The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

For Droib’s birthday, I was attempting to think of something cool to get him. It was then that I remembered that, at some point this year, Droid was in the market for filling up some shelves with some good board games. Now there was an area I knew about! We had also, in our youth, played hours and hours of Risk at his house. So I went out and, with some funding help from one Justin Spants, acquired Risk 2210 A.D. for him, since everyone has always said it is the best variant of Risk created yet. I hadn’t played it though. However, we got together on Friday night to give it a try.

First off, let me just say where I stand on standard Risk: it’s not very well designed. The first few turns are fun stuff, but after that, the game gets boring and stupid. I don’t think we’ve ever actually finished a game of Risk. It’s just too much of a pain to do so. There are also some constant strategies that are always brought to a Risk table, for better or worse.

Risk 2210 addresses most of those concerns. First off, because the game is always only 5 turns long, it keeps the game confined to the turns that are interesting, keeping the game from going on for hours and hours in wars of attrition and rolling that nobody really cares about. Secondly, the fact that you have to mark four random territories on the board as “nuclear wastelands” at the start of the game really changes how the board, whose land spaces are pretty much the same as regular Risk, play. In our game, for example, large portions of Asia were irradiated, and the other wastelands were blocking passage into Asia. This made Asia way, way easier to take and defend than in a normal game of Risk, and thus way more viable, which was interesting. Next time, something else will be more useful to hold because of those areas. I really like that.

The other things Risk 2210 adds to make the game different from the normal Risk experience are also fun. You have commanders, something taken from Lord of the Rings Risk which is a very welcome addition, as those are quite fun. However, you have five different types: Diplomat, Land Commander (or Landmander, as we called him), Naval Commander, Space Commander, and Nuclear Commander. Each type lets you use a d8 instead of a d6 in certain situations that are pretty self-explanatory. Are you fighting at sea? The Naval Commander would give you a bonus there, and so on. Having a commander on the board lets you buy and use their Commander Cards, which do different things related to their specialties. Each deck is shuffled and random, but since each Commander has a different style of ability that you know beforehand, you really can plan your strategy more than you can with some cards of this type in other Risk variants, which is really cool. You can build Space Stations to fortify specific areas and let you send troops to the Moon. Oh, and there’s a separate Moon board to take, and underwater sea colonies to conquer. You also get to bid resources on when you take your turn, which is a great mechanic. Do you save your resources to buy more Commanders and commander cards, or do you really want to get in there and go first?
Honestly, though, it’s just Risk, in the end. You still point at places on the board and roll dice over and over again to whittle down armies. But as I mentioned before, that only gets boring when two players are crazily fortified and there’s no chance for people to swing from the bottom to the top. Since the game only lasts 5 turns, and there are so many more options than in a normal Risk game, it really keeps the fun going all the way through.

Here are three strategy tips for when you play. 1) People seem to forget to look at the Moon board. If you can sneak some troops up there and take one of those continents, that could be a huge help. That was what I did, and it let me manage to win. Somehow. 2) You want to go last on the last turn, so you can be completely suicidal. It doesn’t matter how many armies you have when the game ends, just how many territories, so a suicide run is very effective! This was the other reason I managed to win, even though I was in bad shape for most of the game. Bid to make that happen! 3) If you add magnets to your game, this is what happens.

I think I picked a pretty good game to get for Droib. We had a great time playing it, and hopefully we can play it again sometime. What people were saying was completely right: this pretty well is the best variant of Risk I have played, and I have played quite a lot of them. If you’re going to play any kind of Risk, I would very much suggest this one.