After reading (no pun intended) the Monopoly Reading thread I was reminded of another Parker Brothers game our family would often play on Sundays,
From Seinfeld: “The Ukraine is weak!”
Yes, the Gigantic Ukraine and whatever Southern Europe is both are both adjacent to 7 other countries so to defend them needs a lot of armies.
I know (now) the more correct proportions of countries and of course Risk is just a game. In eighth grade Social Studies we played a game called Diplomacy which seemed to be re fighting the Crimean War yet at least your armies didn’t just parachute/beam into the middle of Europe.
Russia itself is a mess too. Yet the best strategy was to take Asia and all the armies you’d get. I lived in Australia as well and it’s not really divided like that.
I didn’t play Risk much, but I did play the hell out of Axis & Allies in my teens and it suffered from similar geographical simplifications made in the interest of game play. Still, I learned the “general” layout of countries/regions, which is a hell of a lot better than most kids these days.
I played a lot of Risk as a teenager. It helped me with geography but I also knew it was a game and not intended to be fully accurate. Just generally accurate.
As long as I live I will always know where Madagascar is.
I used to love this game! Now I’ve gotta post the board with the countries and continents…
Can we talk strategy? My go-to plan was to always try to get the continent of South America. This is because there are only two routes to other continents to defend, and conversely, two routes to break out and take over the world.
Europe, Asia, and Africa are almost impossible to defend. Europe has 6 routes and/or borders with other continents; Asia has about 8, and Africa has about 6.
North America is large (so hard to take over the whole continent) but to its credit only has 3 routes to other continents. Australia is easy to defend with one route, but because there is only one route, an opponent can easily trap you by building up their armies in Siam/Southeast Asia.
South America is just right, though, the Goldilocks of continents in Risk.
Disagree. I loved Africa! Won more than lost there! Though perhaps I was playing against idiots? But anyway, I felt it was better than south America or Australia because of the extra few routes in and out. Your foes would have to commit far more units to keep you contained, so breaking out was far easier. But at the same time it wasn’t so sapping to defend like N. America, Europe, Asia.
One of the times I was flying Qanttas out of Melbourne there was a stop in Auckland, NZ (probably as usual it stopped first at Sydney too). New Zealand isn’t in Risk! so I was surprised some time later to find out that New Zealand is not really on the way to LAX/USA (straight or even with great circles) but more or less due East of Australia.
Sure, even if the mods want to kick this to the game room. Two other workable strategies are holding Greenland, Kamchatka and either Mexico (or to break the above South America strategy, Venezuela) or (I know there is a name for it) taking Siam and Oceania and hoping to sit pat to someday march out and take Asia if there’s still more than one player who rules the rest of the world.
In either case you block others from holding continents and try and live another round.
Diplomacy (as I recall) had a bit more realistic approach as you had to manoeuvrer your Navy about and they could only, for example, land in Crimea and did not suddenly turn into an army that could march into deeper Russia or try and get Austria or Germany.
My RISK strategy has long been to pour everything into the Middle East until it is just a huge pile of armies, ignoring all other territories, conquer one adjacent country per turn just to get a card, and then negotiate a draw with whoever defeats everyone else.
Plus, once you have South America, you’re in a good position to take North America, which only increases your routes to defend by 1, but gives you a ton of armies. It also gives you one-step access to Europe, Asia, and Africa, so you can prevent anyone from holding any of those.
Just pouring everything into the Middle East means that whoever’s winning the rest of the game certainly has both Americas and Australia, which will give them so many armies that it’ll take them maybe a couple of turns to fortify enough that you can never break out of your stronghold again, and then maybe two more turns before they can squish you like a bug. There’s no reason for them to agree to a draw, under those circumstances. And that’s assuming you even last that long: A lot of routes to elsewhere pass through the Middle East, so everyone will be poking at you.
Exactly! I should clarify that South America is just my starting point at the beginning of the game and the first continent I try to secure. Once I have set up strong defenses in Venezuela and Brazil, my next forays would be into Central America and/or North Africa to deny those continents to opponents, with the goal to be to take them over in subsequent turns.
Of the two, North America has more territories to take, but is easier to defend and awards more bonus armies than Africa. So that is usually the next target.
Typically the other players are exhausting themselves in back-and-forth battles in Europe and Asia (“…never get involved in a land war in Asia!”). By that time I have hopefully taken over the Americas and Africa and can build strength until I can sweep across the globe and wipe the other players off the map.
I’ve probably played this game too much.
P.S. To the point of this thread, most of my early world geographic knowledge came from this game.
If it wasn’t for Risk, would you even know where Irkutsk was?
I think people understand games lack verisimilitude. Though I am often annoyed my municipality fails to give me money when I come across free parking, aspire to one day place first in a beauty contest, and wonder when big government will finally crack down on the railroad trust.
Looking at various Risk board designs over the years, I see that the 2015 version replaces the name of Ukraine for Russia.
In light of recent events, that seems unfortunate. And this change also ruins Kramer’s boastful quote about [the] Ukraine in the Seinfeld episode where he and Newman are playing the game on the subway.
In the 80’s, on my IBM PCjr and in BASIC (no visual anything though the PCjr had 16 colors) I tried making a player BOT or whatever it may have been called in those days. I spent too much time getting it to display the same map (yep with gigantic Ukraine and Canada with what - 3 territories).
I gave it enough logic to perhaps play well enough if I myself played two roles and let the computer play two. It knew some of the strategies we’ve covered yet at the same time knew not to allow others to employ them. So pretty good. Yet left to play several players on its own it was kind of like the Monopoly variant where you deal out all the properties and usually nobody ends up with a full set (I think you’re then supposed to make trades) – all the players would be scattered all over the globe/map, only rarely and by luck would any player get South America or Oceania and Ukraine and Southern Europe were constant battlefields because of all the adjacent territories/.
Some years later I worked at a PC store that had as part of their business plan “renting” out software while both using and selling disk copiers. Any ways, I “borrowed” a copy of a Risk game that was at best okay at playing if you and another human were playing two of its BOTs but left to their own devices. four BOTS would play a similar mess not unlike my long-abandoned BASIC game.
There is just so much wrong and in need of correction in that game. In 2015 (indeed probably by 2002) the Baltic Republics had left and those Russians left behind had some weird grey passports which may as well have left them stateless. European Russia basically goes up to the Ural mountains (I don’t believe there is a territory called “Ural” in Russia) and the rest of it is as arbitrary as is much of the game board.
I’ll leave it to the left out New Zealanders (huh? where is that?) or Canadians who feel most wronged to right things.
I’ve mentioned Crimea in this thread a couple times. The “Crimean War” was basically just an exercise in not letting the Russian Empire or the Ottoman empire get too big (at least from the English and French Empire’s POV). I don’t know how much fighting was actually in or around Crimea yet in the end and since Russia has made it absolutely clear to the world that Sevastopol was to remain their year round ice-free port.
It was Nikita Kruschev who was Ukrainian, drunk and due at Idlewild who “gifted” the Crimean Oblast from Russia/USSR proper to the Ukraine SFR upon Ukraine’s centenary. After the breakup of the Soviet Union Russia made clear again - and supposedly paid some kind of stipend to Ukraine to keep Sevastopol to keep their year round port. I lived in St. Petersburg when Crimea was annexed and could kindof understand how Putin may have felt that NATO or such could threaten control of that port. Alll that happened were sanctions that mostly harmed regular Russians - not the oligarchs who owned half of London. Okay (end politics)
