Scott Rogers

I played Risk for the first time yesterday in a long time. I was reluctant to play, mostly because I think the game sucks. I was happy to play, as I had just met some new folks that were eager to play and didn’t want to be the surly newcomer. While I did have some fun, my opinion of its suckiness has not changed. Here are the problems I see with Risk.

1. Tactically Stale - At a tactical level, nothing interesting ever happens in Risk. There are essentially 4 things to consider at a tactical level:  where to attack, from where to attack, how many dice to roll when attacking and when to stop attacking. Once the decisions are made, it’s really all up to the randomness of the dice to determine the outcome of things. Stretched over 4-6 hours, this just becomes tiresome. Games that are reliant purely on dice rolls to produce drama generally fail to produce drama at all. Now I’ve excluded reinforcements and reinforcement placement from the list of tactical decisions that need to be made…mostly because they’re rarely even interesting at all either.
   
2. Strategic Silliness - I can’t think of the proper term for this one at the moment, but why, in a game of global domination should Madagascar and the Eastern United States be equal to one another? All territories are worth the same thing, all armies are worth the same thing. It just adds to the uninteresting silliness for me.
   
3. Downtime - There’s just too much of it. When it’s not your turn, there’s nothing to do. Many games have exciting things unfold or things you’d better be paying attention to when it’s not your turn (e.g., Dune). Even when you’re being attacked in Risk, the only thing you do is decide is how many dice you will roll. Combine the stale tactics with the snooze-inducing downtime, and that 4-6 hours really becomes a noticeable drag even when you’re doing well.
   
4. Zero Diplomacy - In my opinion, there is no diplomatic element in Risk. Sure, people make alliances, gang up on the front runner and recognize loose boundaries. None of these create any real interest, significance or consequences to the game beyond what’s going on at any given moment. Alliances and recognized boundaries are so fluid that they’re just a waste of time in a game that’s already bogged down by uninteresting game play.

The best thing about Risk is the fact that if people are interested in Risk and can play it reasonably well (problems of the game aside) they are well positioned to move on to much better games…Diplomacy, Bobby Lee, Die Macher, Battle Cry, Memoir ‘44 to name only a few. For me, it’s only a springboard to better things. Will I play Risk again? Probably, but I’ll definitely bring other games in tow when I do.