Risk!

[Phage]

Any other fans of the classic world conquest game?

I've always been a big fan of conquering the Americas. NA is extremely powerful in terms of number of armies per turn vs number of points of entry, South America is similar to the infamous Australia strategy, except you can actually expand without having to derp around in Asia.

How about other types of risk? I've played LotR risk and had some fun with it. Future risk looks pretty cool too. Is there any merit to Transformers and Metal Gear Solid risks if you can get past theme?

 

[Tripicus]

I've long lost my taste for RISK, but I figured I would mention you might want to check out DUST, as people who like RISK seem to take to this game well.

 

[Ulminati]

The future risk (lovingly refered to as SPEHSS RISK! among friends) is ok. the wasteland tokens can lead to some pretty weird map setups, australia/south america are harder to defend and the 5-turn game clock means people in general are a lot more aggressive. In the end of the day however it's still risk and not very compelling.

I haven't had a chance to try Dust yet, so I don't know what it's like. there are 2 other Risk-like games however that are way better than Risk and worth looking into if you want somethign with a similar feel.

First up is Attack! It's more complex than Risk and suffers from the same issue that turns can drag on a bit. On the other hand, it definately allows for more strategic options. There's an expansion for it as well, but I haven't tried it. It's kind of a lead-up to the real game you want for the Risk-like feel.

Because no Risk thread is complete without mentioning that it's completely blown out of the water by Axis and Allies. There's a baffling amount of strategy guides, expansions, fan modifications and whtnot out there. But at it's core it's a very solid world-at-war type game that will take a full afternoon/evening to finish. Highly reccomended if you got 4 friends who aren't afraid to sit down and learn the rules.

Like risk, they're all ameritrash-style games. The people I usually play with perfer eurostyle games since they're highly superstitious when it comes to rolling lots of dice. So I usually don't play them very often.

[edit]

It should probably be stressed at this point that "ameritrash" isn't necessairely a bad thing. It's just a term regularily used to differentiate between american-style games that are usually built around a theme and include a lot of random luck factors and eurostyle games where luck usually plays less of a role and the temeatic components are more of a window dressing. Also, ameritrash games are typically about killing off all the other guys little dudes, whereas Eurostyle games are usually about who collects the most resources in a set timeframe. See the BGG definitions if in doubt: Ameritrash vs Eurogame

 

[Tripicus]

The only other RISK I played was 2210 twice. Being unfamiliar with the action cards makes for nasty surprises, and can be irritating getting kicked around initially until you know which cards you want to invest into.

I didn't think of suggesting Axis and Allies because of the static starting locations, but in retrospect it's the game that replaced RISK in undergrad. There's also an interesting (I believe unofficial) expansion we used sometimes that stepped the time frame back a year or two with treatise and Vichy France. There was a random factor what happened to each individual unit of Vichy France once taken by the Germans. It seemed to us on average that expansion led to Axis victories with certain agressive strategies taking advantage of the treatise rules. I've never played any other expansions though, so I can't comment on those.

But yes, to echo Ulminati, if you haven't played Axis and Allies you really should. The rules really aren't difficult and it quickly becomes second nature once you start playing like most games.