Strategy for risk the board game

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.

A single troop is easy to kill and people will not hesitate to do so. As soon as you add another troop to make two, then their defense is doubled and players will often think twice. An adjacent defense of 3 and 1 would be stronger as a 2 and 2. Have a plan and a basic risk game strategy. Decide early what you want to do and focus your efforts there.

IF possible use diplomacy to clear the way a bit. Thank you for your time. Related Items. August 18, General and Advanced Risk Tactics. Keep an eye on how well your neighbors are doing. Be sure to move more troops to your borders with more powerful players to ward off the possibility of invasion. At some point, it is likely one player will pull ahead of the pack. The only way to survive at this point as one of the weaker players is to forge an alliance. Forging alliances with other players is a tried and true Risk board game strategy, and honestly is where most of the fun of the game comes from.

Watching the alliances shift over the course of a game is always a wild ride. There can only be one winner in Risk, so every alliance is by nature a temporary one born from necessity or convenience. When somebody is clearly winning, players have a tendency to build alliances against them to bring them down to their level. It stands to reason that a good Risk strategy involves flying under the radar to avoid that result!

You have to strike a careful balance of expanding aggressively, but not so aggressively that everybody at the table is looking at you sideways. Sometimes you have to put everything on the line for a big pay out in a game of Risk. Not a good situation to be in! In this situation, when the moment is right, it might be a good idea to pull all your forces from one border for an all-out attack on the other depending on which neighbor is weaker. This will sacrifice your hold on South America, but you may gain a larger continent and free yourself from your isolated position.

The problem with a tried and true strategy is that as soon as it becomes well-known, it becomes useless. As an example: I read an interesting strategy where, rather than battle it out for the small starting continents of Africa, Australia, or South America you instead drop all your soldiers in Asia.

However we are repeating this experiment enough times for the error the be insiginificant for practical startegies for the game. Also this approach allows us to be more flexible. We can figure out any aspect of the battles simply by simulating the battle over and over. We will get some information in the case when the numbe of attacking and defending armies are equal.

The first plot shows the number of armies the attacker expects to be left with on average in an n vs. We can see that as the number n of attacking and defending armies increases the advantage of the attacker becomes more tangible. For example in a 40 vs. So in this case the attacker is at a slight advantage and the advantage increases slightly with the number of attacking armies. The plot below looks at a different dimension: the probability that the attacker wins in a n vs.

The story is similar to the graph above. If the attacker has 5 armies or more it is worth attacking a defending army of the same size.

As the attacking army increases so does the probability of winning. So in this case the heuristic is pretty simple: Attack an army of the same size if you have 5 armies or more. And even in this case keep in mind that you might be left with very few or even 0 armies. The graph below shows the expected values of the armies the attacker you is left with as we vary the number of defending armies. The graph below shows the probability of wininng with 20 armies against a varying number of defending armies.

This basically means that you should roughly attack armies that are slighly less numerous than yours but should never attack armies that are more numerous than yours. In the case of 25 armies the probability the attacker wins aganst 15 defending armies is 0.