The Risk ruleset emulates an almost complete game of Risk with some slight modifications to the turn structure. Instead of turns playing out player-by-player they play out in a more 4X “all-at-once” fashion. This means that players plan out their movements and issue orders simultaneously.
A getting started guide can be found here.
A series of screencasts has also been produced:
As the ruleset is still in development game mechanics are subject to change.As with the boardgame version of Risk a Risk game can start in one of two ways:
- Players may begin the game by using the Colonize order to bid on territories they wish to claim. At the conclusion of each turn bids are tallied on a planet-by-planet basis and the highest valid bid will gain ownership of the planet. Losing bids will not lose any Armies. Once all available territories are claimed the colonize order will disappear from the order list. OR...
- Players may begin the game by randomly receiving a fraction of the available planets. Each player will receive TOTAL_PLANETS / MAX_PLAYERS planets. If random planet assignment is turned on the Colonize order is never available. Players can still colonize adjacent planets with the Move order
Once a player has gained ownership of a planet they can begin issuing regular movements, hence beginning play. Risk, unlike earlier Thousand Parsec Rulesets, is incredibly simple. There are no ships, all moves take only 1 turn, and the movement of units is cleanly restricted to adjacent planets. Here are the available moves in Risk. Orders are executed in the order presented:
- Colonize(if available): As explained above Colonize orders constitute bids to colonize a planet. At the end of a turn all colonize orders on a planet are tallied and a winner is selected. That winner gains ownership of the planet and transfers the bidded number of units to it, while the losers (if any) do not lose any units.
- Reinforce: This order will take units from your reinforcement pool, displayed as the "quantity minable" number, and add them to the currently selected planet. Since the available reinforcements is a global value it means that if you have 5 reinforcements you cannot add 5 units to each planet, you can only add 5 units to planets IN TOTAL. Be careful of this, as units are given out in the order the Orders are encountered; You may well use up all your reinforcements before all your reinforcement orders are filled.
- Move: This order will move units from a selected planet to an adjacent planet. If the adjacent planet is uncolonized or owned by you then the movement is quarrel free. On the other hand if the target planet is owned by another player the movement becomes an Attack move. Move orders will only move one less than the total available units on the planet, forcing players not to desert their planets.
- Attack Move: Any normal Move order that tries to move units to an enemy territory. When an attack movement occurs a number of dice are rolled equivalent to the strength of the participating planets. Each parties dice are then compared in descending order. For every pair of dice the loser of the pair will lose one unit. The attacker will win if their die is higher than the opponents, while the defender will win if their die is equal or greater to the attackers. If it so happens that on the battles conclusion the defender has no more units on the planet then the attacker has won, and colonizes that planet with his remaining units. If two planets are attacking each other simultaneously then the defender will get one additional roll on account of their preparedness for battle.
Should any one player gain sole dominance over the universe then that player has won. This means the player has either vanquished all foes and/or conquered all planets. Defeated players are not required to leave the game, and can continue to spectate.
On account of the versatile nature of the Thousand Parsec Client and Server several more advanced tactics for players to use have been discovered. The first such tactic is a strategy I call "chaining." With chaining players can repeatedly attack a planet within a single turn. This is accomplished by creating multiple "move" orders on a single planet, all of which attempting to move to an enemy planet. The big challenge of this strategy is deciding how many times to chain, as chaining too many moves will move all available units to a planet, leaving the original planet undefended. The second tactic I call "holding out." When holding out a player with very little armies can increase their chance of survival by actually attacking his expected defeater. This causes the defending player to get better odds if attacked. On the other hand, the player will also be partaking in an attack, which could lose him even more units!
These features will either be implemented in later iterations of the ruleset or at the conclusion of GSoC should a basic ruleset be finished early.
- Continent-ownership based reinforcements. This feature would extend the first iteration by providing additional reinforcements should a player completely control a star cluster.
- More advanced battle mechanics. More fortified positions will receive better odds, while wide open territories will face harsher odds.
- Rock-Paper-Scissor interaction of different unit types. This would involve 3 (or more) different types of units, either costing the same amount of reinforcements to create, or variable costs. This would need a tight leash on it as it could quickly transform the ruleset into something entirely not Risk-like and more 4X-space-game like. It is a possibility that the ruleset could fork into other derivatives.
- A bevy of other features from Risk 2210 A.D.. If you notice any features in 2210 you would like to see in the GSoC iteration please leave a comment at the end of the page.