Risk-y Business

In case anyone was wondering, I tried to let that dude down easy, and he hasn't replied, so I assume he's feeling a little (-_-;)

Anyway, my students have an exam on Tuesday, and most of them had their last lab on Wednesday, so they generally wouldn't be getting the graded labs back until after the exam, but since some kids asked me for them, and since I am such an excellent TA, I came in today (Sunday) just to grade them. It's not particularly long or anything, but I will make sure they know how I slaved and slaved for their benefit, of course.

Grading took at most an hour, since I already had one of the two sections graded and since I am very lenient and tend to grade people that I know work together just once and replicate the grade across the group. So I had a bunch of time left over, and the math grad organization recently came into possession of a bunch of board games for the purposes of a board game night, which I didn't go to in order to play board games in Virginia, but I have the combination to the locker in which they are stored, so I decided to simulate some world conquest in my office. As secretary (maybe???) of the organization, I have a lot of pull as to what we do with our money (note: I took the job because there is no work and I am not even required to go to meetings), so I insisted we get Risk. There was plenty of money, so this was no issue. The president (my officemate) picked out the original version of Risk, as per the advice of the department board game aficionado. So here is what is different:

Not much.

There aren't III or V pieces, just oblong pieces that represent X's. The I's are in this version just wooden cubes. Interestingly, there's no brown, but there is pink. I am guessing that they realized that guys do not like to play with pink things in general. I assume that most people who enjoy Risk are men, as well as nerds. I also couldn't find in the instructions, which seem to be pared down for the re-release, how many armies each side starts with, but fortunately I remembered. If there are six players, each gets 20 armies, and for each fewer player, each side gets 5 more, by the way. If you only have two players, there's some sort of dummy third player, but I'm not clear on how that works because who plays Risk with two players?

I think a big part of the fun is the unofficial diplomacy that occurs when you actually have 3 or more (ideally at least 4) people playing that know how to play and don't get all butthurt when you inevitably break your alliance by smashing through their continent's defense. Some more unorganized thoughts about the game:

It's interesting how taking Australia first almost always ends not just in disaster, but in a particular kind of disaster. Almost every time I play, there ends up being a color that is almost forced to try to take Asia because there simply aren't enough continents for everyone to take a safer one at the beginning, and somebody has to get stuck with a bad position, including a couple territories in northern Asia. That guy basically has to try to take over all the undefended territories in a way that lets him maximize the armies along the border, which means for slow playing. Trying to take Asia in one fell swoop at the beginning is essentially suicide, so you get this weird thing where there's one guy with Australia whose goal is basically to get out of Asia, but has no choice but to go through Asia, and one guy who is stuck with most of Asia but no army bonus because he doesn't have Siam/India/Middle East, which is the Australian's path to expansion. But, because he's always taking these little undefended countries, the Asian guy gets to collect a lot of cards, which means he'll eventually get a set, and it tends to be at a time after the Australian guy has his continent but doesn't want to expand north because it would be trying to take Asia from the guy who has been trying to take it all game. What usually happens is that the guy with the set smashes through the border because the set will by that point outweigh the continent bonus, and likely will just take over Australia in a single turn. Maybe it is only due to using the usual rules for sets, which highly favors taking territories because the set values quickly outweigh everything else. I'm not sure what happens if you use the rules where sets only increase in value by 1 each time, but I do sometimes play that way, and it seems like a similar thing happens, in that I don't think I've ever played a game where the color that take Australia first wins.

Since I usually have to play by myself, I have to make sure to preserve features of the game that come from different people playing, and I try not to bias it towards any color or anything by making one guy do stupid things, but of course that isn't perfect. I always have a soft spot for the color that ends up being what I want to term the "roving empire," or maybe the huns of the game. Usually everyone's best strategy at the beginning of the game is to take a continent that that are set up to take, but as I mentioned, if you play with six players, there really aren't enough continents for this to work, so one player will inevitably end up losing this bid. This player never, in my experience, wins, but he's (pardon my androcentric pronouns, but generally all sides are me) also generally isn't really knocked out until later because eliminating another player requires a lot of armies, which nobody will have early in the game. So, he's just this guy who inhabits a non-claimed continent but can't take it from a more powerful player, meaning that his best chances lie in trying to survive long enough to get cards and hopefully establish himself again once the superpowers start fighting over the Bering Strait or something. In effect, he becomes this wandering army, trying to take weak territories, but not really holding onto them because the cards matter more than any individual territory if the continent is impossible to get. I think it's natural to root for this guy and much more fun to play than the guy who has to take the other strategy for a guy who lost his continent bid, which is to sit like a rock, collecting armies and hoping that somebody gets messed up. Probably just counting out armies is annoying.

Some places in the game inevitably get contested more than others, particularly ones that are on the boundary of two continents, and it's funny that for every one that mirrors some historically conflicted area, such as the whole Mediterranean sea, which reminds me of Rome vs. Carthage, or Greece and Turkey, or the middle east, or even 30 Years War-esque battles for Europe, there is an oddball, like Iceland vs. Greenland, two places which have probably never had a historic war, or North Africa vs. Brazil, which seems almost laughable if you look at an actual globe.

As much as I love Risk, the end game isn't very fun, and I usually just give up because I know how it's going to end and counting out 50+ armies for a set becomes tedious. I think the +1 rules are better for sets in general and probably should have started playing that way today but didn't, so I got stuck counting out too many armies, which is especially tedious without III's and V's.

Alright, well, that's probably enough for now.