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.
In our gaming group, we decided Risk just isn't that good of a game. It's old and clunky and extremely long, there are 100 other better board games now. Our main plays have been Dominion, DnD, Gloomhaven, Wingspan, and Crokinole, all of which we greatly prefer.
I've found I actually enjoy Risk when played on the computer. Just speeding up army placements and automating the dice rolls, so you can say "attack until N remain", saves an unbelievable amount of time.
To people who like area control games like Risk, I highly recommend checking out Inis or Kemet. Tammany Hall, and El Grande are other favorites as well, but are less about dudes on a map than the first two.
> It's old and clunky and extremely long, there are 100 other better board games now.
And to just put this into numbers, BGG ranks Risk on position 19,955. By this ranking there are just shy of twenty thousand games better than Risk. And I agree, I will never play Risk again as it's not worth the time with the competition today.
We similarly ditched Risk, or actually, its Italian variant RisiKo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RisiKo!). This variant gives differentiated goals for each player (e.g., "conquer 3 continents", or "defeat the Blue army"), which in principle should make the game shorter.
But it also allows the defender to throw 3 dice (if they have at least 3 armies), making battles much harder for the attacker. In our group we theorized that using d10s or d20s instead of d6s should speed up the game, but honestly we never tried.
Edit: sadly you will have to copy and paste the Wikipedia URL, as HN wrongly believes that the trailing "!" is not part of it.
If Risk isn't a great game, then why do people playing it get so angry when they start to lose? There is something about Risk that makes players get emotionally invested in a way I just haven't seen in other board games.
In most other games I don't care if I win or lose. This is doubly true in the sort of board games my board game 'aficionado' friends play. In those, there are often multiple different ways to win and everybody might have their own unique win condition, that may not be known to other players. I guess this sort of design is meant to minimize conflict. But the way these games minimize conflict seems to be by making people care less about winning.
Well Gloomhaven is new, but also clunky. Friends aren't too enthused about playing it because the setup is intricate, and the game takes time if you aren't used to it. It's ideal if you can commit to a weekly game (much like DnD I guess).
Yes there are better games than Risk. That holds for practically all old games. For example, I don’t consider chess a good game. With good players, it usually ends in a draw which is unsatisfying.
To be fair, we're in a golden age of table top games. I really love Dominion and Inn Fighting. If you can find a copy of Inn Fighting, you'll learn to love its shortcomings because of its rapid pace, dynamic battles, and comic theme.
What a clickbait article. I’m really disappointed. The premise is interesting: win every time using a new strategy. Then, discussion about the concept and preview of the “systems thinking” mentality. Not too bad (although the bathtub example was a pretty weak way to advocate for systems thinking, maybe that’s just me but it seems even in that example to be an overly reductive and not terribly insightful method of thought, but it was enough to entertain the next section). However, during the discussion of the strategy everything falls apart. “Let the other players fight each other. Win the game every time by not participating and hoping to inconspicuously amass an incredible army such that you can take over half the board and then turn the tide in your favor in one fell swoop.” If this fails the suggestion is then to play the meta game and beg for pity. Not a single piece of data to back up the claim that this strategy wins every time. In my experience it doesn’t. It also happens to be the strategy that most every player headquartered around Russia-Asia ends up playing because you simply cant control that part of the board early on. No “systems thinking required”. The author also claims hoarding cards is “safe” and wont trigger other players to consider you a threat to the balance of the system. Well, that’s just naive either on part of the author or requires other players to be pretty green to not account for the risk card factor. In reality, another player also using systems thinking would immediately identify you as a threat because they would be tracking unit quantity flow in and out for the players on the board and using that to inform their understanding of what constitutes a threat. I think that’s the disappointment kinda summed up: this strategy doesn't work in a game where everyone uses it because it depends on your opponents not paying attention rather than you making strategic moves to win the game. The author does not sufficiently incorporate all the complexities of the game and people to yield a solved game.
'The author also claims hoarding cards is “safe” and wont trigger other players to consider you a threat to the balance of the system.'
Unlike continents, cards additionally represent an incentive for other players, so it's even crazier to think it is "safe".
In general I share the same sentiments as you. I'm disappointed this article got voted up, presumably because it uses the phrase "systems thinking" in the title.
In defense of the author, if you actually believe it is possible for you to win any player-vs-player game every time by applying a certain strategy, you clearly aren't doing systems thinking. :-)
Even if the execution was flawed in that it did not deliver a successful gaming strategy or sufficiently complex model of the game, I still appreciated the nature of the exercise. I would love to read an article that takes it to a more accurate and effective system model.
> If this is a good strategy, I have always played it wrong -- because I've always tried to take whole continents.
Its not a great strategy, because it doesn't work. If you are taking only one country a turn and keeping only a small connected corr of reinforced countries with the rest weak, then anyone playing a “grab lots of countries quickly" strategy is going to steamroller your weakly defended territory, and if you are only taking one country per turn, you’ll never recover from that.
A thick shell/thin-core strategy can work (especially if it is “talr Australia, then expand a bubble out in Asia), and otherwise looks a lot like the strategy this recommends, but you just have to accept that if a strategy can work, people are likely to recognize it; you can't reliably avoid balancing feedback unless you are playing against inexperienced players or naive AI.
(Also, contrary to the article, IME while Australia is frequently taken early on, its also a major balancing feedback trigger.)
I often play against bots in yura.net Domination. These bots seem hardcoded to gang up on players (both bots and humans) whenever they manage to take a continent. It doesn't help that continents that are worth holding are usually difficult to defend. I learned quickly to never hold onto continents, especially with increasing cards. When you are strong enough to hold continents, you have pretty much already won the game.
This basic strategy „get a card each turn and avoid losing armies“ gets you from beginner to intermediate. Once every player understood this it once again is a question of who controls the southern continents. The additional two or three armies each turn add up.
I was thinking this as well. It assumes the other players are naiive to your strategy and will not counter it. If someone were gathering a collection of bonus cards I think this would tip off the other players and awaken the dragons.
This author doesn't have much experience with competitive gaming and it's quite obvious. This is only a strategy he devised to play against his friends and relatives, most probably. He assumes a lot of player behavior, and what other explanation could there be? His bathtub example is very bad because there ain't no players, and when there's players the meta absolutely depends upon who you are playing against. there's not such a thing as an optimal universal strategy at all, in fact it makes a player predictable and low-skilled in most competitive games.
Systems thinking without game philosophy understanding is very shallow.
To illustrate my point of the strategy being entirely reliant upon opponents (meta): in cs:go, most unexperienced players will go through a hot spot (that's probably being targeted by pre-positioned opponents) without jumping, making themselves easy targets. this is the behavior you will find in low ranks. eventually, some of the players will learn that jumping may be a good tactic in these situations instead, to make it harder for opponents to hit headshot, and behavior becomes very common in mid-ranks. Eventually, though, mid-rank players will start to notice this tendency to jumping, and will position their crosshairs looking for a jumping headshot - they will progress in rank by doing so. At high-ranks, however, a lot of times it is expected that your opponent will be waiting for a jumping cross, and therefore the low-rank behavior would be the best one: don't jump. In conclusion, it's impossible to point out the best possible behavior without knowing who you're playing against and their skill in the game.
a player can find the optimal strategy within the rules
a player can use the rules to find plays that negate easy access to the optimal strategy to the enemy
this whole article is mostly stuck at level 2, it identifies a workable strategy analyzing a player own options, missing all the more advanced plays that a risk player should know and will need to do to win.
moreover, there's one critical flaw in the analysis, the goal is not to reach your objective, the goal is to reach your objective before other players do, and the time limit influences the risk taking; turtling, as suggested here, rarely wins games.
anyway, risk itself is a insanely complex games, so I'll skip mechanics, which are kind of covered in the article (except combination optimization, which is weird since mechanically speaking it is one major factor driving gameplay) and go at the jugular of the issue:
you win at risk guessing other people goals and making moves that confound your own or even let player think your goal is one of those of your adversaries. mechanically suboptimal moves, like a push into a continent you don't have to conquer but one of your enemy does, will trigger player response, and strategically turning player against each other will both buy you time and reduce the enemy placing too many reinforcements against your actual goal path.
Every time I've played Risk, two things happened. First, a massive bloodbath over Australia. Second, a long slow slog to a dissatisfying end, where multiple players wind up pissed off, because the Australian ends up winning somehow.
The AU continent is just so easy to hold. With only one country to go through, you can amass a huge army in Siam and no one touches your continent all game.
Coming from an economics background, every presentation I've seen of "systems thinking" (admittedly, not a large number) makes it look ill-defined, incomplete, and obvious.
This is an example of systems theory couched in Risk. You don't gain any special insights into Risk from systems theory as framed in this article.
OP/TFA introduced systems theory, then introduced the usual winning risk strategy, and then introduced a lot of required steps like player management / table top diplomacy, selecting countries to attack, timing card cash-outs, boundary holding, and so on without systems theory.
All of the info about how to play risk in the article came naturally to a few friends of mine and me, over many hours of playing the game with each other and crazy bots, which we all manipulated in helping us out, once a player tried to grab a little too much. The bots mostly acted predictably and we abused that to no end. It is observation of long term tactics and how games were won and all that.
However, I needed something more to win games and so I took some time to write myself a risk calculator tool [1] I think I made more educated decisions about risking moves in the game by using the tool. Knowing your chances not only by gut, but also by mathematics can give you that little extra boost :D
I always beat my sister at Risk as a kid. Then she was on a bus trip that waited out an epic snowstorm, three days holed up in a church. A Risk board was the only amusement, and the winner got to play again. She never left the board.
"Start in Australia" is all I remember of my strategy. It's a great metaphor for so many problems. Certainly, for HN, as a startup strategy. What's the "Australia" for your imagined market?
It seems like this only works against not very good players. Only getting a card per turn while slowly losing armies will not stack against 2-3 players holding continents, getting bonus armies and a card.
Letting the other players fight each other imagined a game where no one notices you.
Not to beat a dead horse but the difference between “try to design society to produce positive outcomes for people in the aggregate” and “put the onus on every individual to succeed on their own and have no sympathy for the portion that inevitably fail in a moralistic or Calvinist fashion” is also a difference of systems thinking versus not systems thinking.
So the article describes the reason why taking and holding Australia early doesn't cause the other players to gang up on you (although I have played with people who definitely wanted to take me out of Australia because of the two extra armies and who were willing to go on crazy suicide marches to achieve their goals) but it does not explain exactly why take and hold Australia early is almost a cliche of 'the key to Risk' strategies one sees about.
finally, everyone here seems to argue that Risk is a terrible game but if that's so why do I generally win?! Next you're going to tell me that Stratego isn't any good either!
In my experience the key to winning is endurance: just be the last person willing to play past 2:00 a.m. Then it doesn't matter if you have entire continents or one piece in Greenland: you win.
[+] [-] paulluuk|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whiddershins|4 years ago|reply
The moment you put it on a computer it becomes fairly fast and ... actually most of the gravitas goes away.
One person’s opinion.
[+] [-] x3iv130f|4 years ago|reply
DnD 5E is like the Risk of tabletop RPGs. Just sort of long and meandering without much going on.
Shadow of the Demon Lord, Torchbearer, and Mythras Classic Fantasy are better alternatives depending on what level of crunch you enjoy.
[+] [-] cableshaft|4 years ago|reply
Shut Up & Sit Down do a very good job selling Inis: https://youtu.be/ElcG-_-gfxo
[+] [-] distances|4 years ago|reply
And to just put this into numbers, BGG ranks Risk on position 19,955. By this ranking there are just shy of twenty thousand games better than Risk. And I agree, I will never play Risk again as it's not worth the time with the competition today.
[+] [-] lou1306|4 years ago|reply
Edit: sadly you will have to copy and paste the Wikipedia URL, as HN wrongly believes that the trailing "!" is not part of it.
[+] [-] wearywanderer|4 years ago|reply
In most other games I don't care if I win or lose. This is doubly true in the sort of board games my board game 'aficionado' friends play. In those, there are often multiple different ways to win and everybody might have their own unique win condition, that may not be known to other players. I guess this sort of design is meant to minimize conflict. But the way these games minimize conflict seems to be by making people care less about winning.
[+] [-] bakuninsbart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slothtrop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emsy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiz21c|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davedx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uvnq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvanderbot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] failwhaleshark|4 years ago|reply
~50 BP - Othello
~50 BP - DnD
~60 BP - Risk
~60 BP - Diplomacy
~70 BP - Stratego
~100 BP - Contract bridge
~200 BP - Mahjong
~200 BP - Double twelve dominoes
~600 BP - Playing cards
~1300 BP - Chess
~2500 BP - 围棋 (Go)
~5000 BP - Checkers / draughts
~5000 BP - Backgammon
[+] [-] dcow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfk13|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbsmith|4 years ago|reply
Unlike continents, cards additionally represent an incentive for other players, so it's even crazier to think it is "safe".
In general I share the same sentiments as you. I'm disappointed this article got voted up, presumably because it uses the phrase "systems thinking" in the title.
In defense of the author, if you actually believe it is possible for you to win any player-vs-player game every time by applying a certain strategy, you clearly aren't doing systems thinking. :-)
[+] [-] yetanotherjosh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AQXt|4 years ago|reply
1. Initiate as few attacks as possible
2. Let your enemies break up each other’s continents;
3. Take only one country per turn
The problem is that it doesn't explain which country to take, and how to attack without being attacked -- which is what makes the game difficult.
But, then, the article suggests something new (at least for me):
1. Find a way to grow in strength by taking lots of countries (but not taking a whole continent)
2. Make sure you get lots of cards for bonus armies
If this is a good strategy, I have always played it wrong -- because I've always tried to take whole continents.
[+] [-] jvanderbot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|4 years ago|reply
Its not a great strategy, because it doesn't work. If you are taking only one country a turn and keeping only a small connected corr of reinforced countries with the rest weak, then anyone playing a “grab lots of countries quickly" strategy is going to steamroller your weakly defended territory, and if you are only taking one country per turn, you’ll never recover from that.
A thick shell/thin-core strategy can work (especially if it is “talr Australia, then expand a bubble out in Asia), and otherwise looks a lot like the strategy this recommends, but you just have to accept that if a strategy can work, people are likely to recognize it; you can't reliably avoid balancing feedback unless you are playing against inexperienced players or naive AI.
(Also, contrary to the article, IME while Australia is frequently taken early on, its also a major balancing feedback trigger.)
[+] [-] mathgladiator|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
Continents are great, but only if you are in so strong a position that everyone thinks you are never going to lose it before next turn anyway.
[+] [-] samus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcadam|4 years ago|reply
Then there's my personal favorite once you know you can't win: "Turtle up" in Australia to drag the end game out for no reason other than spite.
[+] [-] HWR_14|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|4 years ago|reply
If everyone decides to follow the advice about the southern continents, the winning strategy is to get all over Asia.
[+] [-] chapium|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gverrilla|4 years ago|reply
Systems thinking without game philosophy understanding is very shallow.
To illustrate my point of the strategy being entirely reliant upon opponents (meta): in cs:go, most unexperienced players will go through a hot spot (that's probably being targeted by pre-positioned opponents) without jumping, making themselves easy targets. this is the behavior you will find in low ranks. eventually, some of the players will learn that jumping may be a good tactic in these situations instead, to make it harder for opponents to hit headshot, and behavior becomes very common in mid-ranks. Eventually, though, mid-rank players will start to notice this tendency to jumping, and will position their crosshairs looking for a jumping headshot - they will progress in rank by doing so. At high-ranks, however, a lot of times it is expected that your opponent will be waiting for a jumping cross, and therefore the low-rank behavior would be the best one: don't jump. In conclusion, it's impossible to point out the best possible behavior without knowing who you're playing against and their skill in the game.
[+] [-] avereveard|4 years ago|reply
a player can follow the rules
a player can find the optimal strategy within the rules
a player can use the rules to find plays that negate easy access to the optimal strategy to the enemy
this whole article is mostly stuck at level 2, it identifies a workable strategy analyzing a player own options, missing all the more advanced plays that a risk player should know and will need to do to win.
moreover, there's one critical flaw in the analysis, the goal is not to reach your objective, the goal is to reach your objective before other players do, and the time limit influences the risk taking; turtling, as suggested here, rarely wins games.
anyway, risk itself is a insanely complex games, so I'll skip mechanics, which are kind of covered in the article (except combination optimization, which is weird since mechanically speaking it is one major factor driving gameplay) and go at the jugular of the issue:
you win at risk guessing other people goals and making moves that confound your own or even let player think your goal is one of those of your adversaries. mechanically suboptimal moves, like a push into a continent you don't have to conquer but one of your enemy does, will trigger player response, and strategically turning player against each other will both buy you time and reduce the enemy placing too many reinforcements against your actual goal path.
[+] [-] codeulike|4 years ago|reply
Disclaimer at bottom of page: The above strategy works “on paper,” but that doesn’t mean that it will work in your next game of Risk.
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dequor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|4 years ago|reply
The AU continent is just so easy to hold. With only one country to go through, you can amass a huge army in Siam and no one touches your continent all game.
[+] [-] Jeff_Brown|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvanderbot|4 years ago|reply
OP/TFA introduced systems theory, then introduced the usual winning risk strategy, and then introduced a lot of required steps like player management / table top diplomacy, selecting countries to attack, timing card cash-outs, boundary holding, and so on without systems theory.
[+] [-] zelphirkalt|4 years ago|reply
However, I needed something more to win games and so I took some time to write myself a risk calculator tool [1] I think I made more educated decisions about risking moves in the game by using the tool. Knowing your chances not only by gut, but also by mathematics can give you that little extra boost :D
[1]: https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-risk-calculator
[+] [-] Syzygies|4 years ago|reply
"Start in Australia" is all I remember of my strategy. It's a great metaphor for so many problems. Certainly, for HN, as a startup strategy. What's the "Australia" for your imagined market?
[+] [-] prepend|4 years ago|reply
Letting the other players fight each other imagined a game where no one notices you.
[+] [-] jlkuester7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] I-Robot|4 years ago|reply
Last paragraph: "The above strategy works “on paper,” but that doesn’t mean that it will work in your next game of Risk."
Too funny. Totally discounts the title... smh
[+] [-] fallingfrog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j4yav|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|4 years ago|reply
finally, everyone here seems to argue that Risk is a terrible game but if that's so why do I generally win?! Next you're going to tell me that Stratego isn't any good either!
[+] [-] ineedasername|4 years ago|reply