Crush your friends and pillage their homelands. (Risk)

Member Name: Deep_Fort

Product:	Risk
Date:	05/11/09 (37 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An involved and exciting battle for the ulitmate prize - ruling the world!!

Disadvantages: Games can run on a bit sometimes. Though this is part of the charm.

Risk is a boardgame focused on world domination. I was going to say that this is the only aim of the game, but with modern variations this is not always the case.

It is actually a lot harder to describe than I first imagined.

The world is first divided into continents: South America, America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. These are then divided into territories (I was mistaken in calling them countries earlier - sorry). Territories are SOMETIMES countries but more often than not just vague descriptions such as 'western europe' 'eastern australia' or else entirely made up place names like 'ural' and 'yakutsk'.

The winner is the player who is able to purge the world of the opposition and stand astride the globe as sole king and ruler. In later variations the aim of the game changed to being the first player to complete a series of missions. Mission Risk as it was imaginatively named is a much shorter and somewhat neutered version of the game.

Purists such as myself consider it to lack the realism and reward of the original's 5+ hour grind to victory.

The real draw with this game is the nonsensical gibberish players start to tell each other once they're familiar with the game's basic mechanics. I used to play with my flatmates and by the fifth go-around we had to outlaw the forming of 'treaties'. This move didn't work. Once you've got the hang of playing the board game proper you'll find it incredibly difficult to withhold from playing elaborate mind-games with your opponents. "If you don't attack here, I won't attack there", "I certainly have no intention of taking Siam off of you", and my personal favourite "Are you really going to stand for that?! He just attacked you. I would get revenge. Go on, attack him, that one over there."

The possibilities are endless.

There are of course certain tactics which have been established. The most famous of course is "Conquer Australia"; and the only one which is also applicable in modern warfare which is "Don't ever try and conquer Asia".

For me it is the history the game builds up when played with regular opponents which makes it so amusing. The famiar tactics and the complex politics make for a great night in when you can spot friends pulling the same old tricks or bringing up grudges you'd thought were long dead. Monopoly attempts a similar trick with people bartering off properties and trying to haggle each other down but in Risk it is a much more integral element.

At the end of the day, this is one of the world's BIG games. Along with monopoly, scrabble, cluedo and a few others it forms the backbone of any good boardgame selection. Of all of these major players, Risk is my favourite. It is the least restrained by rules and despite the overriding objective of WORLD DOMINATION your routes to this goal are always varied and exciting. The human interaction the game encourages also means you spend less of your time focused on moving counters and trading cards and more on interacting with your fellow players. Throw in the multitude of rule variations and you have a world beater of a game.

Summary: A must-own board game.