Moshe Callen
Israel
Jerusalem
I like to exchange ideas but I have no interest in a pissing contest.
If you want me to review your game, just GM me and send me a copy. Abstracts, wargames and euros equally welcome. No party or dexterity games please.
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1. Introduction
As mentioned here, a representative of the designer (a user here on BGG I'm not certain would want to be named) sent me this game free asking for an evaluation. Although I may be mistaken, I believe that the designer is getting the game play-tested by Risk fans and so while I will cite some criticisms, these should not be given undue weight. Unless I am mistaken, the designer will take all feedback into account and make whatever changes he deems necessary to deal with any problems before official publication. This review ought therefore be treated as based on a play-testing session, again unless the designer or his agent corrects me on this point.
To be blunt, the game is very good as is, but I do see a couple of potential problems. I am an old school Risk fan, and this game is markedly different than the original Risk in spite of its obvious similarities. Nevertheless, the game offers a great deal to both old fans and new.
The game is, as per the email I received when offered the game, primarily intended for international tournament play, but the game can be played at home as well. It is presented as an expansion to a basic Risk set, but I for one hope that the final product will not be. This is a game deserving to be packaged and sold as a full-fledged game, not as a mere expansion.
For the sake of completeness, I will mention that the game comes with rules for a basic and an advanced game. The latter differs only in that it has a blind set-up mechanism intended to alleviate any first player advantage. While a slight first player advantage does exist, I find it minimal and so am strongly disinclined to try a set-up that introduces unneeded additional randomness to the game, but for the record I have not tried the blind set-up and so will refrain from commenting on it. That such a mechanism exists for those who want it can only be an asset to the game.
2. Components
The board is an odd mix of languages, with the title in French (apart from one appended word of English) and the map labeled in Italian. The non-Western style world map with the Pacific at center emphasizes the connection added between Argentina and Eastern Australia. Otherwise, the map has the old school connections like those I learned the game with as a child, before a connection between East Africa and the Middle East was added. This means that only Egypt and North Africa are attackable from off the continent of Africa. The value of continental bonuses marked on the board is the same as in the standard game. A notable difference of the board is that each territory is marked with a number in a circle. That number represents a victory points (VPs) value determined by the number of borders a territory has modified by counting any border on the edge of a continent twice. For completeness, I will add that the board I have is not mounted, but as stated I am under the impression this is a play-test copy of the game.
The game also comes with eighteen (18) secret objective cards. Each card is printed nicely on good stock, and shows a miniaturized version of the board without the writing on it. The territories a player with that card must take to win the game are colored blue. All objectives have a VP value of 102 out of a possible total of 194 on the board. This value is less arbitrary than it sounds in that, so the designer states, 102 represents the average VP value for 22 territories, i.e., half the board.
Rules for the basic game are printed on a single double sided piece of paper, as are the rules for the game with a blind set-up. Several sheets for marking one's set-up in the blind game are included. (Pages 2 and 3 in the gallery are combined into a single page.)
The dice, armies and territory cards from the basic Risk game are used but not included in this expansion.
3. Rules
Although never explicitly stated, the natural assumption is that the rules are identical to those of standard Risk except where stated otherwise.
The first main difference from standard Risk are that armies are collected at the end of the turn, rather than at the beginning. Whether handing in of sets of cards should be at the same time is not stated, but this is assumed. Sets of Risk cards do not increase, but rather all sets of three of a kind are worth 8 armies and sets of one of each kind are worth 10 armies. A second difference is that in any attack, if one takes a territory, one can only move exactly the number of armies as dice used in the final attack. Hence one can move a maximum of three armies into a territory after an attack. Secret mission cards are dealt out when each territory on the board has been occupied by a single army but before the remainder of initial armies are placed. Yet another difference allows one, once per turn, to move any number of armies from one territory to another through a continuous path of adjacent territories. Finally, the minimum number of armies one receives is reduced from three to only one.
The wording of the rules in its description of set-up seems to imply the game is intended for exactly four players-- neither more nor less. Nevertheless, I suspect this was intended merely as an example, and that simply was not made clear. The game on which I am basing this review was a four player game, but one of the strengths of Risk is that it can be played with 2 to 6 players, albeit the more players the better. Therefore, I assume the designer either does not wish to lose this strength of the game or else has a specific reason for this which is not made clear.
Finally, the designer suggests that one can set a time limit on the game, giving an example of 90 minutes, at which point each player gets one last turn. Then the winner is the player with the most VPs toward his mission.
3. Gameplay
One reason that the designer may have limited the number of players to four is because this gives each player either ten or eleven starting territories. With a minimum of only one army, players are still likely to get at least three armies at the end of their first turn. With five or six players, the odds of a player getting less than three armies at the end of the first turn are substantial.
In my review of classic Risk, one of the main points I make is the system of incrementally increasing values of card sets handed in leads to a build-up of armies such that one must conquer or be conquered. A juggernaut tactic of plowing over all resistance and expanding massively in a single turn works. Yet, inherently in this game, no such juggernaut tactic is possible. so the question immediately begged is what alternative this game offers. In the first turn, if one has adjacent territories, one can use the move option to increase armies in one territory at the expensive of another thereby enabling a more effective attack, but a player without adjacent starting territories (which often happens in a random set-up) is at a marked disadvantage. Since some areas will be taken by previous players, this puts players going later in the round at an initial disadvantage which a blind set-up cannot really address. If a player then fails to take a territory in the first round, that disadvantage persists. On the other hand,the limit on moving armies slows down advances and forces armies to be well distributed throughout territories. This leads to smaller numbers of armies in each territory. Continental bonuses and card sets do boost the number of armies in a very significant manner though. In essence, the primary tactic is still to build up a contiguous area of control with defensible borders from which one can attack and defend. Since the armies are received at the end of the turn, the limited movement mechanism does work well. The down-side is that this prolongs the game and can cause a player with a totally disjoint set-up going late in the round to be effectively put out of the game early by a few bad rolls in the first round or two. Restoring the minimum number of armies to three instead of reducing it to one would probably eliminate this problem. Giving players a minimum of three armies would as much as possible allow players to be certain they will be able to attack and stay in the game. With that proviso, the system works very well. Yes, progress in conquest will be slower, but even if one does not play using a time limit, the goal is less than the entire board. The two elements seem to well balance one another.
A more critical problem is a run-away leader problem. In classic Risk, set of cards act as a leveling mechanism. More than once in a classicRisk game, I have seen or been a player who seemed surely to have lost but who instead came back from the brink by well using the armies obtained from handing in a set of cards. This removes or at least much mitigates the runaway leader problem in the classic game. No such leveling mechanism exists in this game. That is not necessarily a problem since players may choose to concede the game, but some mechanism which allows a player to fight back effectively against a leading player would be an advantage. This is the only critical problem I see with the game as is.
Finally, the odds are fairly good that some portions of the board will not be needed by any player toward their final victory objective. This means that any player who does take these areas will find them largely uncontested. Admittedly, in many respects the game will be played as if the goal were indeed to conquer the entire board, even if just to conceal the victory conditions. Nevertheless, the secret mission objectives will inherently make parts of the board more valuable to players than others. For example, in the game I played, no one needed the bulk of Asia-- only the most southern Asian countries. The player who went on to win began the game with his only base, i.e., where he had a few adjacent or nearly adjacent territories, being in Asia. That placer took and held northern Asia and then all of Asia, at which point he had become largely too strong to stop, even though his mission included virtually nothing in Asia itself. Players will instinctively fight more over and defend more the territories than give VPs toward actual victory. This fact gives a player building a stronghold in an area no one needs a strong advantage because all territories taken count toward getting a Risk card and getting armies at the end of the turn. One possibility to avoid this problem is to make the victory condition 102 VPs to be gained by any combination of territories. One could however take the view that this is not a problem after all but just simply something players need to take into account in forming their game strategy.
Although I have emphasized the weaknesses of the game, I wish to be clear these are faults well outweighed by the strengths of the game. The mechanisms of play are different than the original game, but this makes the game a different tactical problem than the original. So one who knows Risk very well gets to come at the game afresh in this game. One still must weigh odds, take risks and push for conquest to win the game. One still has to maximize one's own opportunities while minimizing those of one's opponents. This is still Risk with all the good that means to fans of the game; yet at the same time, the game is different enough to be a fresh way of playing the basic game. That makes this game a great addition to the Risk family and any collection. Moreover, while some faults do exist, the designer's efforts to have the game play-tested so he can deal with the problems leave me confident that the finally published version will be an outstandingly good game. My advice therefore: when one can get this game, one should do so!
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