I bought this a few weeks ago, and played a few games of it. Has anyone else played this game? It is surprisingly complex! Now, my friends and I have been playing Risk 2210 AD for quite some time, doing various ‘strategizing’ with that game (I really liked the addition of the ‘irradiated’ zones, commanders, and command cards).
I went on some forums to look at some tactics. It was humbling how ‘noobish’ I was at that game! See, for beginners, winning with Japan is very hard. But once you play with experienced people, you find that Japan has such an apparent big advantage that they had to amend the game regarding how many starting units Japan has.
Last weekend I played a great game with my brother and a roomate. Talk about a hilarious example of revisionist history! In this example of World War II, the United States was surprisingly impotent, relying entirely on Great Britan’s Indian and Australian fleets to liberate the Phillipines. Japanese troops occupied Midway and held it for some time, destroying three consecutive fleets with their original invading force. However, despite numerous naval victories against the Americans, Japan suffered progessive losses against Australian forces in the East, being driven back to mainland China and the home islands.
Apparently, the main winning strategy for Japan in this game is to either make a run against India or Australia, and commit everything toward that campaign. When I played as Japan, I tried to hold off the Americans and grabbed up as much resource-generating territory as possible. However, in order to keep the American player at bay, I needed to commit a large part of my fleet, and while I was VERY lucky against him dice-wise, it didn’t do much for me in the East, where I was unable to hold territories long enough to gain a reasonable amount of Victory Points.
The game is very fun, though the biggest downside is the set-up time. The game takes a while to set up all the pieces, and while this will decrease as I ‘remember’ what pieces start where, it is rather time consuming. Also, the first 2 turns also take a long time just becase there are so many units on the board- after that everybody minus america is pretty whittled down but Japan’s first turn is a lot of “dump a bucket of dice and sort it all out”. 