Go play poker instead.
I’ve played at their table before, and I hold my own alright, I’ve even come out up a few times. It’s just the guys are relentless, they casually play for 12 hours straight whereas when I play, around hour 4, my mood is “can we do something else” which usually leads to me playing really risky for a few hands and shoving more than I should and ultimately busting out and not buying back in.
That was back when they were using tournament rules. I’ve not played with them since they switched to cash games. Both have their pros and cons.
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We tried Risk Legacy and found it a complete slog.
I’m sorry you didn’t like Risk Legacy, but your experience does not represent everyone who plays it.
Plenty of people enjoy Risk Legacy. Additionally, plenty of people who don’t really like Risk still enjoy Risk Legacy.
That’s all I’m trying to say.
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There are also those Academy Games releases like 1775: Rebellion. That’s got diceys.
I played a lot of risk online at one point in my life. Like hundreds of games. Some with variant rules for generals and/or fortresses (basically +1 defending or +1 attacking, maybe to only one die). With the maps and the variants at least it can get a little bit interesting, but playing the vanilla risk map and mechanics I can’t help but think it’s a slog. It’s mostly an RNG game once everyone knows the relatively optimal plays.
I would also say risk legacy was great fun for me and my group. We played through three campaigns. The first campaign was great because everything is new and fresh and you don’t necessarily know what can happen. But once you play that once, you can still have great fun now playing it again on a new board knowing that you’re playing a long game with several ways to tweak things. It also would seem similar to Rym’s family having to buy new decks to play every time in a way.
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Risk is 100% not worth playing with any ruleset I’ve seen. I’ve tried a lot of the official and unofficial variants, and they all fail to make the game interesting enough to be worth the time.
There’s no way to be better at risk. Once you know the statistics of 3:2 dice, it’s just the random starting factor, the completely generic politics, and the random set collection.
Play Shogun/Samurai Swords/Ikusa instead if you want a game that feels like Risk but isn’t bad and long.
Shogun was literally suggested and shot down. (also I think it’s out of print)
That’s a shame.
I forget the exact perfect maths strategy, but IIRC it was something like “always attack while you have a 5:3 ratio” and “stop attacking if you fall below that”, the exception being you need to get at least one card per turn no matter what.
Otherwise, lie low and let the politics happen around you.
There’s nothing else that can be done in that game =(
I found a different article with an even better heuristic about attacking. If you are equal in size to an adjacent army and have at least five units, you have the advantage. The larger the two armies are in total, the larger your advantage is.
So attack forever until you have fewer than 5 or are outnumbered by -waves hands-
Funnily enough, I’m pretty sure when I was suggesting Shogun, I was also poopooing risk. The more I complained, the more they liked risk, the logic being if I don’t like it it must be a game you can’t use your skill to beat us at.
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The line of discussion should be: “So you admit that I have more skill than you? You admit I’m better than you? If a game is fair, then the best player wins, and you admit I’m the best, so I should win. So what you’re saying that we shouldn’t play a fair game where the best player wins. You want to play a random game where it’s just random who wins? Ok, so even if you win the game where it’s random who wins, you have no right to brag, because we all recognize that it was just random. The only way you can brag is if you play a game where the best player wins and you beat me, but you admit I’m better than you?”
If you care so much about who wins, your only choice is to GET GUD.
Yeah, maybe I should have done that. The time for doing that is past however. Only thing to do now is show up on I think the Saturday after thanksgiving and see what happens. If they end up actually playing risk and trying to win, I’ll more strongly renew my objections to the game. If something else happens like a bunch of drinking and joking around with occasional dice rolls and the unspoken agreement that the rules are more like suggestions, no better game will save me.
Cockroach Poker.
I’ll suggest it but my money is on that just annoying my dad and cousin (both of whom are exceptions to the non poker players part of being in the group) and my other cousin will not like it due to it not being a world domination game.
These seem to be very narrow minded people. Just watch football.
EDIT: If you must play Risk, pick the worst person and attack only one. Then get yourself eliminated as quickly as possible so you can stop playing.
Actually also, this entire argument is a good one to have DURING the game itself so whoever wins knows my objection to their bragging rights right up front.
Edit: We all already watch football together.
Also they’re not as bad as I’m making it sound. A big part of why I perceive them as stubborn as I don’t actually know what they want out of the night. Like another thing that they suggest is, because the strategy of locking down Australia is such a well known, a long time ago I had a password I no longer use: “Auisthke2thenga” - Australia is the key to the entire game, first 2 letters of every word. This is the example I used when explaining how to use passphrases way back when that was my go to advice for password management.
They remembered this and consider it to be a strategy I can use, like knowledge skill rather than “real” skill, like knowing the optimal build in a moba. It seems they want to avoid anyone having any “unfair” advantage at the start. For this reason, allowing you to attack Australia from places other than where the board says you can is likely going to be houseruled in. It’s also why my suggestion we play Diplomacy instead was shot down, because some of them are professional negotiators and that’d give THEM an unfair starting advantage…
All this is why I sort of threw up my hands and said, fine, I can’t figure out what you want so I’m just gonna be more passive and hopefully I can figure out what you want by actually sitting down at your table and playing whatever you put in front of me.
Risk Legacy is for sure the best Risk but still not worth it. It’s still built on top of the same heavily flawed system.
This seems like an article that people on here might enjoy:
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