Number 5: Risk

4204 Positive Votes

2661 Negative Votes

In my life, I played a lot of Risk. A surprising number of games, considering how many frustrating and backwards mechanics Risk features. I’m listing the game’s flaws here, mostly so we can move past them:

Too many dice rolls in combat. It can be fun at first, but becomes repetitious.

Victorious outcomes often feel dictated by luck instead of strategy.

Turtling in Australia may or may not be the best strategy. But it sure is boring either way.

While the best strategy for players as a whole is to identify the person in the lead and pull them down, the best strategy for individual players is to prey upon the weak so as to gain resources without invoking the ire of more powerful players.

There is no true ‘come back from behind’ mechanic. Players who are winning tend to win more.

The core mechanics don’t lead to the game’s end. To force the game to conclude, players must trade in cards for an increasingly absurd number of units, until the game inevitably breaks.

For such a simple game, it takes a long time to resolve. Wikipedia estimates between one to eight hours. Eight hours is irregular, but I wouldn’t call it outside the realm of possibility.

The game features player elimination. If you’re knocked out early, I hope there’s a couple movies you wanted to watch at the ready, because you might be waiting a long time for your friends to finish.

These are staggering flaws for any game to feature, never mind the fifth most popular game of all time. Risk was revolutionary for 1957, but game design advanced significantly over the past sixty years. Each of these problems was ‘solved’ many times over by other designers who drew from Risk for inspiration.

But I think some games remain popular because of their flaws, instead of despite them. Risk can be mean; the practice of playing can be grueling. But we, the public, accept its meanness as a by-product of its antiquated rules system. We wouldn’t accept this sort of behavior with a more modern game, but a combination of nostalgia and a desire to test oneself against unfair odds forces players to pick up the box again and again. Like George Mallory contemplating Mount Everest, we play Risk because it’s there.

How to Not Write An Article

Because there’s a negative stigma to Risk among those who play many board games, I wanted to pull myself away from my initial gut reaction and reaproach the game in as fair a way as possible. It’s been a number of years since I last played. So I tossed a copy in the trunk of my car, and convinced my gaming group it might be a fun diversion for a change of pace. But whenever we got together, something always came up and Risk wasn’t feasible. Maybe I was unlucky. Maybe the problem was logistical, since the potential length of the game was a factor. Maybe our prejudices pushed us away. Or maybe our group subconscious kept choosing the more fun path, which lead us to play other games. I can’t be sure.

Either way, this constant failing threw me off my Top 40 Games According to Ranker writing project. The last article, part nine, was published in September of 2016. It’s closing in on a year and a half. Time to shrug and move on.

I should point out that in the intervening year and odd months, the Rankings at Ranker.com changed. No major upsets, just a little shaking up. A few games fell out the bottom of the top forty, but are still in the top fifty. Games that didn’t quite make it which I gave honorable mentions to (Mancala, Balderdash, and Love Letter) are now within the bottom ten. Blockus jumped up the charts to slip into the forty spot. Nothing too crazy.

For the sake of consistency, I’m using the rankings as they appeared in September of 2016, as well as the positive and negative votes. As of February of 2018, Risk is now in the number two spot. But chicanery is afoot. The original listings for games number two and three were somehow deleted. New listings for those two games are making strides back up the chart, but losing all their previous votes is a major setback.

I wanted to give Risk it’s due. But, maybe it’s okay I did not, since I know where that might have lead us. We don’t need another article from a ‘serious gamer’ talking down to the ‘casual gamers’ about how they shouldn’t like the thing they like. There’s plenty enough of that to go around already. Instead, I’d rather give Hasbro the credit it’s due. They took a much beloved property which should have lost relevancy and found creative ways to reinvent it again, and again. Risk should be a footnote in the history of gaming. Instead, it remains the go-to choice for a great number of college undergraduates making a dubious choice to forgo studying in lieu of playing a marathon game that last into the wee hours of the morning, and that’s no small feet considering its many flaws.

Some of these problems were fixed by updating the core rules. The original ‘World Domination’ rules didn’t change much over the years. The obvious exception is that players no longer receive starting countries at random as the default rule. Players now draft their countries one at a time. Admittedly, this is even more time consuming. But maybe that’s acceptable, since the default game, ‘World Domination’, is intended to be the full-bore set of rules for epic game play. For those uninterested in pushing plastic pawns about a slab of cardboard for the amount of time it takes to walk a marathon, modern rulebooks include other rules for faster games.

On Branding Branding

Failing to write a sort of review of Risk, I figured I’d write about the successful updates to Risk over the years. But I don’t think that article is necessary, either. Here’s how one makes Risk better: Address my original eight complaints at the top of this article. Many alternate rules (starting with Castle Risk and Secret Mission Risk in 1986 and 1993) as well as expansions to the game (for example, the Microprose computer game Risk II, The Lord of the Rings version, and Risk Legacy) all tackled these problems, and devised clever solutions. You don’t need a blow by blow from me. There are other Risk enthusiasts on the Internet who are better equipped to break down the advantages and disadvantages of the different expansions.

What I really want to talk about is Star Wars Risk, first printed in 2015. Here’s the box art:



And here’s what the game looks like when you pull it out of the box:

That looks like a Star Wars game, sure. But it don’t look like Risk. The simple answer: it isn’t. It’s a descendent of Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit, originally made by Hasbro’s Avalon Hill branch in 2000 and tied to the first Star Wars prequel: the Phantom Menace. The 2015 version of ‘Risk’ involves choosing and playing cards with multiple different actions, a side fight of Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader on the Emperor’s Bridge (the left side of the board), a fight to destroy or protect the shield generator on the Endor Moon (the right side of the board), and hopefully (for the Rebel Alliance) penetrating and destroying the Death Star at the center of the board. The only thing this game salvages from Risk proper is some of the dice rolling mechanic.

If another company made this game and called it something else, Hasbro wouldn’t be able to sue them for copyright encroachment. Well, okay, technically they could. But that’s because the game steals so many elements from Hasbro’s Queen’s Gambit board game. It bears no true resemblance with Risk.

I don’t know how to feel about this. On one hand, a good game is a good game, no matter what they name it. If more parents buy their kids Star Wars Risk because of the positive associations they shared with original Risk, then that’s great. I’m happy those kids get to play a good introductory miniatures game with a healthy heaping of flavor.

But calling this game ‘Risk’ is like calling the latest Kung Fu beat ’em up a ‘Bruce Lee movie’. It isn’t. Not by any stretch of the imagination. That would be dishonest to movie goers, it would disrespect the legacy of Bruce Lee, and it would diminish the entire genre by insisting that all martial arts movies are ultimately redundant rehashes. It wouldn’t matter if it’s a great movie or not; it would be a boldfaced lie. We shouldn’t need to lie to each other to watch movies or play games.

And I know someone is bound to counter-argue that the target audience for Star Wars Risk is kids between 10 to 14 years of age. “It’s meant for kids. What do kids know?” But to me, that somehow makes it worse. What message are you passing along, in this age of fake news and the masking of opinions as truths, when you take a well-established brand and slap it on a potentially better game? Maybe they don’t recognize the nuance now, but children grow up. Adults dwell on their youth. Eventually they realize how cynical we were with them when they were kids, and many of them will guess it’s okay to be cynical as adults as well.

Look, I know the world won’t crumble to ash because we decided to name a few games Risk that aren’t Risk. It bothers me, but so doesn’t the recent clutter added to Twitter’s notification system (Oh really, Twitter? Four people I follow like something? That’s nice. Why is that a notification? Why didn’t you put that in my feed? Isn’t that what my feed is for?)

I’m just saying there are a lot of good Risk variants out there. Hasbro did an excellent job proving that meddling with success can lead to further success. I think it’s great they found exciting ways to turn an obsolete artifact into a thriving enterprise of games. But now they’re doing it at the expense of their own brand.

Most non-hobbyists I talk to tend to believe board games are long past their golden age, broken at the feet of king video game. It’s a reasonable enough assumption, but way off mark. Dragged along in tow behind the ever-growing video game juggernaut, the board game market is exploding. A century from now, this generation may be considered the golden age of tabletop gaming. But you’d never know it by looking at Hasbro’s line up. All of their games are repackaged versions of their classic line up, even when they don’t resemble the classic games they mock. The result is a steady influx of sales for well-established name brands… for now. Each year Hasbro chooses not to introduce new franchises into the market is another year that Hasbro, and the industry as a whole, becomes further embroiled in the consumer myth that board games are past their prime.

Stop it, Hasbro. Please, stop it. You’re the industry leader. Stop acting like you belong to a bygone era, and start experimenting with exciting new properties. To quote your own game’s product description: “And remember…when it comes to taking over the world, it’s all about who is willing to take the biggest Risk!”

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