Risk is a LONG game. Very long. Long enough to be featured in an episode of Seinfeld and long enough that everyone knows Risk takes a long time - even if they haven’t played. The fact that it takes a long time is probably the biggest reason why most people don’t play Risk, like Monopoly.
In all fairness, Risk is a lot more complicated than Monopoly, but yet both come down to nothing more than a roll of a few dice and a simple math. Dice rolling Monopoly is simple and quick - two dice, next player. Risk is a different story. Collectively there are five dice in Risk and the same two players could end up rolling those dice over and over dozens of times before anyone else gets to play.
Even for those in the midst of dice battle it is tiring. Having burnt an entire Saturday playing and rolling, I can vouch for the exhaustion. Thus, I set out to simplify the process.
And so I present the Risk Battle Calculator. It will take care of your endless dice battles and tell you who is left with what, who wins, and who loses. The RBC is intended to whittle down the big battles, but it can be used for smaller ones as well.
The RBC even lets you stop the battle when you reach a certain number of men, so you don’t kill all your men if you don’t care to - it’s quite handy.
I don’t have any data as to how much is cuts down the time on a game of Risk, but I’m sure it will help. So for those of you that have played and want to play, here you go. For those that haven’t tried Risk because you fear the investment of time, this might make it easier for you to get started.
That would save alot of time. Of course you will get the player who argues the results, this of course being the player that will complain about rolls that have funny hops or dice falling off the board. But I am up for a game of Risk to test out your new calculator. Who knows, with some testing this might be something to pitch to the people at Hasbro.
Free-falling dice were a big problem during the game I played. Some swore the table was tilted and effecting the rolls…one used a box…the other the game board. Heck, real estate where one could roll the dice was limited.
The calculator is far from perfect. Well, let me rephrase that as far from perfect in terms of flexibility. It’s math and randomness is a good as a computer can make it, so it is as statistically fair as it can be. I’d like to add some sort of logging or something that could produce stats and tell players more about their battles and strategies.
I haven’t played Risk in years.
But you think Risk is a long game, try Axis and Allies!
I think we should come up with a way to turn risk into a drinking game!
G+
How to you create the ‘radom’ effect?
Would you set up a test, have your RBC roll 1 dice 10,000 and record the number of times is choose each number. With that big of a population it should be 16.66666% for each number.
Very slick by the way, I wonder who came up with that idea.
Umm…well…the computer does the randomizing. There is just a “random” command that does all the crazy randomizing for me. I give it a list of numbers (1-6) and it does it all nice like. Not a lot of magic to it, really, just some effort to make it look nice.
I suppose I could add some sort of manual average or something, but with all the tests I ran with various numbers of armies for each side, the results were varied and did not show any sort of favoring pattern. Just as good as anything else I suppose.
I’ve noticed that a lot of other sites have RISK probability calculators that give you a % of who will win given numbers, but I haven’t see any web toys that actually does the rolling for you.