A Mirage of Strategy: Examining the Game of Online Risk
The online game Risk(i) is one of the most widespread games in the United States, yet the author feels that this game is second rate after having played many other games. This paper seeks to determine what this popular game is and is not, and will find other games to compare online Risk's different aspects to. This paper only discusses the original game of online Risk, not Mission Risk or Castle Risk, which the author considers separate games and which are not as popular. This paper finds that online Risk is too long for the diversity of actions it offers it players, and that downtime and player elimination have negative impacts on the game. Further, online Risk is not a game of negotiation and its few elements of strategy are overpowered by an excess of luck. Online Risk's popularity is not attributable to its design and will hopefully wane so that more interesting games can be enjoyed by Americans.
Online Risk was revolutionary at the time of its creation. It it one of the first modern games that allows its players to choose where they want to move during their turn. Consider Monopoly(ii), where one's movement is determined by die rolls. Then remember Sorry(iii), Life(iv), Clue(v), Trivial Pursuit(vi) and countless other older games that also take the decision of where to move, or how far or often, arbitrarily out of one's hands. Allowing one to move where one wanted to go was a breakthrough mechanic back in the late 50s. Also, online Risk lets one feel powerful for a few turns. Amassing an enormous army in a single province, smashing into a weak line of defense, conquering a continent, and then being wiped off the board the next turn is exhilarating the first few times around. Online Risk is also simple to learn. Many learn how to play it in elementary school. This allows online Risk to serve as a stepping stone for when its players grow older and began to demand more than it can offer.
Online Risk should be praised for its historical significance and for its shallow learning curve. However, online Risk also has several weaknesses. Online Risk is a long game, and this makes three of its attributes a problem: Online Risk is very simple and does not offer its players many options, it has player elimination, and it has a great deal of downtime.
The first weakness in online Risk is the scarce number of actions it offers its players. For four or more hours, all players do is place armies, move them, and roll dice. There are two aspects of the game, things that give the game a fun theme, that are meant to make this redundancy bearable. First, movement encompasses crossing entire continents; second, this movement is done with large armies that smash into, kill, and die to other armies. These elements are too few to make the game worthwhile for the time required to play it. In comparison, Junta is a game of comparable length that does a better job keeping players interested. In the first round of Junta(vii) (30 minutes), players elect a President for Life, the President appoints the other players to various cabinet positions (General of the First Army, Admiral, Minister of Internal Security), the President divides up the foreign aid money his nation receives that turn, a round of assassinations ensues, and, if the players are not happy with the President's actions, they can start a coup. Junta is clearly the more interesting of the two uses of four hours' time.
Another problem in online Risk's design, a feature in some other games, is player elimination. In four-hour long online Risk, it is quite possible to be eliminated within the first thirty minutes. That player must then sit around and watch other people play for at least two hours. Elimination is a fun mechanic, but is usually only in games that do not last long. Two examples of such games are Lunch Money(viii), where players beat each other to death for lunch money, and Bang(ix), where players are cowboys who shoot each other. Lunch Money lasts 30 minutes; Bang lasts 45. In these games, the number of times you can play make up for the fact that some players may hardly be able to act in a single game where they are killed on the first turn. Because players will be eliminated from the game, the game itself is short so that they can jump in and play again. Online Risk both eliminates players and is a long game. Instead of being a fun game, online Risk serves as a test of patience to those who play it and lose early.
The third problem with online Risk's long play-time is the small proportion of that time with which any single player is actually involved in the game. The time spent in idleness in a game is known as downtime. In online Risk, players only place pieces and move during their turn, and only roll dice when they attack someone or when someone else attacks them during that person's turn. Because involving a player in the game is dependent on another player targeting him or her, it is common for players to remain inactive in-between their turns. This becomes a problem in a game when turns can last twenty or thirty minutes and when there are more than two players, which is often the case in online Risk. Generally, it is good to be involved in the social event one is participating in. If a player is camping out in Australia, he or she could conceivably not roll a die for hours on end. This problem can either be fixed by involving the players when it isn't their turn, or by making turns short to begin with. Back to the political half of Junta, players get to use cards and heckle each other in two rounds of voting to elect a president, can argue about who should get which cabinet position, can then vote on the budget, can kill people in the assassination phase, and can then lead their forces in a coup. A game of Junta involves every player in every phase of the game. In the coup phase of Junta, a mini wargame in which players resolve coup attempts, players aren't involved in each other's turns, but when they move they only move one stack of units a round. Only moving a single stack takes much less time than moving every army a player controls; this is allowed in online Risk. Making the turns shorter as in the coup phase of Junta alleviates the pain of a large proportion of downtime. Online Risk has no safeguards against downtime, its turns last very long and do not involve every player.
Besides its problems with game length, online Risk suffers from a lack of depth. A game has depth when players make a number of meaningful choices throughout the game. A good choice might increase one's resources, eliminate a rival from the game, or gain an advantage in a conflict. A bad choice might lose resources in the game or otherwise set up failure in a conflict. There are two areas online Risk often receives credit for in providing depth: being a game of negotiation in how one deals with the other players, and of strategy in how one moves his or her pieces. Both of these claims are misguided. Online Risk lacks meaningful negotiation, and its preponderance of luck, its consistency in geography and unit capabilities, and its poorly chosen objective keeps what strategic element it has weak as well.
Negotiations with other players in online Risk are superficial. One might be able to convince new players what to do, but an experienced player, aware of the game's rules and objective, will generally act in his or her best interests most of the time. For example, if one player is holing up in Australia, and another is sitting in Asia fighting a third player who is attacking from Europe and Africa, the latter two players should eventually make peace for awhile so that the second player can attack Australia. Otherwise the first player in Australia will build an incredible army that will overwhelm the other two weakened players. If the two players fail to realize this and do not attack Australia it would not be a diplomatic triumph for the first player, it is just incompetence on the part of the others. In cases where it is not obvious what course of action should be taken decisions could just as easily be made randomly. In a second example, the three remaining players fight over Asia. Negotiation will inevitably fall apart if the players are equal: no two players can split an area up any more efficiently than another pair, no area is worth more to one player than another, and all players share the same objective and the single means to accomplishing it. In a game where the goals and capabilities of all the players are the same, there is nothing to base a diplomatic decision off of. If anything, negotiation in online Risk amounts to appearing meek in order to avoid the wrath of a losing player who might pit his forces against a single opponent in order to ensure that player's demise. The concept of online Risk being a game of negotiation is a false one.
Negotiation as a worthwhile use of time is an element of the game Diplomacy(x), another very long game where players attempt to conquer the map. In Diplomacy, the best course of action is rarely evident, but each decision brings certain advantages and disadvantages with it beyond the variance in other players' outside-the-game wrath. Players' decisions are affected by the capacity of their armies to move across the map, by the importance of some areas over others, by the players bordering them, by their in-game relationships with other players, and by the other players' in-game relationships with their opponents. All of these variances create different situations for each player, allowing observant players the opportunity to build relationships with others for mutual benefit. Two weak players should still team up against a third stronger one as in online Risk, but when three numerically equal powers meet in Diplomacy differences in the players' positions will generate different goals for each player that can then be negotiated for. An example arises in the first turn of Diplomacy, between England, France, and Germany. All players will be expanding their empires in the first two turns, but who gets Belgium is always an interesting conflict. From Britain's perspective, it has a right to Belgium in order to stay numerically equal with the other powers who will each get at least two supply centers. However, Britain may want to stay away from the lowlands for awhile, using the time Germany and France waste fighting over them to take Scandinavia from Russia. Britain hardly needs numerical equality anyway, as a strong island-nation sea power it can hold its own in the first few turns. Britain could instead move towards France and help Germany into Belgium with the promise that Germany will later split France's territory evenly with Britain. These three different courses of action each have different consequences. If Britain takes Belgium, then it might be involved in a three-way war over the area that leaves the whole region weak to a strong power that emerges elsewhere on the board. If Britain attacks Scandinavia, then Russia will be angered and Britain leaves itself open to a Franco-German alliance against its underside. Russia's normal thirst for Scandinavia might not be present if it is attacked from the South by Austria or Turkey though. Invading France may allow Russia to grow too strong in the North if Russia is not distracted in the South. This could also be a setup for an attack from Germany, since Britain's forces would be tied up fighting France. To decide which of these options is the safest, Britain must negotiate with the other players. Thus, the path that Britain takes is meaningfully determined by negotiation, as its actions have consequences to the viability of future courses of action for Britain and for the remaining countries as well.
Online Risk's first fault movement-wise is its draconian objective of eliminating every other player. This can only be accomplished by destroying every single opposing piece on the board. The coarseness of this objective in online Risk eliminates the potential for subtlety, for being able to win the game without making it obvious to the other players. The only way for a player to be harmed in online Risk is to lose pieces. Liberté(xi), a game about the French Revolution from 1789 to 1799, has multiple ways to win. Players can either win by amassing the most victory points at the end of the fourth turn, can stage a royalist counter-revolution, or can emerge victorious after a radical landslide victory during one of the elections. These different objectives are accomplished in different ways. To stage a counter-revolution, a player must control a certain number of provinces with a royalist faction. For a landslide election victory, a player must win a very large number of regions during the national election held at the end of any turn. To win with victory points, a player must consistently invest his or her resources to finish strongly in the elections and to have his or her generals emerge victorious in the battle box. These different paths to victory allow for a player to still be competitive after a clear defeat in one area of the game, he or she can just switch over to another area. These different paths also create tension in the game that in turn builds excitement. A player not only has to win, but has to spend resources preventing others from winning as well. A player trying to win with victory points might still have to place pieces on a province that isn't very important to his or her cause just to prevent a counter-revolution. Having placed his or her pieces, one will still have to worry about the resources available to his or her opponents. With three ways of winning, the threat an opponent's hand of cards presents is tripled. Online Risk has no such tension; all players can see all of the pieces on the board and might know hours ahead of time who the victor will most likely be. The use of territory cards, which can grant bonus armies, is a weak addition that does not alleviate this problem. Players can tell when using cards would be necessary: a player should use them at a point before their use becomes moot and a winning player doesn't need to use them at all. If a needy player with three cards failed to use them then he or she obviously did not have a matching set. Further, the effect of a set of territory cards is often negligible. They can immediately be negated by a bad run of dice, or else the new armies will bog down in enemy territory along with their normal comrades. In Liberté, a good hand of cards can end the game, and a player through a recycling mechanic can create this good hand. In online Risk, the influx of armies through cards merely adds more numbers to the monotony.
Online Risk's second mistake in its strategic movement is consistency. All armies are worth the same amount, and all the spaces on the board are equally unimportant. In online Risk, if a player controlling an army in Alaska loses that army, it can't invade Asia from that direction until it replaces it. Sounds strategic, but the player that destroyed that army also lost a comparable number of pieces, and a replacement army can be positioned on a nearby area as quickly as his next turn. Compare this with Axis and Allies(xii), where a Pearl Harbor attack hardly causes the loss of Japanese units, and secondly, knocks the US out of the Pacific until it can build a navy and move it to the Far East. This requires time and money. Because his or her units countered the American units stationed at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese player didn't also lose half of his or her fleet. Also, because of geography, the Japanese player gains an advantage greater than the sheer benefit of removing some US pieces, it can control the Pacific for the first few turns. Online Risk doesn't vary the value of units. Online Risk varies the value of land in two ways, by allowing players to choose their territories and their strengths at the beginning of the game and by granting players who control whole continents bonus armies. Both are inadequate in presenting players with a variety of interesting choices every turn. The first mechanic, choosing starting holdings, only affects the first few rounds of play as players consolidate some strong points and leave other patches of territory open for conquest. If two equal armies meet in this initial scramble, an outcome undesirable for both sides, then one will be eliminated and one will be weakened doing the eliminating, which player being which determined by the luck of the dice. Such a buildup is a game of chicken, with a potentially large payoff if the opponent gives up, but mutually debilitating consequences if both continue. Also, did the other players benefit from the warring twos' mishap? Yes, but it was not any of their doing and could have just as easily happened to them, hardly a circumstance worthy of relishing. Initial placement is short lived and its outcome greatly affected by luck. Online Risk's granting of bonus armies to holders of continents does create an incentive for one player to attack another, preventing a bonus while hopefully not losing an equal amount, but this mechanic alone is too little too late. Too little in that the additional armies aren't numerous enough to overpower the luck factor, and too late in that a player able to hold down enough continents to really make a difference is probably on a track to win anyway. In online Risk, players have nothing to consider but the strength of the other players and what continents they control in the placement and movement of their pieces. This is too simple for a game this long that is supposed to be one of strategy.
Thirdly, the luck element in online Risk is a strong obstacle for any attempt at creating a field for strategic thought. It does so because it creates a large potential for upset victories. The most advantageous odds a player can aspire to are roughly two in three chances of winning(xiii). With such a high chance of an outnumbered defender winning an encounter defensive winning streaks are not uncommon and an army easily has the potential to inflict a greater amount of damage than it is worth. By punishing the attacker in this manner, by allowing him or her to falter so often where he or she chooses to be strong and where their opponent chooses to be weak, online Risk renders the decisions that a player makes meaningless. A game of Settlers of Catan(xiv), where players roll dice to see which resources they are able to harvest, can also be decided by luck, but there are two key differences. First, short term bad luck in Settlers affects a player's long term prospects much less than in online Risk. A player might be able to increase ones productive capacity in Settlers faster than others because of a lucky streak, but the dice will probably even out over time and allow the other players to catch up. In online Risk, the army built up over several rounds of play can be destroyed in a single battle and leave its former owner too weak to win for the rest of the game. If a player is reduced to only receiving three armies a turn, his or her military buildup can easily be periodically swept aside by his or her larger opponents. Second, luck can only determine the winner of a game of Settlers at the very end of the game. When both players need a single resource to win, it is up to the dice to see which one of them gets it first, but consistent skillful play is required by both parties in order to reach this point. A bad choice will render a player's efforts sterile much more readily than a few bad rolls. Again, a player's chances of winning in online Risk can be eliminated by luck at the beginning. If a player's choices are not an important factor, than the movement of pieces around a board and the rolling of dice amount more to a pointless activity than to a game.
Though not a game of strategy or negotiation, and even though it takes too long and includes player elimination and a large proportion of downtime, online Risk is still easy to learn and can be a fun game for some. These advantages, unlike many other claims made about the game, are real, but they are not unique and the latter is in fact manifested weakly. Many games are easy to learn, Settlers of Catan, Carcassone(xv), Bohnanza(xvi), too many to count, and as one plays more games the learning curve becomes less of a factor as one becomes familiar with the mechanics games use. For an easy example, Mouse Trap(xvii) and Monopoly both use the roll-a-die-and-move-a-token-around-the-board mechanic, so if one knew how to play one game and fell upon the other, one would know how it worked. Fun-wise, many similar games exist that avoid many of online Risk's mistakes, making them more fun and rewarding games to play. In games like Quest for the Dragonlords(xviii), Conquest of the Empire(xix), Attack!(xx), and Viktory II(xxi), players also attempt to conquer a very large portion of the world. Unlike online Risk though, these games feature different types of units that cost different amounts and fight over areas of varying worth to the different players. The element of luck is also controlled so that it isn't the deciding factor at every contested part of the game. These factors allow for plans to be formed and to be put into action. Thus they are games that actually involve strategy. It is interesting that after nearly fifty years, online Risk remains as widespread as it is. Its popularity should eventually wane as newer, better, board games are discovered and played in its stead.
Endotes:
i Albert, Lamorisse, & Levin, Michael I (1959). Risk. Parker Brothers.
ii Darrow, Charles (1935). Monopoly. Parker Brothers.
iii Sorry (1935). Parker Brothers.
iv Bradley, Milton, & Klamer Reuben (1860). The Game of Life. Milton Bradley.
v Pratt, Anthony E (1946). Clue. Parker Brothers.
vi Abbot, Scott & Haney, Chris (1981). Trivial Pursuit. Horn Abbot Ltd.
vii Goldber, Eric, & Grossman, Ben, & Tsao Vincent (1978). Junta. Creative Wargames Workshop.
viii Nephew, John, & Wiedman, Charlie (1996). Lunch Money. Atlas Games.
ix Sciarra, Emiliano (2002). Bang!. Mayfair Games.
x Calhamer, Allan B (1959). Diplomacy. Avalon Hill.
xi Wallace, Martin (2001). Liberté. Warfrog Games.
xii Harris, Lawrence H (1981). Axis and Allies. Milton Bradley.
xiii Lemke, Kennedy (1999, March). Risk Board Game Dice Odds. Retrieved January 10, 2007, from plainsboro.com Web site: http://www.plainsboro.com/~lemke/risk/
xiv Teuber, Klaus (1995). Settlers of Catan. Mayfair Games.
xv Wrede, Klaus-Jürgen (2000). Carcassonne. Rio Grande Games
xvi Rosenberg, Uwe (1997). Bohnanza. Rio Grande Games
xvii Glass, Marvin, & Kramer, Harvey (1963). Mouse Trap. Milton Bradley.
xviii Johannessen, Robert (2002). Quest for the Dragonlords. Dragonlords Inc.
xix Harris, Lawrence H (1984). Conquest of the Empire. Milton Bradley.
xx Drover, Glenn (2003). Attack!. Eagle Games
xxi Morrison, Peter (2006). Viktory II. Morrison Games.
Play Online Risk: The Top Sites
Risk is the classic Hasbro™ strategy board game enjoyed by millions all over the world.
If you're visiting this site then you can probably remember spending hours, days, and even whole weekends huddled around a RISK game board arguing about dice rolls, luck, tactics and diplomacy with your friends.
For many of us this isn't possible any more as jobs and family take priority and so a new breed of website has started allowing you to play RISK online against friends (and enemies!) anywhere in the world.
But which website should you join? If you type 'Play Online Risk' into Google you'll come up with pages and pages of hits and investigating each site can take forever.
So I've done the hard work for you by joining all the major online RISK sites and I've reviewed and rated them in a number of key areas to come up with a list of top rated sites to play Risk online.
The top sites are listed to your left with their ratings, click through for my full review of each one.
John Adams
July 2011
BM Box 2892, London WC1N 3XX
Risk Articles [All Articles]
- What can You Learn from the Mongol Invasion (Part 2 of 2)
- What can You Learn from the Mongol Invasion (Part 1 of 2)
- How can you Stop a Rumour?
- Don't Fight the Last War! Part 3 of 3
- Don't Fight the Last War! Part 2 of 3
- Don't Fight the Last War! Part 1 of 3
- Online Risk Interview
- Online Risk is Under Attack!
- A Mirage of Strategy: Examining the Game of Online Risk
- What do Online Risk Players do When They Win?