Strategies of risk board game

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These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. Very simple risk game strategy. Do not extend yourself to take a bonus unless you can defend it. I see it all the time. New players eager for some extra troops manage to cling to some continent, but then have weak defenses. Another risk game strategy.

Only make a few moves in the beginning. Winning a game of Risk is not done in the first round. It takes patience. Often new players will make several attacks in the first round, trying for a quick land grab. Even if they are successful, they become open to stronger predators in the area.

In fact it is often beneficial to not make any moves in the first round, or maybe just a reinforcement. The way you gain ground is by attacking enemy territories via rolling dice. Here is a very basic rundown of the battle mechanics: Battles occur in rounds, with an attacking player typically rolling 3 dice, and a defending player 2 dice.

The dice are then ordered and compared and the person with the lowest die loses some number of armies.

There a quite a few other rules; you can find them explained here. The board is an approximate map of the world and players can attack territories adjacent to them. I have actually made an interactive graph using the really cool networkD3 package in R see code [here].

From a game theoretic point of view the first question is who has the advantage, the attacker or the defender? On one hand the defender only rolls 2 dice - one less than the defender, on the other hand the attacker loses armies in the case of equal die. A correct version of the computations by Jason Osborne can be found here. Once the battle probabilities are found one can use recursion or Markov Chains to figure out probabilities of winning between mutiple armies.

In particular you are interested in the expected value and variance of this distribution - as far as I could tell no one has addressed these issues directly. So the purpose of this post will be to do just that! Our approach, while not necessarily the most precise but is certainly the most natural: just roll the corresponding dice over and over again and see what the outcomes are. This means everybody tends to try to gun for that continent early, which could defeat the entire purpose!

When I say take an easy-to-hold continent, that definition will change based on where the other players are placing their troops. In theory Australia is the easiest, with only one lane of entry.

Knowing when to cut your losses and go for the territory you can take is crucial. A lesser known Risk board game strategy is to take is South America as an early continent. It tends to fly under the radar at first if you commit early to trying to take it, and an early build up of troops there during the placement phase can quickly dissuade competition.

The other reason I like South America is you can quickly expand from there into either Africa or North America, depending on which area looks easier to take. This idea has already been touched on a little in the previous tip. You need to adapt your plans to what the opposing players are doing. Maybe you planned to move into North America from South America but suddenly the tide turned for one player, who now has a solid grip on the continent. This is a big trap newer Risk players fall into.

Taking one territory at a time to gain cards will only get you so far, especially if you only have one continent bonus — and especially if that one continent bonus is only giving you 2 extra soldiers.