To wrap up this Risk Management series, I’ll describe of the best variations on the game and one of the easiest ways to speed up the game and make it fun for everyone. What’s in your wallet? It’s time for…
Capital Capture
One of the things I didn’t like about risk was the random objectives you had to accomplish to win the game. Objectives like “Take over all of Asia and Europe” or “Defeat the Red army and control 18 territories”. Some objectives where easy, but if YOU were the Red army you’d have to control all those territories which might be pretty hard depending on which areas you control. That’s why we adopted Capital Capture. Instead of using the Objective cards, each player controls a capital somewhere in one of their territories. If you sieze control of everyone elses capital while still controlling your own capital, you win the game! But how do you select a captial? The way we’ve always done it is, at the beginning of the game, all the country cards are divided amongst the players. Each player then puts one soldier on each territory they have a card for. After that’s done, each player must then select one of the territories they own as their Capital. They then pull the corresponding country card from their hand, leave it face down in front of them and turn in the rest of the country cards. Play them proceeds in a clockwise manner with each player depositing one solider at a time in one of their territories until everyone has placed all their soldiers. Players then flip over their Capital country card for the remainder of the game. You may use your Capital card to your advantage when attacking from it or to it should you lose control of your capital. Should your capital be captured by an opposing army, you must hand over your Capital card to the attacker. You are still in the game as long as you have soldiers elsewhere on the board. The attacker must keep your Capital card face up in front of him for others to see and CANNOT turn your Capital card in for troop reinforcements (neither can you for that matter!).
There are other rules and scenarios out there for Risk (you can Google them – “Risk rule variations”). These are just a few of our favorites and we use all of them at the same time. They made for some really exciting and fast games of Risk. We’ve finished three player games in less than an hour with these new rules and we’ve seen underdog players come back to crush everyone else. Give ’em a try and I promise you’ll love Risk even more. And if you’ve never liked Risk, they’ll make it go a lot faster and you’ll have more fun the next time one of your friends convinces you to play a round.
If you can’t find your copy of Risk, I’d highly recommend getting a copy of the new Advanced Risk. It incorporates some of the strategies I’ve mentioned and has a dramatic new look to it. While I’m not a big fan of the replacement soldier pieces, they have some amazing new objectives and a clever reward system for winning those objectives (how about an extra attack or defense dice? would you like an airfield? what about a guaranteed extra 2 soldiers at the start of each of your turns?).
It incorporates some of the strategies I’ve mentioned and has a dramatic new look to it. While I’m not a big fan of the replacement soldier pieces, they have some amazing new objectives and a clever reward system for winning those objectives (how about an extra attack or defense dice? would you like an airfield? what about a guaranteed extra 2 soldiers at the start of each of your turns?).Good luck Commanders! See you on the battlefield!!!