Risk

The Game Room
41

I don’t even know if I could get back to playing the original game. Or, more accurately, the game with it’s original rules.

The way my friends and I played back in the day:

1- Escalating armies, until the row of numbers on the side of the board was maxed, then a “collapse of Industrial Society due to the Unending War”. Start over again at 3…

2- Blitz rule. Which is to say, You make your initial attack, say, North Africa into Brazil. Using the same army that is now in Brazil, you can make additional attacks (from Brazil) to each territory touching it. Once you had done that, that army was exhausted, and needed to wait for refit (next turn) before anything could be done. Example: I launch my huge army of 35 guys into Central America from Venezuela. My surviving army of 30, firmly entrenched in Central America, Can then launch two more attacks from Central America to Eastern and Western US. That force is then exhausted. I could, in theory, launch an attack from Alaska into the Northern Provinces, and from Iceland into more of the north, but taking all of N. America is almost impossible.

This has the effect of making games both longer, and WAAAAY more strategic. You hoard your troops, you move much more cautiously, you tend to not leave the interior of your continent stripped down much at all… Someone could turn in for 50 men, and with that vast swarm… conquer S. America, and then stall out and have to wait. Giving everyone else a turn to prep for defense.

So much fun.

That was it, btw. No “Nuclear Risk” stupidity, nothing like that. A good 4 player game would last an entire weekend.

42

I choose **North Africa.
**
In general I prefer Africa over Australia as a starting base of operations. Every time I’ve played Australia I’ve gotten bogged down in endless skirmishes in south Asia. Australia is easy to protect, sure, but it’s also easy to blockade and it’s hard to make meaningful gains in Asia.

Africa, on the other hand, gives you lots of offensive options. You can easily strike at either Europe or South America, and it’s easy to play the spoiler if someone is trying to consolidate Asia. A giant pile of armies in North Africa is scary in a way that a giant pile of armies in Indonesia isn’t.

43

I loved that game. One thing they did to balance Australia was they added a few new territories; two of which were The Philippines and New Zealand, both part of Australia. N.Z. was connected to Argentina, and The Philippines were connected to China, Japan and Hawaii (another new territory). To compensate, Australia’s bonus was raised to 4, but you could no longer make it a fortress without significant sacrifices.