Lord of the Rings Risk

This afternoon I was backing up my hard drive (my current hard drive has been developing a lot of unrecoverable bad areas near important Windows files) and I found an old file that I think is pretty interesting. A couple years ago I played a modified version of the game Risk that was themed after The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and I loved it. Normally I find Risk to be terminally boring. It's never really that fun, things slowly tilt back and forth until someone gets a bit of an edge and then rolls over everyone else. A good alliance will guarantee victory, but there's also plenty of backstabbing. Most importantly, every game lasts like 8 hours.

Lord of the Rings Risk solves a lot of these problems. First of all, the game has a finite length, so you can't just sit around and build massive armies and trade one territory back and forth in order to get a Risk Card (as in normal Risk). Secondly, the addition of "Leaders" and "Defensive Strongholds" that can give attackers or defenders an advantage against regular armies. The net result is that territories can change hands quickly but strong defensive positions do exist and (due to the scoring at the end of the game) can be worth the effort to conquer.

So, after I first played, I became convinced that LoTR Risk is far superior to original Risk. Given that I'm actually a huge nerd, my natural response was to prove that it was superior by calculating odds of losing armies in battle under different game situations in both regular Risk and LoTR Risk. Oddly enough, the conversations usually broke down as I tried to explain this:

"So I sat down and calculated the cost, in armies, of attacking in each game in every situation and it turns out..."
"Wait, you what?"
"I calculated the odds of a successful attack for every situation in each game; it shows how LoTR Risk is a more balanced, dynamic game."
"You're such a dork. Lord of the Rings Risk is for dorks."

Despite those early setbacks, I eventually acquired the game. I can say that everyone I've forced into playing it (ok, I think I've used it twice, maybe) begrudgingly agreed that it was a fun game. Either way, since I've got the information, I might as well share it. After all, according to Time magazine, it's this sort of sharing that makes me Person of the Year.

Download my results by clicking here: risk_odds.pdf

Enjoy!