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Title: How To Win At Risk Every Time By Using Systems Thinking Disclaimer at bottom of page: The above strategy works “on paper,” but that doesn’t mean that it will work in your next game of Risk.
Yeah this title is clickbait. No strategy wins every time, especially if everyone's cognizant of your one style.
Every time I've played Risk, two things happened. First, a massive bloodbath over Australia. Second, a long slow slog to a dissatisfying end, where multiple players wind up pissed off, because the Australian ends up winning somehow. The AU continent is just so easy to hold. With only one country to go through, you can amass a huge army in Siam and no one touches your continent all game.
I dislike games where it’s just a system to win. Kinda defeats the purpose. No actual gamesmanship.
Coming from an economics background, every presentation I've seen of "systems thinking" (admittedly, not a large number) makes it look ill-defined, incomplete, and obvious.
I wonder how she would fare at Diplomacy. hmm.
In our gaming group, we decided Risk just isn't that good of a game. It's old and clunky and extremely long, there are 100 other better board games now. Our main plays have been Dominion, DnD, Gloomhaven, Wingspan, and Crokinole, all of which we greatly prefer.
Title: How To Win At Risk Every Time By Using Systems Thinking Disclaimer at bottom of page: The above strategy works “on paper,” but that doesn’t mean that it will work in your next game of Risk.
Yeah this title is clickbait. No strategy wins every time, especially if everyone's cognizant of your one style.
a player can follow the rules
a player can find the optimal strategy within the rules
a player can use the rules to find plays that negate easy access to the optimal strategy to the enemy
this whole article is mostly stuck at level 2, it identifies a workable strategy analyzing a player own options, missing all the more advanced plays that a risk player should know and will need to do to win.
moreover, there's one critical flaw in the analysis, the goal is not to reach your objective, the goal is to reach your objective before other players do, and the time limit influences the risk taking; turtling, as suggested here, rarely wins games.
anyway, risk itself is a insanely complex games, so I'll skip mechanics, which are kind of covered in the article (except combination optimization, which is weird since mechanically speaking it is one major factor driving gameplay) and go at the jugular of the issue:
you win at risk guessing other people goals and making moves that confound your own or even let player think your goal is one of those of your adversaries. mechanically suboptimal moves, like a push into a continent you don't have to conquer but one of your enemy does, will trigger player response, and strategically turning player against each other will both buy you time and reduce the enemy placing too many reinforcements against your actual goal path.