A Not So Friendly Game of Risk

Today we will be taking a look at the game Risk, a game that I myself played with Thomas and Sonaal.

For those unfamiliar with the game, the goal is to have complete domination of the world (pretty easy right?). You do this by using your troops to go head to head with your opponents’ troops using dice to determine the outcome of battle. As you conquer territories you will be able to add more troops to your army each turn. Of course you will also need to defend your own territories so play smart!

Game Mechanics:

• Area Control / Area Influence
• Area Movement
• Dice Rolling
• Player Elimination
• Set Collection

Our Game

Setup Stage:
To begin, we evenly divided up the territories on the board by dividing the deck of territory cards and place troops according to the stars on the cards.

Thomas ended up with a strong presence in Australia, South America, and North America.
Sonaal ended up with a strong presence in Africa but was fairly scattered in the rest of the world.
I had a fairly strong presence in Europe, and one or two scattered in other continents.

We then rolled to see who would go first. The order went Sonaal, Thomas, then me.

Turn 1:
With our positions set, it was time to start the game. Each turn consists of three phases.
1. Deploy:
Here players receive a number of troops to place in their territories, we decided on 4.

In his first turn, Sonaal deployed additional troops to his territory in Africa.
Thomas began preparing his troops in Australia for battle.
I deployed all my units to a territory in Europe.

2. Attack:
Here players can choose to attack as many territories adjacent to one they control. We roll dice equal to our attacking (up to 3) or defending (up to 2) units, with the highest rolls winning the battle.

In his first turn Sonaal, took over the remaining territories in Africa, thus conquering the entire continent.

Thomas was able to push me out of the final territory in Australia. He got very lucky with having most of Australia to begin as it is one of the better continents to hold.

I began fighting my way through Europe conquering a single territory. This was a double edged sword for me as while in the next turns when I finally conquered it all gave me many additional troops to deploy, it made me a target from the other two, who made a “if you don’t attack me I won’t attack you” pact (guess who was left to be attacked…).

3. Fortify:
This final phase of the turn is when you can move troops from one of your territories to another. However the two territories must be connected by land or sea.

In the first turn, none of us moved any troops.

End of Turn
Here if you had conquered a territory this turn draw a card. Since each of us had conquered one this turn we each got one.

Turn 2 onward:
Although I do not have the play by play of what happened later, after the first three turns I had conquered all of Europe, Sonaal all of Africa, and Thomas all of Australia and South America. A highlight of our game was when Sonaal went after a territory and continually lost the dice roll until finally conquering at a high cost. Unfortunately we did not have enough time to finish the game. In the last minutes of play we all turned in our territory cards to gain a large number of troops and subsequently tried to destroy each other in World War III.

I hope that for those reading you have gotten a sense of how to play Risk, and will enjoy the playing this strategy game where sometimes horribly terrible luck can make you frustrated and taking over the world is definitely possible.