aznin wrote:
3. Only play "flat rate" games. "Escalating" is neat, until you get burned by someone getting 50 armies out of the blue. I like the idea, but it seems to favor the one-shot strategy over careful planning.
I used to think that too... but check out a game with only high ranked players in it. You'll see everyone spending 90% of the game making tiny, tiny shifts in position. Yet no matter how tiny, each one counts, and each one has to be weighed carefully with a total awareness of the entire board. There's no room for error in escalating... you won't have a chance to recover. Every single country and every single army needs to be taken into account. You have to hone in on the likeliest targets while at the same time blocking them off from other players and protecting your own rear, and this over usually no more than 8 rounds. Needless to say, you need to be so intimate with a map's layout that you could make love to it blindfold and shackled. Pedronicus, one of the best escalating players here, recommends forgetting all the shiny maps in their abundance, and just obsessively playing the same few over and over again with the same options. I totally agree.
Then, whether you're good at all this or not, playing escalating takes guts. Can you take 20 with 30? Can you reach their last isolated country and take their cards? If you don't finish it in one go, you'll probably never finish it. Screw up one time and it is done over finished. But if you pull it off... man, your adrenal glands are dumping everything they have right into your trigger finger! Oh yeah, wipeout! CC's crack cocaine. It's the hardest workout you can get without moving off your ass.
Flat rate games build a sort of inevitibility towards the end, usually... you can tell who'll win three or four rounds out. The end is mostly sighing.
Speaking of Pedronicus again, he once came on this board and declared (this was ages ago, when we were all young) that escalating games were the only true Risk game. I thought he was just mouthing off crap, and didn't get him at all. I had to become a good player before I agreed.
