RISK Legacies and Diablo III

Playing more RISK Legacy. Got my name on the board. Friggen Finally. The game is continuing to update, and now there's a faction of mutants on the board. Figures that we'd end up nuking each other before we managed to put the world capital on the board. I'm still 1/7 amongst four of us, so I'm still doing worse than average. Grr. Barbarossa is up to three signatures now.

Also? Playing Diablo III. Having a great time playing it, it's a wonderful game etc, etc. Don't intend to elaborate on it much, except for this bit of inspiration. Naturally it gets me thinking about... math. Yeah, who didn't see that coming? Allow me to elaborate.

Diablo III has numerous monsters that spawn other monsters. As long as you stand around like an idiot that portal device will keep summoning imps, or that doom bat nest will keep popping out doom bats. Pretty cool and all, except there's a part of me that wants to just stand around, waiting for them to spawn enemies for me, and then just kill those enemies. The sweet EXP without having to go running about and all. It's a case of cross incentives because pretty obviously what the game wants you to be doing is running about and all, killing other, more varied things.

How do they solve this? Generally by making the enemies spawn at a slow enough rate that it's quicker just to blow up the nest and go searching. (And that's not terribly slow, given the nature of the Diablo games). In Diablo II at least (I haven't checked this in Diablo III yet; having too much fun killing things) when a Fallen Shaman would resurrect a Fallen, the already killed monster would grant you no more experience.

How would I solve this? Math. There are ways to sum up infinite series of numbers that (so long as they're smaller htan one) gives you an actual number when you're done. Image!It's a geometric series, and I think you can get how it works by looking at that picture. So this is how I'd set up my monster generator. The generator itself is worth a certain amount of EXP. The first monster (or wave of monsters) would be worth 1/2 that amount, the second 1/4th and the third 1/8th and so on. Then, when you finally get sick of the diminishing returns and blow up the monster generator, you find that it's worth the sum rest of the square. So the experience gains for that monster and it's spawn are fixed at a given number no matter how long you have waiting, and thus you're pushed to kill the thing quicker and be on your way.

There's a problem with this setup; if you bury the mechanics in combat text (by the by, do I need to mention this is a strictly video game setup? Board game players would get bored entirely too quickly having to do all that dividing.) Anyways, what was I saying? Oh yeah, if you bury the mechanics where only careful parsing and some Science! will dig it out, your players generally won't, and might end up getting frustrated. "I stood there like, all day and still only got a measly 2000 exp!" It goes against that interface design stuff I was talking about.

Further updates on RISK updates

Ok, ok, one month is better than three, right?

When last I showed my face around this blog we were talking about RISK Legacy. The promise of the game is that each time you play the game changes irrevocably in new and exciting ways. It's interesting territory, stuff that I haven't really seen games doing before. So I'd been waiting to play the game for a couple months before we finally got a chance to.

Dramatis Personae:
Havoc Jack, playing myself
Barbarossa
Zerg_Rush
Napoleon

The game comes with five factions, so maybe if we had been able to rustle up a fifth conspirator that'd've been better, but you go to war with the generals you have. Or something. We divided factions between ourselves.

Each faction starts with a special power. Which you have to choose from two. Then you physically peel the sticker off of the card it comes on and place it onto the faction's card. So, for example, Die Mechaniker (which, for those of you who don't "spreckinze Deutsch" is German for "The Mechaniker"), they get to treat the space with their headquarters as fortified. That is, they get a bonus on their dice rolls when defending home. Oh yeah, you get a headquarters when you start the game, to place on a space of your choice. I went with Russia, recently upgraded from being Ukraine on previous boards. The board itself starts the same as standard RISK. It doesn't stay that way for long.

In the game we each also got scar cards, at first they're just two types; a space gets declared "fortified" by putting a bunker scar on it; that gives all defenders +1 on their higher die roll. Or you can have a space with an Ammo Shortage on it, which gives it a -1 to it's defense instead. In the first game, due to a border war I was having with Barbarossa Brazil got the fortification and North Africa the Ammo Shortage. Each player gets one scar per game to place on the board (provided there are enough scar cards left) and each territory can have only one scar. They remain on the board permanently, affecting future games.

To cut to the chase, Napoleon took this one down. He owned Australia. He got to sign the board (They provide 15 lines for signiatures), and he founded a major city (Erik's Land) in Greenland, because he he heh, those suckers are gonna be soo cold. I founded the city of Scandiland in Scandinavia, Barbarossa founded Jaynestown down in Argentina, and I can't quite recall which town Zerg_Rush founded. Possibly the Prussian Consulate in Siam, but maybe that happened in a later game. There are other options for changing the board at the end, (in a later game, which Zerg_Rush won, he renamed North America to "Twelvepakistan". Or you can choose to upgrade a territory card; upgraded cards count as multiple when trading in cards for armies.)

Anyways, with the first game over there are some changes. Cities on a territory mean that the territory is worth 2 or 3 for purposes of counting for armies at the start of your turn. So if I held Scandiland it'd be worth two and Erik's land worth three. And Napoleon gets a missile instead of a red star. The stars act as victory points; if you control four you win the game. You start with one if you haven't signed the board yet (that is, if you haven't won a previous game), and controlling someone else's headquarters counts as one, and you can get them in other ways. By giving Napoleon the missile (which can be used once a game to change one die roll into a six) you make it harder for him to win in the next game.

So we played the next game. Barbarossa took this one down, (holding S. America), and put up a major city in Russia, named Syktyvkr. (This is a running joke from our playing of Russian Rails, basically that any word with eight consonants in a row doesn't deserve to be pronounced correctly. I'm looking at you Kyrgyzstan. So we tend to pronounce it something like "Skeer-ki-veer-ki-verk-i-gard." Or something longer.) And the game evolved more.

In the box they have some cards blocked off in containers with tantalizing instructions. "Don't open until all the minor cities have been placed." "Don't open until a faction has been eliminated." "Don't open until the world capital has been founded." (How do you open the world capital? It must be in one of those containers.) And my personal favorite. "Don't open. Ever."

After the fourth game we were able to open three of them. In the fifth game we had one faction with another special power (having gained one from being eliminated) and a couple new scar types. Due to repeated provocations by Napoleon, who somehow tends to end up down there, Barbarossa scarred West Australia with a toxic waste dump that removes one army from that space every time he takes a turn. Essentially it means that holding the continent is only worth one extra army, a change I think we can all get behind.

So after five games what does the world look like? It's surprisingly more populous; there are cities all over Southeast Asia, various scars all up and down South America, a continent renamed, and five signatures on the board.
Napoleon
Barbarossa
Zerg_Rush
Napoleon
Zerg_Rush

Yeah, I'm still irked by that.

So what about the game from a design perspective?

Interesting.

So, I really like the idea of future games proceeding from the way the first one changes. Or, more generally, games that take more into account than the movement of pawns on the board. Richard Garfield's quest to make a game larger than the box it comes in is what gave birth to Magic.

Speaking of Magic, you've got to be careful treading in these grounds. You know how they did a parody set called Unglued? Well, you know what the two least popular cards from that set were? Blacker Lotus and Chaos Confetti. You know what those two cards have in common? Yeah, they both refer to Alpha cards*, but really what I'm saying is they both require you to tear them up to play it. People don't like getting rid of perfectly good stuff. I know I was unhappy to toss away the cards with one sticker still on them, one special ability never to be played. We even went so far as to look up the price of multiple copies of this game in case we wanted to play through it again. Beyond my price range.

Another concern with the game is, once we're past 15 plays, will we be able to continue to play the game? Probably, but if it's still changing at that point it'll only change for the worse. One of the options you have if you win the game is you can tear up a territory card. Literally tear it up. No word as to whether you need to sprinkle it over your opponent's permanents... anyway. You can make them better if you lose a game, so taking that option if you win (instead of renaming a continent, founding a major city, or raising or lowering the army bonus of a given continent) helps you control an out of control territory card. But if you play the game an infinite number of times (in this case, infinity is probably close to 40) you'll run out of territory cards.

Using stickers to modify your cards is probably the best way to handle that, but it does make them harder to shuffle.

How do we manage a play group? Taking the life of the game as fifteen games, it looks like we're going to keep on with the same four players throughout. Most games we invite people over to play, let them play, let them see how things are going, etc. In this one? I sort of want to keep the same group together, because it feels like the 15 games are really all part of one larger one.

Anything else? I think the changes could be a bit more radical. That is, I don't think they're doing enough to change the game. Or maybe I've got enough lingering resentment for how RISK worked beforehand that I could use more change. Still, it'd be nice to see "Nuclear Wasteland: Remove Great Britain from the board." You could print a "cover this up with a sticker" sticker large enough while still fitting it on those cards.

Even so, I'm still pretty happy with the game. Odds are I'll steal some of it's ideas in the future.

If we go 15 games without opening it, I'm cracking the "don't open. ever" pack.

*Hanging Asterisk. I don't see a good place around the web to link to for the chaos confetti legend, so this is a reminder for me to write it up someday.

RISK and its updates

Let's talk about RISK. You've played RISK, right? Everybody has. You take your armies and you conquer the world, only someone backstabs you and it all ends in tears. I've even talked about it once or twice on the blog here.* I've played a lot of RISK, probably running the gamut of potential game states. I've played innumerable games, including the time I brought it winter camping with the boy scouts. I've made alliances and nonagression pacts, been backstabbed, broken up other people's alliances, had bitter arguments over the rules and the terms of agreements. I kicked the board over once when I got eliminated on the first turn. I've played once on a double world with two boards, and I even organized my own RISK tournament. (Napoleon won. Oh, don't bother sending in for their tournament information; it's useless. The only thing I learned from it was that the proper spelling of RISK is in all caps.)

Given my longstanding connection to the game, it might come as a surprise when I tell you that the game sucks. Ok, not that much of a surprise, it's not like i didn't foreshadow it by telling you I'd be surprising you. But back to the point. Judging by the standards of today and the other war games you can find on the market, it's a wonder that anyone plays the game at all. Quick rundown of the problems with it:

-Australia. Friggen Australia. You get someone set up there and it becomes prohibitively expensive to go in and root them out. Meanwhile they're getting extra armies every turn.
-The cards. In the long term, it doesn't matter what else you do, the cards is all that matters.
-Diplomacy. I gotta say, I learned a lot of things about negotiations from this game. Trouble is, a lot of those lessons came via harsh penalties; you table talk because if you don't you're screwed. You don't form alliances because if you do, they screw you. You don't break a promise because that's a great way to lose friends. In a permanent sense.
-Only one kind of unit. Makes the strategies pretty straightforward.

That'll do, for now. The point is, while RISK was innovative and exciting when it was introduced what, seventy years ago? Game technology has moved on since then. You've got dozens and dozens of more modern war and strategy games that are a lot more interesting to play. There's a reason why we never seem to stop talking about Axis and Allies here. So why do we still play RISK?

Because everybody plays RISK. Everybody's got at least a passing familiarity with the game. So if you're forced to socialize with those long lost cousins, and they're having trouble coming to grips with the fact that you don't go to the bars for a good time, instead you stay up all night pretending to be a wizard or some such, well, it's something that they'll play. And it does have some merits. I griped about only one kind of unit above; inasmuch as that bothers me as an advanced gamer, the simple rules structure that that entails makes it a lot easier to play with just about anybody. The fact that at least one of them has probably played RISK before is also huge; it's always harder to get your foot in the door with an unknown anything; it's why I've played so many Axis and Allies franchise games, it's why comic book movies are the thing this decade, and it's why when I go to the grocery store and want pickles, I pick up Vlasic ones. Not because I know anything about pickles, but because I've seen their adds before and the comforting warmth of already knowing the brand name is enough to steer me in their direction. I hate advertising so much.

That brand name recognition is huge in terms of marketing the game. RISK is never going to leave the Walmart shelves because of that. Supposing your nephew is turning eight. You don't know a thing the kid, so what do you get him? Maybe you want to get him a game. If you know absolutely nothing about board games you wander into the toy aisle and look at the familiar names, and get him one at random. You pick one you recognize, maybe you dimly remember playing twenty, thirty years ago. What did you pick up? Monopoly. Or Clue. Or RISK. Maybe Yahtzee. Scrabble is for a more mature audience. You know- when they're old enough to snigger endlessly about spelling out dirty words. But back to the point; these games generate huge amounts of revenue for the companies that publish them.

So we've got a cycle going on; kid plays RISK, kid grows up, kid buys RISK for his kids. And while the player base is large enough that you can get steady revenue from this cycle, well, wouldn't it be better if you could turn these kids into true gamers, people who will shell out again and again for your games? To that end, Parker brothers, or Hasbro, or whomever, anyways, they've been publishing variants on RISK to patch up some of the rules, and to hopefully convert their occasional customers into more steady sales.

The first one of these that I ever played was called RISK 2210. "OK, so, you're in the future, right? You fight with giant robot armies. And you get generals with special powers and stuff. Oh, and you can conquer the moon."

Conquering the moon is one of my longstanding goals.

Later I got to play RISK Godstorm. In this one you're in the ancient world, and you summon gods. Which interact much like the generals. Come to think of it, it's suspiciously similar to RISK 2210. Anyways, in this one when your armies die, they get sent to the underworld, where you get to fight it out. When they die there? Then they're really dead.

I gotta admit, being able to sink Atlantis is pretty cool.

While these games are all right, they haven't exactly revitalized my interest in the brand. Sure, I'll play them, but they aren't exactly as exciting as I'd like.

Now, now a new one comes along. RISK Legacy. This one promises that the game will change, irrevocably, depending on how it's played. Interesting. I wonder how they'll do that. Or at least I wondered. I'm five games in now, and some interesting things have gone down. But I've spent too much time yammering about RISK in general, so I'll talk about that. Next post. Which won't take three months, I swear.

*For the people who are bored enough to click and are still curious, I haven't gotten much further with my Markov Chains. I've done some fiddling with simulations rather than actual solutions, which has met with limited success. Unfortunately, I don't trust computer simulations almost at all.