Hands up if you’ve played Risk! Crumbs, that is a lot of you. One, two ,thr– wait, you on the left – that’s not a hand, please put it down. Oh god.
Risk’s a game that’s on pretty much everyone’s radar, even if they’ve never touched a copy. It gets a bad rap from many board gamers these days because, well, it’s almost 60 years old and plenty of bright people have come up with better games in that time.
It’s one of those boxes that sits alongside Monopoly and Scrabble in homes across the land, because people think there are only half a dozen board games to choose from and this is famous so it must be one of the best. Well, they’re wrong, but the frustrating thing about Risk is that it can be a good game. With a bit of luck, all the players dance around attacking each other until someone surges ahead and overwhelms a neighbour after an hour or so, and quickly goes on to win the game. Pacey, fun and everyone feels like they’re involved.
Sadly, Risk’s mechanics mean this outcome is pretty rare. Once players realise that the best tactic is wedging themselves into a continent and massing troops at the choke points, it becomes an hours-long grind, with everyone turning on any player who starts getting too powerful to keep themselves in with a chance of victory. It’s torpid, and boring, and if someone gets knocked out they might as well head home rather than watch a bunch of people slowly sliding a bunch of plastic men and horses back and forth for four hours.
If only there was a game developer out there who loves Risk but, understanding those problems, just decided to go and make a similar game which solves them? Step forward Josh Lamont from Little Nuke Games.
Lamont’s Kickstarter project Spheres of Influence: Struggle for Global Diplomacy might sound like it got its name from someone eating a bunch of cold war novels and seeing which words end up blasting out the other end, but it’s persuaded enough people of its merits that it’s within a whisker of its $35,000 goal with just over two days left on the clock.
The Kickstarter‘s keen to point out that while Lamont loves Risk (and similarly old and somewhat plodding wargame Axis and Allies for that matter), Spheres looks to deal with its shortcomings, even going so far as to provide a spreadsheet of differences (I know right) to draw you in. I think it might work.
Games running too long? Spheres has a fixed number of rounds, giving it a one to two-hour play time and letting everyone know when the end is nigh so they can make their final pushes. Player elimination remains, but has no bearing on victory – Little Nuke reckon that if you begin a game, 99 per cent of the time you’ll still be there at the end. Player turns are only five to 15 second long, backstabbing an ally is a much trickier process, and access to countries on the board is much more open, preventing the defensive ‘turtling’ that so often hamstrings Risk – if you want to win, it sounds like you’ll need to hit your objectives fast, not all dally around creating impregnable empires.
Add in resources to the board like oil and high-production regions, as well as special military equipment cards you can buy to help you make assault on islands, trash your opponents actions for the round or even nuke a nearby territory, and you’ve got what sounds like a massively-improved game on your hands.
It’s the turn deck which sounds like the smartest move, however. Each player gets a couple of cards each round, which allow them to do an action like move around the board or attack an opponent. More powerful empires – those who’ve captured oil-rich areas on the board like the Middle East and Brazil – get more actions, but everyone’s cards all get shuffled together and drawn one by one.
No more watching one powerful player steamroller their way through an empire before anyone has a chance to respond. Now, they might not even get to go first, so canny opponents can nip their attacks in the bud before they start, or create a distraction, or race to the objective they were aiming for and beat them to it. A lot of thought’s clearly gone into making this game zing, but I think it’s this mechanic which’ll really shake things up.
It’s a sweet $49 for our colonial friends in the US, but shipping elsewhere means you’re looking at about £43 for the UK, €62 for mainland Europe and a whopping $89 for most of the rest of the world. On the other hand, you can stick in just $5 and get access to the print and play files, which means a bit more work but could see you kicking your mates across the globe within the next couple of weeks, whereas delivery for the full game isn’t expected until February 2016. Check out the Kickstarter here.
