Conquer Club

I've been playing Risk for over 15 years now, but never read the rules until just now.

Very interesting.

I've been playing some weird, strange made up rules in the past with my mates it would appear. (They had been playing it 10 years before I joined, and had come up with their way of playing the game, and I played to those rules for the 15 years)
Their rules were: Mission cards, escalating (cards go up in mutiples of 3, up to 30, then down to 3 and back up again) adjacent forts, maximum number of cards to be allowed to be held is 4 before handing them in (jokers included in the deck)

But what struck me in reading the rules was;
World domination - you play escalating cards.
and for
Mission cards - you play flat rate.
I didn't come across the no cards option anywhere.

Your mates are very creative...

I have an old game from 1963 that has what I think are the same rules as the 1959 version. This is what we have always used.... except that we often played "limited escalating" (4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11....) and I don't remember if that was in the original rules or not.

I am pretty sure that Mission Risk is a "modern" variation, and I don't ever remember reading the rules from the more modern games. We all preferred the wood blocks, so the newer games never got used unless we were setting up more than 1 table. So there we would be, wearing the heck out of the game we found at a yard sale, while the shiney new modern game our parents bought sat relativley unused.

The biggest difference that jumped out at me playing CC was the inital troop deployment of 3 armies per country. We would of course either pick countries one at a time, or deal the cards. Either way, we would have only 1 army per country and then fortify 1 at a time.

There have been many rule changes in Risk. The USA alone has seen five. England a few more, and a few in France. These include changes to card values, initial deployment, etc.
Mission risk was introduced into the English version in the 70s, but the USA didn't see it until 90s.
I think the reason they never mention a 'no cards' option is to keep the game as short as possible. The reason they brought most rule changes in was to speed the game up. No cards is fine on CC, but I know I couldn't sit at a real board moving little pieces around that long!

The game of Risk is the only game that I can think of that has so many different variations. We would play that when your turn started if you attacked from China all your attacks that turn would have to be from China or any county that you conquored that turn from China.

From what I remember, I think there were 2 different versions of Risk rules, a UK version and a US version, and i think i remember liking the UK rules more. I'll have to dig up my old box of Risk.

Here is some good info on Risk rules:
http://www.kent.ac.uk/IMS/personal/odl/riskfaq.htm
Just in case anyone wants it

Well, with my real life friends, I usually play:

- mission cards (although I dont like them, but they make the game shorter)
- random spread, but you deploy the armies
- cards: escalating per player (each player first set is 4, 2nd is 6, etc)
- defense use 3 dice, argh!
- when you take a country, even if you have 50 armies in the attacking country, you only advance 2 more, if you used 3 dice. This makes the game very slow, because normally you wont attack again from your new territory.
- we usually have unlimited fortifications, but a single army cant cross more than one border.

Hasbro 1959 Risk Rules

Hasbro 1963 Risk Rules

Hasbro 1975 Risk Rules

Hasbro 1980 Risk Rules

Most of the ones on the bord ive never heard of. In real life I usually play:

World Domination
Escalating (same rate as in CC)
Adjacent Fort.


Is this common at all?

i think thats the one that most of us grew up with.. well me anyway..

My brother and I always played with how we thought war should really work out: 10 armies attacks 7, the attacker wins with 3 left. We really hated the dice and how they work; it always aggravated us when things go the way of absurd as they sometimes do.

The thing that's really most important about RISK is the same thing that's amazing about Monopoly: the people. There are an infinite number of permutations because of what people value differently, etc. Monopoly has RISK beat just because you have the aspect of money, which ALWAYS gets people going...

Oh, and you're supposed to decide before attacking how many dice you are using and you must move in that amount of men as minimum when you take the new country. Also the defender must nominate how many dice to defend with. It would make CC incredibly tedious to play by those rules though

As I remember from playing in the mid 60's, defender could also opt to roll only one die.

JerseyDevil wrote:As I remember from playing in the mid 60's, defender could also opt to roll only one die.

Thats the same rules as we play - but this can only happen on this site when 2 things happen

1. Proper Real Time games are made.
2. Some sort of instant sound is required - to promt these defenders to throw 1 or 2 dice in games as re freshing the screen takes too long.