This article suggests that you should not play too aggressive and not take continents too early (maximizing Reinforcing Feedback), because other players will then unite against you (Balancing Feedback).
However, this article fails to understand that in Risk, most players are not willing to unite. In fact, if player A and player B decide to unite against me and player A had his turn and stopped me, player B is highly likely to backstab player A and then emerge as the winner.
I've found that playing very aggressively, and really get as many continents as possible within the first few turns, is the best way to win the game. I always win if I can get 2-3 continents in the first few turns, and if I fail then the game is usually won by whomever did manage to do just that.
Being a turtle or "mongolian horde" as we call it can be interesting, but your only viable strategy is to wait for an opening while everyone else stockpiles their continental forces. If you wait too long, you're just an annoyance to the other players, but you don't actually have a good chance to win.
Continents are overrated; they are a big source of armies in the early game, but the primary goal of the early game is mere survival, and a skilled player can win without ever owning a continent until the last couple turns. After the early game, cards are where the real threat is in Risk – in particular, the way someone can eliminate an opponent and capture their cards (and when they end up with >5 cards, immediately turn some in in for armies) makes risk a very unstable game when played aggressively.
The best aggressive players wait for the right moment when they can go from minor threat to unquestionably dominant in the span of 1–2 turns, by toppling one opponent after another. The tricky part is the timing (and there is some luck involved with dice rolls and card matches). If you get it wrong and don’t quite take out one of the card-rich opponents along the chain, then (a) that extremely weakened player will be open to easy attack from the other players, and (b) you’ll be completely exposed having used all of your armies on at least one side of your territory in the attempt.
Funny, I've never played a game of Risk where a player got wiped out well before the end of the game – probably because I usually played with only 3~4 players. I could imagine with 4+ this would be a more useful strategy.
This is especially true on more recent versions which have nerfed south america, that used to be a fairly easy and defendable play with high chance of winning.
Might just be a friend group thing but I will also add on that very few games of risk I ever played didn’t involve some level of ‘meta’ strategy like a husband/wife not attacking each other or that guy that doesn’t like you refusing an obviously mutually beneficial alliance.
I hate hate HATE that behavior. Games are games. Obviously you can be unnecessarily rude or cruel in a way that will sour someone's taste for playing with you or playing the game again. But the point of games is to win. When people refuse to act in their best interest or are "nice" its so frustrating because it makes the entire game pointless.
edit: In a way, it feels like people who wave you on when they have the right of way at a stop sign. It's not nice, just follow the rules and drive predictably. /rant
Wait, I must be missing something here. If people are nice to each other and that's a bad strategy, surely you get to wipe the floor win them (i.e. fulfill your objective of winning) and if people are nice to each other in a way that makes them hard for you to beat, surely it is you who are playing the worse strategy by not doing the same?
In my group of friends, whether it is Risk or Monopoly, being nice makes it much easier to win. People are happier to enter into mutually beneficial agreements with nice people who they know are honest and keep their word.
> If people are nice to each other in a way that makes them hard for you to beat, surely it is you who are playing the worse strategy by not doing the same?
If the arguments that underly the strategy decisions taken during the game purely happen during the game, that's perfectly fine. The issue arises when you absolutely cannot do anything to influence those. Rules of games are designed not designed to account for external behaviours that might favour
Eg: If Alice, Bobo and Charlie are playing a game of Risk and Alice is in love with Bob in real life and won't do anything in the game to hurt him. What can Charlie really do ? The rules of Risk have been designed to give each player with equal skill roughly 33% chance of winning - as they should. But in this case, Bob is almost sure to win and Charlie has very little things he can do to change that. How is that fun for Charlie ?
I like the ones who stop to wave you out into traffic, not realizing they're only one lane on a 4-lane road, so you can't go without getting hit by at least one of three other cars, and the backup they've now caused behind themselves has closed the entry window you were about to have if they'd just picked "smart" over "nice."
I'm as skeptical about the appropriateness of rules as it comes, but a surprising number of the ones around driving actually do work to make the traffic flow efficiently!
What some people don't understand is that the main factor in having traffic flow nicely is being able to accurately predict what other vehicles are going to do
Nobody wants to ally with the guy who always wins. The game group I’m in has one of those, and so for some games I’m the one who wins the most. They expect him to win, so they drag him down, and I win by default.
It’s important in this dynamic that you pick games with a high wildcard factor, so that other people win occasionally, otherwise nobody wants to play after a while.
games in themselves have no point. The act of playing games may have a point: it is generally to have fun, not to win.
> edit: In a way, it feels like people who wave you on when they have the right of way at a stop sign. It's not nice, just follow the rules and drive predictably. /rant
It's not a question of being nice or mean but a question of being competent and predictable to other drivers.
We have roundabouts where I live, and some people will always stop before entering. This is done even to the point of waiting for people to arrive and enter from the other roads, despite the law being to yield. This causes more problems than it solves.
I wouldn't have said anything if you concluded "you're not nice" from the first part. But you conclude it because they don't like when someone messes up traffic? That's wrong.
The complaint isn't about a friendly wave. The complaint is that it's someone's turn to go, and instead of going they wave at someone else to insist the other person go out of turn.
The wave is an insistence of "you go first", not a greeting or a thanks.
No. That is a net negative. But a cyclist in an unsafe position should be given a path to safety regardless of what happens to other traffic. A cyclist that is not on a roundabout yet is perfectly safe, and stopping traffic on a roundabout to yield to traffic that does not have right of way is not ok.
Ah, OK – that makes sense. In my country, it's not a question of being nice but a part of the road rules. Loosely translated excerpt:
> The driver has the following responsibilities: (...) to do his utmost to ensure that other road users are not endangered, especially the most vulnerable (pedestrians, cyclists and electric scooter riders)
If a cyclist ignored the law and entered a roundabout anyway then I would definitely stop. But if they're waiting in front of a yield sign then obviously not.
I'm not, and after checking the website of multiple driving schools in my country, I guess this is a fairly deep cultural difference - they all mention that you can always let the other driver go first by courtesy, and that adaptation to the situation overrides the base ruleset.
The issue is that very often it would only take you a couple seconds to go through anyway, so you end up forcing the other person to adapt in a way that leaves everyone either the same or delayed.
There are definitely places where letting someone go is appropriate, especially if it's leaving a gap so they can make a turn. But if you're on a road and you have to wave them through then most of the time you're not actually helping, and fake-helping is an annoying thing.
True, people find different things fun. I sympathize with the idea that playing a game not following the rules and not making the best logic choices make the game less fun, because it becomes more about luck than skill. I, for one, have no joy winning or playing something entirely random, whereas beating other people on a skill based game is fun.
The kind of "nice" in board games that is bad is when a player is willing to lose in order for another player to win. When you play a game, everyone has to play to win for the rules to make sense (I'd argue almost definitionally for a competitive game.) Playing a board game with someone who is not playing to win is like playing tag with somebody who refuses to run away and won't chase you. You should be working on a puzzle together or writing a song instead. Maybe make up new rules every turn and pantomime playing the game, that's fun.
The kind of "nice" that is good in multiplayer board games is strategic. Being "nice" isn't necessarily being nice. If a subset of players collaborate, they eliminate the other players from the game. It's one of the ways most multiplayer games naturally handicap based on the reputations of good players - other players assume that they will get the short end of any deal with a good player, so refuse to collaborate with them.
See also the investigation of So Long Sucker in The Trap. Quoting Wikipedia:
>The programme traces the development of game theory, with particular reference to the work of John Nash [...] He invented system games that reflected his beliefs about human behaviour, including one he called 'Fuck You Buddy' (later published as "So Long Sucker"), in which the only way to win was to betray your playing partner, and it is from this game that the episode's title is taken. These games were internally coherent and worked correctly as long as the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit their opponents, but when RAND's analysts tried the games on their own secretaries, they were surprised to find that instead of betraying each other, the secretaries cooperated every time.
If you can't beat people who are "nice", doesn't that mean your strategy is bad?
Whoever wins the game is the person who played the right strategy.... you have to account for other people not playing optimally when designing your strategy, whatever the reason for their suboptimal strategy (whether it is them trying to be nice or just not knowing the best strategy)
If you know a player is always nice during a game and won't attack anyone, incorporate that info into your strategy. Part of game strategy is knowing your opponents.
Your playing the wrong game. The husband is winning points or at least not losing points with the wife by working with her. The game becomes a proxy for your social relationships.
If you want a fair game, play strangers or a computer
Games never exist in a vacuum of their own mechanics. That's what makes them interesting. Learn the meta of your opponents, not just the game's if you're focused on winning.
You have just described international diplomacy. For a slightly dumbed down version with working shown: Eurovision Song Contest.
Actually, when I say dumbed down, I'm not too sure! If I was you, I'd embrace the added dimensions that go outside the official rules. Get your Machiavelli on. Get him so pissed he can't see and his alliance with the missus might break down.
Be careful and get some lines that shall not be crossed worked out first if you are going to play Extreme Risk.
International diplomacy is like that, but every now and then some random soldiers in one of your backwater armies get drunk in some podunk border posting, murder some of the other side's soldiers, then suddenly you have to explain to your nutso nationalist press why a great power war is a bad idea.
(The india-china border clashes are a good example of this. Or that one where a NK soldier killed somebody with an axe. Or that time japanese soldiers bribed a triad gang to attack japanese priests so they had could convince their officers to invade more of Manchuria.)
When I read stories like this I always wonder how much of this is groupthink. Speaking as someone who has played a ton of different, complex games over many years, groupthink can be really pervasive and often explains why someone swears a particular strategy is dominant.
I don’t play Risk so can’t speak this specific example. I suspect if you took your strategy elsewhere your get far more boxed results however.
In the ever evolving online game world (eg, hearthstone), group think is basically 'the meta.' Lots of people get the same common advice, or learn a new trick, so suddenly it becomes advantageous to use strategies which defend against the trick or take advantage of some weakness which opens up due to a trade-off... And then repeat.
Afaict, being really good at these games requires a good grasp of the fundamentals, knowing the game itself inside and out, and also having really up to date knowledge of the current meta.
The same phenomenon happens with Diplomacy (board game) as well... Probably any sufficiently complex game with a community ends up with a meta.
When a game is "evolving" in the sense that the rules (or some element of the game which in effect alters the rules, such as player classes or unit compositions and their statistics) are changed periodically, the meta can influence that, mostly in an unfortunate way.
If the general perception is that Bears are too powerful while Geese aren't powerful enough, developers may subsequently alter the game to reduce the power of a Bear's attack, or allow Geese to fly further. These are often called "balance tweaks" but it's almost unavoidable that they'll focus on the meta, rather than addressing a proven flaw in the game itself because most of these games aren't subject to any theoretical underpinning. As a result the meta may change even as the game itself is being changed as a result of influence from the meta. If you announce on Tuesday that from next weekend the overpowered Bear gets reduced damage, and then on Wednesday a renowned player demonstrates that (with the existing damage) Bears are easily overcome by a previously unseen strategy using Geese, the developers look foolish. Cue outcry when the damage reduction takes effect on schedule while at the same time players who favour Bears are now being swarmed by Goose players who've learned the new strategy.
If they stop balance patching the game obviously there's a risk that a degenerate strategy is discovered. Perhaps Bears are in fact just so good that Geese always lose against equally skilled players, and people lose interest in the game. But it's also possible that the meta continues to evolve, Bears dominate Geese, then with a new style of play Geese are destroying Bears, and later the Bears are back on top, even though the rules never changed. This is the case with Chess for example, styles wax and wave in popularity as top players show off one way or another way to play the game and win.
StarCraft: Brood War (by now a very old game) is still played competitively although its meta doesn't evolve as quickly as it did twenty years ago.
> If the general perception is that Bears are too powerful while Geese aren't powerful enough, developers may subsequently alter the game to reduce the power of a Bear's attack, or allow Geese to fly further. These are often called "balance tweaks" but it's almost unavoidable that they'll focus on the meta, rather than addressing a proven flaw in the game itself because most of these games aren't subject to any theoretical underpinning.
This is easily solved with data analysis of actual games.
The only problem is if there are strategies and play styles that weren’t discovered by players.
Well I've played hundreds of games of Risk, against many different people IRL and also a lot online.
IRL you'll see that people tend to be "nice", don't want to push you too far. And they're also willing to accept deals like "hey, you want to agree that neither of us ever crosses this border here?" rules, because there's a good chance that you'll play again together, so being trustworthy pays off.
Online, the game is played very differently, and it's all about maximizing the results of every single turn, and completely ignoring any metagame or personalities. You might as well be playing against bots.
I tend to do a bit better offline, because I'm a bit of a charmer and people want to make deals with me. But online, I feel like I can try many more strategies without worrying about people thinking I'm "mean" afterwards.
My experience is that capturing and holding smaller continents early on is best. Capturing and keeping North America, Europe or Asia early on tends not to work well when I play.
Agreed! There's often a little jostle during the starting land grab to get Australia: easy to defend and those extra reinforcements really matter in the early game.
Australia and South America, because Australia can be defended in a single territory (Indonesia), against a single territory (Siam) and South America can be defended in two territories (Venezuela and Brazil), each against a single territory (Central America and North Africa respectively.)
In South America, you can get lucky and take North America in 1 or 2 turns. Since North America shares a front with South America, you end up with the same number of fronts you would have if you possessed North America alone, and in a very defensible position. The fewer fronts you have, the more interior you have that doesn't need to be manned with troops.
Yeah in my experience whoever starts in Australasia basically always wins because it's so easy to defend. Risk is a pretty terrible game by modern standards anyway.
This reminds me of two strategies of playing Starcraft PvP.
No 1: Play very aggresively in the beginning and use your excellent micro management to make sure your opponent doesn't have enough time to stop your expansion. Sure you are going to lose one or two bases but then you have a full three bases to devastate your enemy.
No 2: Play conservatively, let the opponent expand but grow your available bases (usually only 2) to full potential quickly and devastate your enemy with your big army. The key is to grow your army quickly (you opponent meanwhile is busily expanding his new bases) and to use a lot of micromanangement to harass your opponent (e.g. dropping a squad of marines to kill all drones of a new base).
Ultimately it falls into micromanagement and how familiar you are with the map.
In my experience players are happy to unite against me. Usually I take Australia and move into Asia when I’ve amassed enough forces. Then my strategy moves to holding asia at 3 points, while I disrupt the continental bonuses of my opponents between turns. Africa, Europe and North America can be disrupted from this position.
So take it from a young man who spent way too much of one summer playing Risk on the computer, you don't want to take Australia, the problem with Australia is that there is no good way to go from Aussie to anywhere else because the only thing next to you is Asia so someone else can solidify gains somewhere else, and Aussie only gives you 2 more reinforcements, not enough to get you a decisive enough edge to move out of Asia.
The trick is to always capture SA, it is close enough to other things to keep you involved, also you can capture Centeral America and North Africa without having to hold any more territories than you would need to. Then choose NA or Africa and work on seizing the rest of that, when you complete that if it is late enough in the game you'll win almost every time because Asia, and Europe are impossible to hold, North America is to big to capture in the early game and Austraila as noted before doesn't bring a big enough advantage because it puts you in a poor tactical situation.
EDIT: A good point was made below, this applies only to the standard classic Risk map, in standard Classic Risk.
My experience is that people overvalue Australia heavily. I think South America is the strongest start the way people typically play the game. You just keep taking potshots into Africa and expand into North America and end up with +7 armies a turn and 3 borders.
I think if Australia wasn't overvalued it wouldn't be bad because there is no real non-suicidal way to stop the Aussie snowball once it gets going.
Yes, but if you expand to Africa from SA you have to defend all three northern provinces. That's 4 points you have to equally reinforce. Asia + Aus is only three. SA + NA is 3 too.
Asia usually lacks a strong player while players focus on their relative home continents, often being sabotaged by competitors or me. That said, I rarely get a chance to play people with Risk experience these days.
We played extensively at school, with lots of politics - so games often lasted weeks (played in-between certain classes) as naturally the weak team up against the strong, ad infinitum.
Asia can be held if you can also take (or start from) Australia and take Ukraine iirc. It works out to 3 territories defending the entire space. That's literally the same as defending the whole of the Americas. Europe+Africa can also make a sustainable combination, but neither works on its own.
Every other pair has too many connections and no way to reduce to a chokepoint.
Australia plus something else is good though as it both gives you easy to protect reinforcements in Australia plus the ability to influence the board elsewhere. For example Australia plus South America.
Notably, I've played Risk with two people, one who taught the other. They appear to make the same sorts of moves in similar positions, and they speak the same strategies. Yet, one consistently wins compared to the other. I believe the missing component is that one plays the game against people and wins, while the other plays against the board and wins less.
> In fact, if player A and player B decide to unite against me and player A had his turn and stopped me, player B is highly likely to backstab player A and then emerge as the winner.
The fun in Risk is the other player knows they will be backstabbed, but can't resist the temptation to team up anyway, hoping that they might be the one to do the backstabbing. Everbody knows that backstabbing will occur, and yet, invariably, some players are still willing to team up.
Absolutely. Even if they don't end up backstabbing you, at the very least they'll be like: "Oh, you already dealt with the threat? Well then I think I'll just reinforce this turn."
This reminds me of Master of Orion 2, a game I have spent countless hours on.
My typical strategy depends on chosen race and other game configurations, but I tend to prefer a slower pace. Peacefully building my empire while focusing mainly on research and trying to build strong relations with other races.
However, on the hardest difficulty (called "Impossible") the only way I ever win is playing with extreme aggression and conquering everything in reach with force as quickly as possible.
In Civ I’m always trying to balance my attacks so that I get the killing blow on an enemy. If I don’t the AI gets the credit and possibly the city (if it’s a city state they raze it).
Seems like in risk you should let your ally “win” so that they feel more satiated. Like playing the long game in poker.
However, this article fails to understand that in Risk, most players are not willing to unite. In fact, if player A and player B decide to unite against me and player A had his turn and stopped me, player B is highly likely to backstab player A and then emerge as the winner.
I've found that playing very aggressively, and really get as many continents as possible within the first few turns, is the best way to win the game. I always win if I can get 2-3 continents in the first few turns, and if I fail then the game is usually won by whomever did manage to do just that.
Being a turtle or "mongolian horde" as we call it can be interesting, but your only viable strategy is to wait for an opening while everyone else stockpiles their continental forces. If you wait too long, you're just an annoyance to the other players, but you don't actually have a good chance to win.