Who deserved to win?
Last weekend I played Risk with my cousins and uncle. We had a blast for about 3 hours. It's a very interesting strategy game, it really forces you to think about how to better achieve your objective. If you don't have a well defined and adaptable strategy you risk spending your game helping others doing their game.
My objective in this particular game was to destroy the blue army (my uncle). I later found out that his objective has to destroy the green army (me). I started my strategy by bluntly attacking him near Oceania, I used the fact that he wanted to win that continent has an excuse to attack him. It was very important to ensure that no one understood that my objective was to destroy him because it allows you more tactical maneuver space and I needed to ensure that I was the one killing his last soldier. If I didn't achieve that I would have to conquer 24 territories (a rather difficult task).
Let's speed about 2 hours into the game. I'm almost winning! I managed to eliminate the blue army from Oceania. I managed to conquer Africa, which guarantees me 3 extra armies everything. This last fact called attention of the blue army (my uncle is a great strategist - great chess player), which started to attack me from Europe. This was very important since I had an extra advantage defending than attacking (note: if the dices go square the army defending wins). Many times is better to provoke and wait than go bluntly directly to your objective.
At this moment the blue army was without any chance to bounce back in the game so my uncle wanting to favor my cousin asked her to finish him off (note: the player eliminating the other gets the territory cards accumulated so far)! I couldn't believe on what was happening! I was a mere 3 scarcely blue populated territories to win the game! I tried to verbally argue his move, but obviously my cousin understood the benefits of the move. At the end she didn't managed to finish him off. That task was accomplished by my cousin, which is a good player.
Suddenly I went from a certain and glorious victory to complete desperation. All of this without being able to show my disappointment! I now had to conquer 12 territories, while my cousin had North America secured, Oceania, a good part of Asia and an inheritance of about five territory cards from my uncle!
The time to be bold had arrived - this was the moment. One more play and my cousin would win it all. I gathered 12 armies due to territory card accumulation, put them all in North Africa and moved all my armies from Egypt to North Africa. My strategy has to try to win 12 territories with one play. The fact that there were only 3 players helped spread the armies around, meaning that only strategic areas, like continent borders were more populated. Looking around I noticed that there were about 13 adjacent territories (in Africa, North America and Asia) scarcely protected. The main hurdle was Central America.
Territory by territory I started my path to conquest. Luck was on my side in Central America, since I only lost 2 armies. By each territory conquered, my cousin's face would become more tense. I managed to conquer 12 territories, having 1 attacking army left! My cousin was desperate and I was enthusiastic praising my own audacity!
