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You have battled your way through the game. It wasn’t easy and you are glad that you have survived. You really want to win. You have now come to a really decisive point. You have an advantage and you don’t want to blow it up.
End-games in Risk are quite tricky. There is only one winner and when you get to a certain stage, a single mistake or a missed opportunity means you will lose the game and leave the trophy for someone else.
Consider the dilemma you may face in the following game where you are playing as Red. You have eliminated a player who was dominant in North America and have cashed in his cards. You have a choice to place armies on the map and carry on with your march. But you want to pause and think for a second. What are your options? How can you make sure that you will win by choosing the best move possible? You don’t want to leave it to chance. You want that trophy really badly!
"An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things
he predicted yesterday didn't happen today"
Laurence Peter
Risk is one of the most successful strategic games with clear abstract rules. It is amazing how you can relate Risk strategies to other fields, even those such as economy and investing.
Here, you will find a number of strategies that are applicable to both worlds and make Risk an incredibly useful tool to experiment with. If you are good at one, you can apply your strategy to the other field and expect to get good results.
So, master Risk players, this is your chance to become rich! Billionaires, it is your chance to conquer the whole world, literally!
While playing Risk with random initial positions, sometimes you may find yourself all over the place owning a country in just about every continent! You blame your luck and wonder how other players managed to get half of some continents already and seem to be way ahead of you.
Consider the following configuration. You are playing as Red and you are indeed scattered everywhere. Is there anything you can do to get out of this dilemma? How can you turn your weakness into strength?
Over time, experienced players develop a recipe of actions that they go through in every turn of every game. They perform a number of evaluations to get a feel for how the game is developing and if the timing is getting right for their plans. These evaluations are more like questions that you need to ask yourself. I have drawn up a number of standard questions that you must answer to yourself and in doing so, plan your next moves.
I am glad to announce the release of Risk Map Editor. You can now use this tool, to make Risk maps to illustrate your games for other players. The tool lets you create a map, place armies, arrows and notes and generate an image which you can later attach to your forum posts.
Find out more about Risk Map Editor by starting from the Guide
Your views on this tool are welcome and much needed. Please share it with us and other users.
You look at the map. Your current position looks good (you are playing as Red, A). You decide to go for Africa. You have lots of hope. You think in a few turns you get yourself established in the continent and will be ready to make a challenge for others. All is going according to plan. Excellent! Later, just by accident, you bump into a fortune teller who wants to predict your future. She looks at your hand (and probably the map) and says, “My son, I am afraid I have some bad news for you. I see darkness ahead. The more distant I look, the more darkness I see. You ought to be careful with who you deal with. Look around, never lose site of the distant world and try not to get carried away by your own strength.”
The fortune teller leaves you in deep thought. What did she really mean? Not to get carried away!? Distant world? All too confusing. You consider her comments for a moment, but you need to move on. The game is waiting for you. Maybe later you will realise what she meant. Hopefully …
You start with this map and make your move. [These maps are illustrated in BOMS Graphs].
Have you ever started a game from really poor random starting positions not knowing what to do and where to go? If you use random initial positions in online games or even the normal board game, you may find yourself in every continent on the planet. What you hoped for was to have a concentration of your armies in a particular area so you could focus on it. Imagine the position illustrated below. You, playing as Red, have no presence in either Australia or South America which are good small continents to start from. For the rest, you are scattered all over the map. What should you do to survive and go on all the way to win the game? What would you do if your initial plan backfired and you found yourself competing intensely with another player over a continent. Should you carry on with the corrosive war or pull out and look for somewhere else?
You made all the right moves in a Risk game. You set yourself next to the most ideal continents. You created conflicts between other players and watched them as they fought each other. You thought only in a few turns you will collect enough armies for your large continent that you will emerge as a new world power. Suddenly, out of no where, a new player started to invade one player after another and got more and more powerful every turn. He conquered one player a turn until your turn was up. He eliminated you and went on to win the game! Sound familiar? This is commonly known as ‘the chain effect’.
A series of elimination moves by a Risk player can lead him to victory much easier than collecting armies for continents or staying in isolation for a long period of time. You need to make sure that you are not caught up in this, while at the same time, know when to take advantage of it when the opportunity comes.
As you may know, learning by example is perhaps one of the best ways to learn new techniques. This walkthrough shows you ' the chain effect’. The Risk game presented here was played between 6 players starting from random locations.
I am a board game and Risk game enthusiast. I like thinking and talking about strategy in games which has led me to the creation of this website. Although Risk is a classic, I feel one can never get tired of playing this game. Read about what I think of the game and I am always eager to know what you think.
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Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Bertrand Russell