The Australian Gambit - RISK

There are a few games set aside that are timeless classics that everyone knows.  RISK is by far the most popular war game in the world, and I know I have poured more of my time and energy into games of that than anything else.  As old and great as the game is, though, it isn't without its problems...

RISK is very highly based on luck, is generally long (especially if you're knocked out early on), and has been known to have unbalanced points, most well known is Australia.

The Australian continent has 1 entrance, 4 territories, and provides 2 extra units per turn.  It is a common strategy to bottle up in Australia, earn 5 units per turn, and just wait until you can conqure the world in one turn.

So how effective is it?

For this discussion, we will be using the TRADITIONAL RULES OF RISK.  Yes they exist, yes they are written in the rule books.  The game is the result of so many different house rules that I won't bother to cover how well the strategy works in these settings.

Dice in RISK
You know the basics, the attacker rolls a max of 3, the defender, a max of 2.  Here is a table of how individual battles work:

Defender		Attacker
		one die	two dice	three dice
one die	Defender loses one	41.67%	57.87%	65.97%
	Attacker loses one	58.33%	42.13%	34.03%
two dice	Defender loses one	25.46%	N/A	N/A
	Attacker loses one	74.54%	N/A	N/A
	Defender loses two	N/A	22.76%	37.17%
	Attacker loses two	N/A	44.83%	29.26%
	Each loses one	N/A	32.41%	33.58%

I just wanted this to be public knowledge before we continued.  The Wikipedia article on RISK has this and several more charts for the game.

Hypothesis: Australia is the best starting point for RISK and you will almost always win if you can take and hold Australia for a long period of time.


Now, there is nothing wrong with the Math, it works, if you can take and hold Australia and hold out long enough, you will almost always win (if you attack at the right time, also).  However, I wouldn't make that your go to strategy, since....

Everyone else is doing it
The reason the Australian Gambit is so effective is that Australia is out of the way, and inexperienced players will be too busy battling on other continents to pay mind to your small choke point in the corner.  However, sense everyone knows how effective that is, its very unlikely you will be able to take and hold it unopposed.  Anecdotally, I've seen players who rush for Australia be ganged up on and eliminated first.

While you can still easily hold Australia, you are going to have to fight for control of it.

Taking Australia
Assuming a random setup where you have control over 1 of the 4 (5 if you include Siam) territories in Australia, players going for the Australian gambit will need about 16 armies (and probably more), depending on how your opponents react to you stacking all of your units in 1 territory.

Defeating the Gambit
As stated above, the reason taking Australia works is because most people don't see it as a threat.  If your opponent is going for Australia early on, you can apply several countermeasures early on.

1. Call them out - A little bit of psychological warfare always makes RISK more fun, and it will make them start second guessing their moves, which is an advantage to you
2. Get aggressive - Chances are they left a lot of open territories elseware, knocking these out really forces a player into shutdown.
3. Don't let them accumulate soldiers - Most people view RISK battles as an all or nothing, you go until you can't attack any more.  Set this thought process aside.  Chances are they will be building up their forces in Siam, if you can, leave some troops in India to take a couple potshots at this stack to keep it under control.
4. Get cards and use them - A player going full offensive in Australia will not be able to collect cards, you can really abuse this.  Also, keep an eye on when they are getting ready to trade in (5 cards), as this is usually the sign that they are going to go on the offensive.

Applying the Gambit

So just going for Australia is not an option against experienced players, you will constantly be harassed and won't be able to build up a large force.  You can learn to apply this tactic in other ways.

Beating RISK counts on using 2 of the 3 Ss.

Stay Silent - Keep out of the way of the big fights, don't make yourself a target
Stay Small - Don't Spread Yourself Thin
Stay Intrusive - As oppose to staying silent, focus on taking a territory every turn for a card.

Using Australia keeps you out of the way (Silent), and consolidated (Small).  Other options include playing nomadically, you consolidate in an area of about 4 or 5 territories, and each turn you take 1 territory and lose 1 territory, slowly accumulating cards.  There have been several games I've played where everyone is so hellbent on taking Australia I was able to set up shop in South America (or Sometimes Africa), and play a similar strategy.

Side Note: If you are defending 2 territories, the best statistic advantage is to place 2 armies in 1 territory and all of your armies in the other territory, this way, you have the highest probability of doing damage in both territories, while maintain a force to counter attack.

Conclusion: While Australia is no longer a guaranteed success, the same tactics that allow for a successful Australia run can be applied elsewhere.

Well that took longer than expected.  Maybe in the future I'll look at Objective based RISK, but next week, I plan to tackle the modern classic, Resistance.

Until then, play smart!

 

Pandemic! Difficulty Levels

Pandemic is one of the most popular co-op games on the market, designed by arguably the genres best game maker, Matt Leacock.  It features some of the best mechanics you can think of when it comes to the theme, and never fails to disappoint.
The most dangerous part of the game, those who have played know, are the Epidemic Cards.  These cards sit in the supposedly helpful player deck waiting to wreck all of your plans with the dangerous three actions: Increase, Infect, and Intensify.  You can set the difficulty of the game by using any where from 4 to 6 cards (7 if you include the On the Brink expansion pack (I didn't)).

While changing the difficulty of the game makes it harder, it does provide a small advantage...

There are 3 ways to lose pandemic, the first is to have 8 outbreaks, the second is to use all 24 cubes of a color (not have any more to place).  The last way is to not be able to draw player cards than needed, also known as "running out of time".

I have played six games of easy (4 cards), with the following results:

3 Wins!

1 Pandemic Loss (Out Breaks)

0 Plague Losses (Run out of cubes)

2 Time Losses (Run out of cards)

We have never had trouble working with the outbreaks or cubes, but running out of time is a big thing (one of the wins was on standard, where we had 0 cards left to draw, 7 outbreaks, 1 yellow, and 2 black cubes left).  However, having more epidemic cards leads to having a larger player deck, which means more time....

Hypothesis: Adding more epidemic cards makes pandemic easier, since you have more time to reach the cure.

Maybe easier is a bit of a streach, but how much difference is there between difficulty levels?

Step One: The Difficulty Levels
In the player deck, there are 48 city cards, 5 event cards and 4 to 6 epidemic cards, depending on the difficulty, just how much does this affect the deck length and chances of epidemics?

Difficulty	Epidemic Cards	Player Deck	Turns	Actions	Chance of getting an Epidemic
		53	2	4
Beginner	4	57	20	84	7.02%
Standard	5	58	21	88	8.62%
Heroic	6	59	21	88	10.17%

Players always draw 2 cards and have 4 actions per turn, meaning that you can easily calculate how much time a team has to beat the game (this assumes a 4 player game).

We can see plain as day that there is no difference between standard and heroic (for those intrested, you get at least 1 more turn out of a Legendary game which requires the on the brink expansion, but I don't know the exact card count to come up with the other numbers).  But how much does that one extra turn matter?

Step Two: How long to victory (or the more likely defeat?)
So is it actually easier to play on standard than beginner?  For this, we need to look at how long it usually takes to win.

In pandemic, you need to have 5 cards of the same color and use an action at a research station to win discover a cure, 4 cures wins the game.  It takes a lot of numbers to figure out just how many turns it takes for an average pandemic win, given different abilities and assuming that you are moving around, but will look at how often it takes to get all 5 cards of a color on the table.

Cards	Chances of a Certain Color	# Of turns til 5 appear	To Complete a cure	4 times
	12	(1/.13)	Assuming it takes 2 extra turns to get the cure	(Assuming you work on 2 cures at once)
57	21.05%	8	10	20
58	20.69%	8	10	20

Side Note: If you have the researcher and the scientist, you can theoretically win the game in 3 rounds, now, the chance of this happening is so small, it didn't even register when I calculated it in google calc.

The .13 comes from the card drawing probability that you have (x/y)+(x-1/y-1)..... until you reach a certain number of cards, in this case 5.
Now this is actually low, since it doesn't take into account the first 2 draws of a player don't have epidemic cards (meaning about 22% chance for these).
This goes to show how intense pandemic is, it looks to take the entire game and luck to even have a shot at victory.  From this angle, it looks like the extra turn would be benificial, as there is such a small margin for error, however, that extra turn would end with an epidemic, so we need to see...

Step Three: Chances of losing on the last epidemic
An epidemic has 3 steps, increase, infect, multiply...

1. Increase...keep this in mind for later.
2. Infect...an infection card you haven't seen yet
3. Intensify...all discarded infection cards go back on the top of the draw pile
4. And then the killer: Draw infected cities.

Its the drawing infected cities that causes the loss. so we will focus on that.  If it is the last epidemic on an standard game, you will be drawing 4 cards.  According the the shuffle rules for epidemic cards (shuffled into stacked piles), you will be looking at having about 10 rounds between epidemics, meaning you would have 31 cards in the infection discard pile when you intensify (3 * 10 +1 (infect)).  Now, I'm going to guess at this point you have 5 outbreaks (about 1.25 outbreaks per epidemic), and that you have been very fortunate as to not be in too much trouble with cubes, so based on the number of cities you have ready to outbreak....

Cities Ready to Outbreak	Expected Outbreaks
	Cities/30+Cities/29+Cities/28+Cities/27
1	0.140567414705346
2	0.281134829410691
3	0.421702244116037
4	0.562269658821383
5	0.702837073526729
6	0.843404488232074
7	0.98397190293742
8	1.12453931764277
9	1.26510673234811
10	1.40567414705346

So if you've been doing your job, chances are you will be fine, now, these don't take into account chained out breaks, but it actually doesn't look that scary, unless you are down to 7 cities with 3 cubes in them (7*3 is 28, meaning at this point, the cubes are to be an issue as well).

Conclusion
First, lets look at some numbers we learned
20%, the chance of getting a card of a specific color
12, 6, and 5, You have 12 cards of a certain color, meaning if you burn more than 6 of these cards for research stations or travel, you can't win
20 or 21, the number of turns in a game.

After looking at the results (and using anecdotal evidence), I would have to say the standard game is just a little bit easier than a beginner game, overall, you get 4 more actions in a game where actions mean everything, and if you have been playing good prevention, you run a very small risk of outbreaking.  Now, this being said, most of these differences (even in difficulty) are well within the 5% error that makes a result valid.  So, it doesn't even really make the game that much more challenging, or easy.

However, telling new players they are playing on heroic will never stop being fun.

So I plan to try to do one of these every week.  Next week, I will try to find out just how powerful Australia is in a game of risk, but until then, play smart!