While playing Risk, quite often you may find yourself negotiating with other players. Negotiation is a skill that can prove extremely useful when you want to avoid direct conflicts and save your armies and resources for better use later in the game. However, negotiations can be tough. Some people ignore them altogether. Others actively argue that there is no need to negotiate or make deals with other players because these deals can be broken. These player find negotiation difficult and as such either avoid it or to try to justify their negativity philosophically. Remember, negotiation is just another tool. You are not forced to use, nor do you have to avoid it exclusively. Just be good at it and when the right circumstances arise, use the tool to get ahead of others.

Most people learn how to negotiate in the field without much systematic training. There are many established guidelines to follow for better results, though many still fall to the trap of old ineffective approaches. Consider the following example negotiation…

When playing Risk, you can generally adopt three kinds of strategies; passive, aggressive or assertive. Each of these has its own style of play and has certain consequences. It is well known that in order to successfully communicate with others, you need to be assertive and this also applies to Risk as well. However, what does it mean to be assertive? How can you optimise your strategy to take advantage of the benefits of assertiveness?

In this article you will be introduced to the APA model (Assertive, Passive & Aggressive) and explore various issues and parameters that you must be aware of when you are dealing with other Risk players.

Risk is all about attacking and that’s what you do most of the time in this game. However, as you know, direct attacks are costly and over time come to erode your armies. Some players are naturally more aggressive than others and usually pick on the weak and vulnerable intending to eliminate them. What should you do if you find yourself in a position where you are threatened by a stronger player? Should you keep a low profile and hope for the best? Should you go for a direct attack and hope you get lucky? What is the best strategy to contain a stronger player and extend your life in the game?

Throughout history, various military strategists in different cultures have noticed an unusual phenomenon: in battle the side that was on the defensive won in the end. Why should this be the case? Does this apply to Risk as well? Based on history, is it truly better to defend rather than attack? How about the other famous aphorism that “Attack is the best defence”? Aren’t these contradictory?

To answer these questions we need to look at attack and defence in more detail and examine the human psychology that dictates certain behaviours that will eventually lead to one choice or the other.

Attack and defence are like two sides of a coin. They each have advantages and disadvantages. Like many questions examining two possible solutions, you may have to use one or the other in specific situations as the ultimate choice. However, the general question remains as to which method is the preferred default choice.

Imagine, one afternoon, by some magical coincidence you find yourself in a room where a number of ‘players’ are gathered around a world map, playing Risk. What’s unusual about this game is that the players are not ordinary people like me and you. They are in fact the heads of states of some of the most influential countries in the world and they have gathered together in the UN to ‘play it out’, over a Risk game.

Europe	USA	South America	Middle East	China	Japan	Africa

(Rules: using escalating cards and connected fortifications)

You are an excited observer and can’t wait to see what happens next and how it will all play out especially since a new person is now in charge of one of the most powerful continents.

This is the last part of the 3-part series. As you saw earlier, many players suddenly made bold moves and expanded in different directions. The cards meant that the game was unstable and anything could happen. Here is how the world looked like.

As you saw in Part 1 of this example scenario, Brown had a dilemma and needed a compromise. This is how the world looked like. Follow with this example to see what happened next.

Every now and then I come across Risk games that stand out in memory for a long time simply because of the way they unfolded and provided sheers entertainment. The following is the story of one of these games.

The game captures the essence of timely decision making. In Risk, players need to be robust and continuously recalculate their position in respect with others. Unfortunately not all do, and as you may imagine this will cost them the game. In effect, they fight their last war and get eliminated!

The following example will illustrates this beautifully. This is the first part of a 3-part series. You are encouraged to suggest solutions. A few days later, the next part will be published and you can all compare your potential solutions with what actually happened.

All of us have experienced Risk games that have gone smoothly. We also have experienced games that haven’t gone that smoothly at all despite our good initial positions or fortunes. What happened in these games that we ended up losing so badly, especially if we were still using the same strategy as in our other games? Is it just bad luck, or is something more sophisticated going on?

Risk is a game of politics. To win you need to be able to influence the opinion of others. Of course good players are good at this, so when you are playing against them, anything goes; manipulations, deception, vague remarks, fuzzy justifications, you name it, it’s all there. There is always more to see than just the map in front of you. If you only rely on the map and the armies placed on it, you are limiting yourself from all that you can use to make good strategic judgements. So, what more is there to see? The answer is motivation. It is other players’ desires, wants and needs. If you can work this out you will be much more prepared for what is to come. There is indeed an elegant phrase that captures the essence of this.

You won! You just keep winning. You must be a great player if not the best. It wasn't easy. Some players in your view were just plain bad. You had some arguments with some other players in the game, but you don't think of it much. You think it's just part of the game.

Sometime later, you go back to the online forum only to discover that there is a whole amount of conversation going on about you from certain players who did not approve of what you did or said in the game. In effect they are spreading rumours about you and your character and trying to destroy your reputation. As you know, winning Risk repeatedly is all about reputation and any damage to that will have all sorts of serious consequences for you when you are online next time to play. So you need to be able to control the rumours. The question is, how?

The situation is the same if you were not playing the game online. Rumours can spread behind your back and when you get back to your friends next weekend to play with them, you realise (quite late of course) that they have already plotted to remove you from the game, perhaps to teach you a lesson.

All of this means that you need to be able to control your reputation and spread of any rumour. Here, you will learn a number of techniques to achieve this.