Risk is the classic game of world domination. The concepts of area control and border defense that are important in the game have become standards in many a war game since. Despite being a classic game, the game has numerous features that can make it frustrating to play. Recent editions of the game have fixed some of those problems, but unless you own a newer edition, those fixes don’t necessarily help the original game. The following variants can add new fun and fix some of the bigger problems with the game of Risk.
Limit on Army Size – In this variant, you can never have more than six units in a single territory. This prevents players from building up an enormous army and moving like a caterpillar across the board. Instead this encourages tactical use of flanking and area control and encourages players to be more balanced in how they distribute their armies.
Goals – According to the rules, the winner of Risk is whoever conquers the world. Conquering the world is fun, but it also takes an incredibly long time. In this variant, at the start of the game, after every player has claimed their countries by placing a single piece in each country, the cards are shuffled. Each player draws cards randomly until they have five cards depicting countries they don’t own. If you ever control all five of those countries at the same time, you immediately win the game.
Australia and South America – These two continents are generally considered overpowered because you only need to hold four territories to get the bonus armies and only one territory in Australia can be attacked from outside of Australia. In order to deal with that problem, one variant adds new sea lanes that can be used to attack South America and Australia. One of these sea lanes runs from New Guinea to Peru and the other runs from Madagascar to Western Australia. That makes the continents more difficult to hold and requires more resources to be used to hold them.
Capitols – In this variant, you secretly choose one of your territories to be your capitol. If that territory is ever overtaken, the player that captured the territory immediately wins the game. This is similar to the variant with goals, but you don’t know what territory you need to take to win the game. In a less vicious version of this variant, as long as you hold your capitol you gain two additional armies each round, but you don’t win the game by taking over someone else’s capitol.
Altered Redeployment – At the end of each turn, you may move as many troops as you want from any one territory to any one territory as long as there is a path of territories you control between those two territories. In this variant, you may move as many troops as you want from any one territory to any number of territories or you may move as many troops as you want from any number of territories to any one territory. This makes redeployment slightly more tactical.
