A week or so ago someone playing Risk appered in my YouTube feed. I didn't realise such a thing existed and since it happened to be on sale, I droped the $7 to try it out. Turns out that I was really missing out on something fun from my child hood.
After playing for a while I wanted to bring some of my expertese to see if I can win faster. The first thing I did was a lit review, so I headed over to Wikipedia. Turns out that there is even a campain planner already built. Too bad it links to the Wayback Machiene and the origional link does not exist.
So I hopped over to Google scholar. Do not put in the word "Risk" first, you will get the wrong type of results and it is not fun to sort through everything. After a while I came accross a 1997 paper by Baris Tan. Reading the math is hard, so the TLDR ir this: Attack with 2x the defender, expect to lose half-ish.
I am not super happy with the results of my review for two reasones:
- I want more information at low levels. The paper looks at 5, 10, 15, ... 30.
- I want to see the campain plan. Not looking one or two moves ahead causes a great deal of issues.