From RIsk to Warzone

I played many fun sessions of Risk over the years.   There is something deeply enjoyable about getting together and putting little troops on a map, and trying to outmaneuver each other.  Of course, there is also that epic, grinding sense of doom and failure when the forces start to close in around you ... and the in-person game might still drag on for another hour while your world dwindles to nothing.  At least with the software versions, you can rage quit if you need to. ;-)

Each group of gamers probably had some of their own house rules.  There were a few different "Nuke" rules: in one case a roll of 6-6 would draw the top card off the deck and nuke the territory shown, marked on the map with a penny, and all troops on that space were halved.

In Games magazine (Oct 1981) there was a Risk-style game called Ozymandia, by R. Wayne Schmittberger, who went on to write one of my favorite gaming books: New Rules for Classic Games, Wiley & Sons, 1992.  I played the game from that issue for a while.

I remember the early versions of Risk for Windows 3.1, and probably bought two or three others for later versions of Windows.  And now there are hundreds of apps that are obvious knockoffs, clones, hobby versions of the original game.  The trouble is, when I went to find a decent Risk app, most of them were all graphics and no meat, or they had cartoon generals who were always telling me what to do, or irritated me within minutes in some other way.

The app I finally settled on was Warzone.  It starts off with the standard Risk world map.  Then it offers different maps in a logical sequence, introducing new game concepts with each one.  Then there was a button called "Custom Game" and ... whoa, there are hundreds of community-designed maps to choose from.  There are gorgeous maps of almost every continent and country, even one showing Germany divided into about 400 little townships.  Then the community got even more creative: there are maps showing castles, trails up the side of a cliff, forts, abstract geometries, 3-dimensional chess boards ... one even showed a water molecule where you are fighting over the particles.

The custom maps can be further organized into Community Levels, which are a map with a detailed scenario and rule set all ready to play.  These show how many times it has been attempted, how many times it has been won, and who has the quickest win in the fewest turns.  This last number is really useful for me.  Usually, I don't get to play at all until late at night, and I don't want to drop into a game which is going to take 30 moves at a half hour each.  Last night I was able to find two maps that ran about 8 turns each, perfect for the time available.

Here is one of the castle/fort maps where I played purple.  In this case, my allies actually cut me off from helping fight the yellow enemy team, so I should have gotten down those stairs faster.

As an example of how extraordinarily complete these maps can get, here is a world map designed to show European colonization, but in this scenario it is a battle for Europe with the rest of the world blocked off by setting them up with 100 armies each.  Once I was finally dominating, I was able to siphon off enough troops to move into some spaces which the scenario was designed to keep me out of, but I just didn't want the game to end, so I left my opponents with just one territory and went out trolling.

The map actually continued down further into South America and Africa, but it wouldn't fit in the screenshot.

So, here is a case of an app with a very active community, expending on an original game concept in every way, right down to a Mod API for coders to add new features, and a detailed map developer guide.  There is a big multiplayer section I have not even looked at yet.  Five stars.