Most of the folks reading this blog have played Risk before. Most of us have grown out of Risk, and are playing German-style board games now. When any of our group would happen to be together for gaming, it is very unlikely that we would play Risk. However, we might be inticed to play if we were to stumble upon a group (perhaps on vacation, when visiting relatives we don’t normally see, etc.) playing, we might take it up. Anyone disagree with this idea?
Anyway, there is an interesting article on The Games Journal, by Dave Shapiro, regarding the history of the game of Risk, and also an apology:
The history is kind of cool (did you know that Risk is French? Made in 1957?), but I also find some of the other comments in the form of apology interesting and thought provoking.
“Length – “Risk takes too long. There is too much downtime between turns.” Allow me to be brutally honest: any Risk game that runs six or more hours (as some have suggested) is being played by gamers who have misread or misinterpreted the rules, are thoroughly intoxicated or are complete buffoons. Consider the most complex of the Risk series, either Risk 2210 A.D. or Risk Godstorm: assuming the full complement of players (five) and five minutes per turn per player, this results in only 125 minutes for a complete game. Even the addition of an extra hour only brings the total to about three hours (shorter than the average playing time of Die Macher, Civilization or World of Warcraft.) Of course it is a matter of preference but a two to three hour game is not, in my view, excessively long.”
This caught my attention for a few moments. I remember a time (back in the 1980’s) when we used to fly through Risk games in under 90 minutes, ramming around the board as fast as we could, literally “taking risks” in our positions, ramping up army counts from 5, to 10, 15 and +5 each time we had a set up cards. Game was over quickly, and we’d play 3-4 times in a typically gaming night.
Then I moved to the Allentown area, and started playing with Mike S., Mike K., Doug, and Kevin. They played with (strange) rules like 4, 6, or 8 army for a set of soldies, cannons, or calvary. No “power moving” (allowing you to reset armies from one side of the board to the other).
They also had very strange strategies based on this slower type of game, where they would build large clusters of armies at choke points on the board (Australia, Mexico, Iceland for example). They would make very small limited attacks, wait for someone to have a bad sequence of rolls, or attack a player who had been attacked elsewhere. Games would take all night! And I began to complain that Risk “took too long”.
Reading his comments about game length made me wonder if I was playing the right game!
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