A version of this review was previously posted on BGG as a comparative review of 5 versions of Risk, and gave equal focus to each of them. That review is now completely rewritten, re-edited, expanded, and updated with a special focus on Risk: Black Ops.
I must admit I am biased towards admiring this game. Black Ops is the first time one of my
Growing up, when I had no idea it was possible to have fun shipping indigo; I was a huge risk fan. Since then, I’ve been introduced to a larger world of gaming, and Risk doesn’t hit the table nearly as often as it used to. Risk: Black Ops brings a welcome rejuvenation of Risk for me and my gaming group.
This review includes the following Risk incarnations:
Risk: Black Ops(referred to in this review as BO)
Risk (Referred to as vanilla)
Risk 2210 A.D. (Referred to as 2210)
Risk - The Lord of the Rings - Trilogy Edition (Referred to as LOTR, and note that this review is specific to the trilogy edition)
Risk - Star Wars: Original Trilogy Edition (Referred to as SWOT)
Risk - Star Wars: The Clone Wars Edition (Referred to as clones)
Theme:
BO: Taking a step away from TAKING OVER THE WORLD, BO players instead use their armies to complete objectives. It still has a war theme, but players accomplish things more subtle than global domination. As the title “Black Ops” would suggest, the game tries to produce an experience of covert conflict instead of massive global conquest. This is very different from what is known as the mission risk rules in most versions of vanilla. Instead of each player winning by completing their own hidden mission, all players compete over the same 8 objectives. The first player to complete 3 objectives wins. The box design, rule book, title, and map do an over-the-top job of supporting the theme. More on that in the Components section of the review.
Vanilla: This classic game takes place in the Napoleonic era and has only 1 thing on its mind: word domination. All things being equal, there’s just something about TAKING OVER THE WORLD that is more exciting than trading brick and wood to build a road. This game is the foundation for all Risk themes: war, battles, conquering, world domination, and military conflict. What else could you need? Maybe good game play.
2210: Earth is a very different place in this sci-fi themed risk. Players must TAKE OVER THE WORLD…and the moon. Just watch out for the Martians. Not that there’s any Martians at all I this game, it’s just generally a good idea to always be watching out for them. Humans have created underwater colonies. Political and environmental strife has changed the landscape of earth. The moon awaits exploration and military exploitation. Instead of armies composed of humans, the next inevitable phase of war has begun: giant robots blowing stuff up!
LOTR: As the name would indicate, the theme is Tolkien’s Middle Earth at the end of the Third Age. The design is taken more from the movie than an interpretation of the books. The risk engine is a good fit for the epic battles of the story. It always seems to work out that the biggest battles are between Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul. You get to have big battles in all of the places you would expect. Plus, there are plenty of options to rewrite the history of the war of the ring. Sometimes the elves in the grey havens get to attack Gondor in Dol Amroth.
Although it pits the forces of good versus the armies of evil, there are no differences in the sides except unit sculpts and starting regions. It may have added thematic value to have mechanical differences between good and evil, but I think it works just fine. The starting positions actually make it likely to attack a player of the same moral allegiance. Strong differences between good and evil would dictate more of a team approach to the game like the Star Wars versions. I prefer to not have teams and be able to attack everyone. In my opinion, there can only be one Lord of the Ring. And he does not share power!
The story element of the fellowship sneaking around is minimally represented. The fellowship simply moves one region towards mount doom each turn, with its struggles abstracted into a 50/50 chance on a die roll. This does little to add to the theme, but it makes a fine clock for the game. This game focuses the theme on epic battles, not the challenges of 9 characters, which is fine. If I want a game about the fellowship, The Confrontation scratches that itch.
SWOT: This game features the galactic events of Star Wars that occur in A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. The Empire, Rebellion, and the Hutts vie for dominion over the galaxy. Unlike LOTR, if there are multiple rebellion players, they form an alliance (a rebel alliance, one might say) and cannot attack each other. Same goes for the Empire. Galactic domination is the goal, and oh yes, there are Death Star(s) at your disposal. Too many Hutts on Dagobah? Wipe them out. All of them. This is the only game I’m aware of where you can blow up entire planets. Combining the theme of TAKING OVER THE WORLD and BLOWING UP PLANETS is as close to heaven as Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in the same movie.
Clones: The Star Wars galactic events that occur in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith are represented in this game. The Separatists lead their droid armies against the Republic’s clone troopers. It does a good job of representing Darth Sidious using war as a distraction until all of his plans are in place to execute order 66. As the game grows longer, Sidious’s plans come into the place as the Jedi’s forces are spread thin across the galaxy. This risk does the best job of sticking to and representing the story line.
Rank from best to weakest theme:
LOTR
SWOT
BO
Clones
2210
Vanilla
Components:
BO: The components of this game must be considered in the context that it is a limited run free (unless you got it on Ebay) preview game with only 1000 copies. Therefore one can expect minimalist components and not a lot of extra money spent on niceties. In regards to the pieces that represent your armies, this holds true.
Behold the ferocious and awe inspiring Black Ops warrior:
There are different opinions on cubes vs. minis. If cubes are your thing, this will please you just fine. I have to admit they are very functional. When it comes to counting out your troops, moving pieces on the board, and putting out new armies the cubes do make it easy. That being said, I would prefer make a small sacrifice in functionality in order to have sculpted army minis. I have to admit, having cool toys in my games is a nice addition to good game play. Taking everything into consideration, BO still meets expectations for what it is. When it comes to all of the other components, BO far exceeds expectations. As you may have already noticed, the game board is very well designed.
That black board is simply the best looking Risk board by far. There are few games that make me want to play it just by looking at the board. The design works so well both visually and supporting the theme. It’s just as functional as any other Risk board, but the coolness factor is off the chart. It rivals War of the Ring or Star Wars: The Queens Gambit as my favorite board. The board is the coolness anchor but that isn’t all of the nice extra touches. The box itself stays in the all black motif. The quote on the front adds nice flavor.
One of the nicest touches was the rule book. But it’s not a book. It’s not even called the rules. It’s a field guide. It’s a folder with several tabbed inserts. It tries to recreate a mission folder given to a field operative.
Inside the box there’s an insert to hold everything. The insert was a nice try, but you’ll still need baggies to hold your cubes. Those cubes are a pain to try to get out of those inserts. The box for the cards is just a hair too shallow, allowing for the top few cards to slide out. That’s fine, though, because it’s far better than the box insert in 3rd edition of Settlers of Catan:
Vanilla: It depends on which version you get, but many of them feature sculpted plastic infantry, cavalry, and artillery miniatures, although they function the same in combat. It’s nice and fun to turn in cards and dump a bunch of cannons, cavalry, and little dudes with guns on the board.
2210: Your armies are represented by miniatures of 3 different mechs. I gotta say, the mechs are pretty cool. More than any of the other versions, this one makes me want to pick of the pieces and start playing with them by themselves. They’re well sculpted and visually interesting. Each player also gets 5 different Commander pieces. Each of the commanders has their own plastic mini. The map takes the vanilla map as it’s foundation but has some additions – underwater territories as well as a moon that needs to be conquered. The moon is its own separate board. The territories have clever new names, such as the “Amazon Desert”.
LOTR: The miniatures have wonderful sculpts. The large cave trolls and eagles really stand out. If you want your armies to look threatening, just swap out for cave trolls! Boy do they look intimidating! You also get orcs, elven archers, Nazgul on horses, Rohirrim, and a nice One Ring to Rule them All. Until BO came on the scene, I used to think this had the best map. Anything based on Tolkien’s map (even though the dimensions are distorted to fit a rectangular board) gets extra points in my book. It’s very nice to look at. In some parts of the map you do lose some readability of the territory name, although it still looks nice. This can slow down playing cards or deploying your starting armies. Also, it has more territories than any other map in this review. More territories and more regions mean more options.
SWOT: The miniatures in this game are rather mediocre. The stormtroopers barely look like stormtroopers and aren’t distinct enough from the rebels. Ships are represented by cardboard tokens, which is a dull way to portray an X-wing. The components that really do stand out are the Hutt pieces. Those rancors are so darn cool. Haven’t you always wanted to command an army of rancors to TAKE OVER THE WORLD while planets are being blown up? I’ve swapped out a lot of the miniatures in this game in favor for some of my old star wars micro machines. That helps make it a little more fun. The map design is better looking than the clones map. It also provides more strategic options.
Clones: Like SWOT, it has mediocre miniatures. The battle droids and clones look nice, but they don’t scale well with the figures that are supposed to represent larger armies. The 1 army figure is much bigger than the 3 army unit figure. This game also has cardboard tokens to represent ships. The map is rather dull both visually and strategically.
Rank from best to weakest components:
BO
LOTR
2210
SWOT
Vanilla
Clones
Strategic depth:
BO: Having an objective based Risk turns the strategy on its head. It’s very fun to see new people try this game and suddenly realize the new choices they have to face. Each game has 8 objectives randomly chosen out of the 12 that come with the game. These are open information to all players. The first player to complete 3 objectives wins. There are 3 important catches:
1 – you can only complete 1 objective per turn.
2 – Once an objective is complete, it is no longer available for any other player to complete.
3 – Each player starts the game with a capital. For every capital a player owns, it gives them an extra army each turn. A player cannot win until he has completed 3 objectives AND controls his own capital.
In addition, each time you complete an objective, you get to claim a bonus. Like the objectives, once a bonus is taken, it is not available to the other players.
The possible objectives:
Control Asia
Take over 4 cities in 1 turn
Control 1 enemy capital
Control North America
Control Europe
Control 8 cities
Control 2 enemy capitals
Take over 10 territories in 1 turn
Control 2 complete continents
Takeover an entire continent in 1 turn
Control 18 territories
Control 11 cities.
The possible bonuses:
Airfield x2 (your highest die roll in that and adjacent territories are +1)
Additional Maneuver (Move twice at end of turn)
Starting Maneuver (Move at beginning of turn)
Guaranteed card
2 extra troops at the start of each turn
Attack die (instead of rolling 3 and picking your top 2, you roll 4 and pick top2)
Defense die (see above)
There are many paths to victory. 336 paths, to be exact. Out of 8 objectives, there are 336 unique combinations of 3 different objectives to choose from. That gives players a significant amount of interesting decisions. This adds some important complexity to the decision making.
Players must choose which objectives to go for, and which ones compliment each other in a long term strategy. You can only claim 1 objective per turn. Often you may fulfill more than 1 in a turn and be forced to choose which one to take now and which one to try to take later.
You also need to keep track which objectives your opponents are going for and which ones they have a good chance of getting. This gets even more interesting when you’re competing for the same objective. In other risks, there is a constant tension between pushing troops on offense vs. keeping troops behind to defend the land you have claimed. In BO, keeping your territories is less important. Once you have an objective, it is yours until you get wiped out. This means you can spread yourself thin to take North America to get the objective. If you are kicked out of North America, it matters little, since you still got your objective. This makes players not have to worry too much about their borders. This also changes the leader bashing dynamic. In other Risks, this is usually triggered by a player controlling 1 or more continents. In BO, control of continents is secondary or even tertiary to your goals. Instead, leader bashing kicks in high gear once someone has taken 2 objectives and therefore only needs 1 more to win.
Players still have to make sure their capital is well defended. The capitals add a lot to make this the decisions interesting. They are also essential to balance the game. Without them, all players would expend all effort to offensively take objectives. The capital forces players to try to find the right temper between capital management and objective fulfillment.
The bonuses give interesting decisions, too. It’s rarely an easy choice. While some are stronger than others, any of them in the right situation can make or break your victory. The different bonuses help give the game some flavor by adding some nice exceptions to the rules. It also adds another layer to the competition. Once a player claims a bonus, it is non transferable and no one else may claim it.
The cities help fix the problem of having too few armies per turn. Risk is less engaging when everyone is getting a small handful of armies. Instead of just counting your territories and dividing by 3 to calculate how many armies you get, you count your territories plus your cities and divide by 3. There are 15 cities, distributed randomly. This gives everyone more armies to be dangerous with and also changes the value a territory may have.
I also think BO has a very successful card system. Instead of a 5 card hand limit, you can stockpile cards indefinitely. You can also turn in as little as 1 card to get extra troops. Each card has either 1 or 2 stars. You turn in cards to get troops based on how many stars are on the card. The more stars you turn in, the better star to army ratio you will get. This gives players the choice between short term instant gratification of a few armies, and the delayed gratification of many armies. It works very well and gives you something to think about each turn.
Vanilla: There’s not much strategic depth to vanilla risk. I still think the player with the most skill will win at least a majority of the time, but the skill level required to win vanilla is very low. At first you need to decide which continent is the best to go for. Once you realize that it’s Australia, all you have to do is bash the leader and wipe someone out to get their cards.
2210: This game has strategic depth far beyond vanilla. It provides choices in which type of territories to focus on: land, water, or moon. Each has its own advantages. In addition to managing your army resources, you also obtain “energy”. This is used to purchase cards, bid on turn order, etc.. Bidding on turn order can be very powerful. It’s a big advantage to go last on one round and first on the next round. It’s also important to plan your energy use to prevent your opponents from doing this. This game also lets you build bases (which give defensive bonuses and moon access) and commanders (each with their own ability), which adds more options to the mix. Compared to vanilla, you’ll find yourself actually having to make decisions in order to win.
LOTR: As mentioned, the map has a lot of territories. This means plenty of options to choose from. There are many regions that are worth going for. There’s also enough territories that it’s a viable strategy to not focus on whole regions but to simply have lots of territories to fuel your orc factory. More territories on the map means there are more armies being put out by each player per turn. This helps you manage a few unlucky die rolls. If you’re only getting 3-5 armies per turn like vanilla, two unlucky die rolls can wipe out your entire placement for the turn. But, if you’re getting 7-10 armies per turn, you can still survive an unlucky roll or two.
The leader pieces also add new strategic options. If you leave your leader sitting on a stronghold, you will have a very secure defensive position. But, without your leader out gallivanting around the sites of power on the board, you will not be drawing the special cards. In terms of the fundamental Risk decisions: Where to put troops, where to attack; this game gives the most options.
SWOT: The nicest strategic element of this variant is that each of the 3 factions has its own victory conditions. The empire’s victory condition is to eliminate the rebellion. The rebel’s victory condition is to just kill the emperor. Each turn, the empire player places a token face down. It could be the emperor, or it could be just a run of the mill Imperial base. The empire player must choose wisely and bluff safely where he puts these tokens. The empire player also has the death star to control. If TAKING OVER THE WORLD is fun, than blowing up planets in the process just makes you want to cackle in evil laughter for an awkwardly long amount of time. The Death Star also prevents a territory from being attacked until the Death Star is blown up. Neither the rebel nor imperial player has Hutts involved in its victory condition, but they must play wisely in order to not let the Hutts get too far. The Hutts need only to conquer 10 out of 13 special resource planets on the board. The mixture of all the victory conditions makes the game dynamic. Both star wars versions feature multipurpose cards. You have 3 options on each card: The special event text, trading 1 card in for 1 starship (which do things like give +1 to die rolls, or let you use D8 instead of D6), or trading 3 cards in for several bonus armies, like vanilla.
Clones: All of the strategy revolves around order 66. When called, all clone controlled planets are subject to a die roll to see if all units succumb to their orders to slay their Jedi commanders. The earlier this happens, the more likely the clones will be loyal to the Jedi. The later this happens, the more of a sure thing the clones will execute Order 66 successfully. The clones player has the military advantage (he’ll usually be drawing a lot more cards) and must press his advantage early. By capturing separatist leaders, the player can get more cards and thus more armies. The Sith player needs only to live long enough and victory will be certain. The strategy is light. It’s pretty much crush swiftly if you play the clones, and buy time and defend the separatist leaders if you’re the droids.
Rank from best to weakest strategic depth:
BO
LOTR
2210
SWOT
Clones
Vanilla
How The Game Ends:
BO: Unlike other recent versions of Risk, this has no artificial time clock like Order 66 or the Fellowship of the Ring. It ends only when a player meets victory conditions: 3 objectives. The game length is at about an hour, which is very acceptable. 3 objectives sometimes feels a little too quick. While the game play is far more engaging, the ending climax of TAKING OVER THE WORLD is more exciting than completing your third objective.
Vanilla: The positive aspect of this game is that it ends authentically. Meaning, in a game where the object is to TAKE OVER THE WORLD, the game doesn’t end until someone TAKES OVER THE WORLD. No arbitrary game clock or turn limit. This is its gift, and it is its curse. This is one of those games that often takes hours and hours and hours. I’m very supportive of games that take a long time, I’d just rather spend those hours on a more mentally challenging game. The endgame can also turn into tedious die rolling exercise until the powerful player swallows the other.
2210: Since risk takes much longer than most people are willing to invest in a board game, most of the variants have some sort of time limit built in. In 2210, everyone gets five turns, then add up victory points based on territories and regions. Thus, the person going last on the 5th turn has the advantage of pushing his mechs as far as they can go without fear of reprisal. While this seems too simple of a way to end a game, there is a silent auction mechanic to determine play order. The craftiest player will save up his energy tokens to make sure he plays last. It’s good that the game doesn’t go on and on forever, but 5 turns just doesn’t feel satisfactory. Some times I feel that if it just went a few more turns I could have turned the game around. The up side is that everyone is aware that the game ends in 5 turns and each player has full control over the turn order they want.
LOTR: In this game, the fellowship of the ring moves one territory per turn until it reaches the fires of Orodruin. When this happens, the game ends and everyone counts victory points based on territories and regions. Like 2210, the player going last has the advantage. Unlike 2210, there is nothing that can be done about it, except holding onto cards that hurry up/slow down the fellowship when they are at mount doom. This often makes the winner the person who had the final turn. This can be a negative play experience if you played well the entire game, but got bested by some chump who spread out on the last turn, like butter scraped over too much bread. It feels arbitrary and too random. The fellowship has to make a 50/50 die roll to move into Mount Doom to end the game. A house rule to make it a 1/6 die roll to end the game solves the last player advantage problem. It does create its own problem of a game dragging on.
SWOT: Each faction has its own victory condition. There is no artificial mechanic to end the game, it simply ends when that condition is met. Despite that, the game still only plays in about 2 hours. All in all a satisfying ending in a reasonable amount of time. There can be a few rare situations where the Empire player gets the emperor tile his first turn, places it, and the rebels kill the emperor the next turn. This game result in a game that’s too short and no one had a chance to implement their strategy.
Clones: Although Order 66 doesn’t end the game in and of itself, it does mean the end is certainly near. After order 66, the emperor is revealed and is placed on a territory. The clones can win by conquering that territory. The game will end in 1 of 2 scenarios. If the clones are doing well militarily, it forces order 66 before the time is ripe. This leads to a poorly executed order 66, which puts the emperor on the table and the republic player is usually powerful enough to kill him. The other scenario is if the emperor is able to call Order 66 when everything that has transpired has done so according to his design. Then, nearly all clone armies betray the Jedi and it only takes a turn for the last remnants of the Old Republic to be swept away.
The game length is short, and it doesn’t end arbitrarily, but it is outside of player’s control. Order 66 progresses inexorably, however, and there is no strategy to speed it up or slow it down. The problem many people have with this game is that order 66 turns the game upside down so quickly that it feels broken. Even though order 66 can trigger victory for either side depending on how well they’ve played the rest of the game, order 66 makes the end so certain for one side that the losing player can feel out of control.
Rank from best to weakest on how the game ends:
SWOT
BO
2210
Vanilla
LOTR
Clones
Number of Players
BO: 2-5. Plays best with 5. The more players, the more people competing for objectives, which means more challenge. The down side of 5 players is the 4th and 5th players have a disadvantage with objectives being gobbled up before they get a chance. This is counter balanced by the 3rd, 4th, and 5th players starting with extra cards. This might give them a better chance to get objectives on their first turn that other players don’t. This helps the player order imbalance a little. In my 5 games so far this hasn’t been a major issue.
Vanilla: 2-6. Plays best with 3 or 4. Avoid playing with 2. 5 or 6 takes too long and players can be wiped out easily.
2210: 2-5. Plays well with more than 2 players. Haven’t tried it with enough combinations of players to give a confident number of players recommendation.
LOTR: 2-4. Plays best with 4. With 3, the two evil players tend to kill each other and give the good player an advantage. With 4, everyone’s killing each other equitably. 2 players isn’t great, although not terrible.
SWOT: 2-5. Plays best with 3 or 5 players. Odd numbered players are best because it means the Hutts are active. In 2 or 4 players, the Hutts are a neutral 3rd party.
Clones: 2-4. Plays fine with 2, 3, or 4. Of all the variants, this one has the best playability as 2 player.
Rank overall:
Black Ops
Lord of the Rings
Risk: 2210 A.D.
Star Wars: Original Trilogy Edition
Star Wars: Clone Wars Edition
Classic Risk
Posted Mon May 12,2008 12:43 am
