an example: If the attacker moves from Venezuela to Brazil with three troops, and the defender in the Amazon has two troops, then the attacker would roll three dice and the defender two. The attacker's goal is to have two dice that are higher than both of the defender's; if this happens, then both defenders are "killed" and the attacker takes Brazil. But if the defender matches or beats the two highest dice from the attacker, then those troops are in turn removed from the game and the defender gets to keep its territory.
That's ... about it as far as gameplay goes. (Don't yell at me in the comments about it being more complicated; it can be, but the basics are straightforward.) At the end of each round, players get more troops based on how many territories they control, with extra bonuses handed out for controlling whole continents. You can also cash in cards that you receive for acquiring territories in order to get more troops; these moves are, well, risks, but the right timing can completely change the game, allowing you to sweep up plenty of land in one go.
The strategy then becomes a push-and-pull between conquering a lot of territories and solidifying one's own position. This makes continents such as Africa (worth three extra troops if fully controlled) and South America (two troops) more valuable than, say, Asia (seven troops), because Asia is, perhaps in a nod to real life, near impossible to hold in its totality. There are too many territories and too many avenues into the continent, while Africa has only three entries and South America two. Conversely, even tho Australia only has one point of ingress, it is, in my eyes, the worst continent to hold, because there is nowhere to go but into Asia, and a smart player will block that route off, essentially locking the Australian player's troops off into a corner of the map.
These are all things that weren't particularly obvious to me when I started playing Risk. When I was a child, maybe about six, my dad had an old Mac laptop that had a primitive version of Risk on it. I played that as often as I could: on plane rides, while at home, in the car sometimes even. (I miss when I could do things in the car without feeling like I had to vomit.) I wasn't very good; though Risk is straightforward enough for a 6-year-old to learn, there are enough nuances to knowing when to push an advantage and when to live to fight another day that escaped the dopamine centers of my young brain, the ones that loved to win battle after battle before realizing I had no center of power from which to defend. I lost, often, but I kept playing.
Now that I am an adult with responsibilities, it's a lot harder to find time and, more crucially, willing players to engage in a Risk game that could take upwards of four hours. I bought a modernized version of the board game about a decade ago, and I think I've played a full game on that board maybe seven times since. When people think of Risk, they tend to think of long, drawn-out games that are left mostly to the chance of dice rolls. That's not wrong. There's some strategy involved in amassing troops to overwhelm probability, but at the end of the day, players are at the mercy of the dice.
Risk also has a problem in its endgame, where it becomes clear that one player will win, and either everyone has to forfeit—that's never a satisfying ending to any game, in my opinion—or play out turn after turn with no chance of coming back. And it's not fun to be the first person eliminated; not only do you lose definitively, but then you have to wait for your friends to finish the game, which can take hours. I hope you like looking at your phone!
With all that in mind, I certainly can't blame anyone who'd rather play something faster, more fair, or more strategic. There are other board games that do what Risk does, only better. I did enjoy my time playing Inis with some friends a few years ago, and I've heard good things about Root. None of these newfangled board games have ever hit the same way that a good Risk game does, though. Plenty of games let you form alliances and then betray those alliances at opportune times, but few seem to anger players as much as Risk. Perhaps that's because Risk allows an impromptu alliance to wipe out a player's endgame in just a few turns (this happens to me all the time), or maybe because everyone thinks they're better at the board games of our youth than they are (I certainly do). But some of my favorite memories of Risk come from the backstabbing and the subsequent rage they conjure. There's nothing quite like betraying your best friends over little plastic toy soldiers on a colorful map, only to have it done right back to you. That's the Risk promise, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
