Risk iPhone Review (Review)
Monday, 16th August 2010, 17:27

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First off, what is Risk you may well ask. The short, short, short, short version? This is a classic board game from Parker Brothers for between two (three in the iPhone version) and six players, the aim is to take over the world. Was that too brief? A slightly longer version involves attacking and invading neighbouring territories with your armies, marching your war machine across the map with the aid of nothing more than dice and a bit of lady luck.

Simple in nature, easy to learn, this aptly named title has come in many flavours over the years, not just anniversary and special editions, but also Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, Narnia, Halo, heck even a 2210 A.D. version. EA Games have brought us the standard official basic version to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch platform, though I do wonder if they might start adding other licenses if this sells well.

Anyway, already know how to play Risk? Then you can freely skip to the next page! If not, read on...

Every game goes the same, you pick the number of players, take it in turns to place your armies one at a time on the various territories of the board. Then each player in turn has their go, which consists of three phases.

The first phase involves adding reinforcements to any territory that player already holds, the number of new armies they get depends on factors such as how many areas they hold, with bonuses for holding an entire continent of which there are six. Bigger harder to defend continents are worth more recruits than smaller isolated ones. So if you hold all of Australia, you get a bonus of two armies, but hold Asia and you are gaining seven every single turn.

Additional armies can be gained by turning in Risk cards, these you get one of every time you conquer a territory. If you happen to wipe out an enemy from the game by capturing their last area, then you'll receive all their Risk cards too. Turn in three matching cards, or three that are all different, and you'll get more armies to place. The more you turn in, the more you get, with extra bonus armies if you control territories on the cards.

Second phase is where the action happens, here you get to attack any territory adjacent to your own, providing you have more than one army in that territory, as much as you like, until either one side or another gets wiped out, or you decide to stop beating your head against a brick wall. And here in lies one of the two reasons this game is aptly named, beating your opponent is an act of attrition, one which is partly dependant on luck of the dice.

The attacker gets to roll a number of die up to the maximum of three, one for each army in the attacking territory, whilst the defender gets one for each defending army, up to the maximum of two. Then the top roll for each side is compared, if the attacker out rolls then the defender loses an army, otherwise even if it's a draw the attacker loses one of theirs. Then the next two highest dice are compared, unless of course the defender only got to roll one die.

This system is repeated until either the attacker has wiped out the defender, the attacker only has one army left, or the attacker decides to give up. Whilst the bigger the attacking army the more likely they are to ultimately win, sometimes it can incur heavy losses in the process, and others have the attacker so convinced the defender has rigged the dice, he has introduced the other players to all new levels of swear words.

When you defeat an army, you have to move at least the number of troops you attacked with to the defeated territory, whilst always maintaining at least 1 in the place you attacked from. So if you have three in the attacking place, there was one defender, and you defeated them without losing any troops, you could only attack with two armies and both of those two would have to move to the newly conquered area.

Once this phase is over, you get one last thing you can do before your go is over. You can move any number of troops from one of your territories to one other. Some versions of the game limit this to adjacent territories only, but this one doesn't.

Hopefully players new to Risk now begin to see the dilemma, how many troops do you leave behind to defend as you advance? Where should you place your troops in the first place? As your elite army works its way across Europe, how thin do you spread it? When do you stop attacking? Can you wipe out a whole continent before they are whittled down too low? Do you keep your big armies on the front line and leave the territories nobody can attack yet defenceless?

Every decision is not without risk, if you capture a continent and start bolstering up your armies whilst others push on, their recruits will outgrow yours. Do you camp one nearby territory in another continent just to stop someone from receiving a troop bonus? But getting there might prove costly in troop numbers.

And so on, and so on.

If you want to read more about the rules and history of Risk, plus the variations which obviously you can't play on the iPhone, check out the very good Wikipedia page on it all. It also has a nice table showing you the probabilities of winning vs certain army sizes.

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