August 12, 2023

"Yes, a bit like Risk… only fun?"

How ‘troops on a map’ games snuck into my gaming heart

Note: The gaming posts on this stack are for a general audience, so I apologise to my fellow obsessives if I skip over any vital details. But this post was inspired by reviewing Lords of Ragnarok, the most TOAM-y TOAM game I have ever played, so if you want some of that good good stuff, fill your boots. 

I vividly remember the last time I played Risk, in the early 2000s. It was a 4-player game involving me, my wife, another couple, and a really excellent sloe gin. The game wore on interminably, with players incrementally increasing their control, only to lose 90% of their gains by the next term. One player quit in drunken disgust at his failed land war in Asia. The game ploughed its repetitive furrow until my wife suddenly swooped into my remaining African strongholds, wiped me out and triumphantly revealed a ‘Destroy Red’ objective card which gifted her the win. Then we all went to bed and felt distinctly weird about the whole thing. 

So when I got into board games a few years later, I rather looked askance at the ‘troops on a map’ genre, for which Risk was the unpromising basis. I was all about longest train routes and farmers lying in fields to get surprising numbers of points. But I was wrong about Troops on the map (TOAM) games. Because while I was exploring the elegance of ‘proper’ family games, the problems we had encountered that night in Suffolk were being solved, one by one. The result is a genre that I can say, with no hesitation but considerable surprise, is my favourite in games. 

This article is an attempt to trace the process of how what is broken in Risk got fixed. For me, it’s an amazing tale of iterative design and innovation. I hope by the end of these thoughts that you at least somewhat agree…

I’m going to take each problem with Risk, and look at how they have been, to some extent, solved in modern TOAM games. 

1. Player elimination as the sole objective. In the OG Risk, the one and only way to win is to eliminate each and every one of your opponents. This has two consequences: one is player elimination, the other is a narrowing of the whole design space down to ‘destroy your opponents’. 

If you are wiped out in Risk you need to go and do something else (almost certainly more fun but hey); this is generally considered a game design sin, at least in longer games. It’s fairly easy to design out elimination- recent game Lords of Ragnarok gives players a hero who simply cannot be killed, for example. But in order to do this you need to allow for other ways of winning, as the later edition of Risk that we played did by giving each player a secret objective. This is still an element of modern games, but in isolation can make the game unbalanced, as some objectives may end up far easier than others, depending on game state. 

More common is the situation in something like Cyclades. Here, everyone has the same objective, which doesn't involve the elimination of players, but does create friction between them. The nature of these objectives varies, but they are usually a combination of territorial control and the building of some kind of ludic ‘engine’, of which more below. 

So, objectives replace destruction, and elimination is written out. Problem solved.

2. Repetitive turns. Risk is long: but that’s not necessarily a problem. Last week, I won a game of Lords of Ragnarok after three hours, and no-one commented on the time taken, because it had been glorious, varied and FUN. The problem with Risk isn't that it's long- it's the repetition. 

The first repetitive element is what you can do, and with what. You have troops, you have movement (one space per turn, no exceptions) and you have fighting, during which you make no decisions but just see how the dice resolve things. This is the same on turn one and turn one hundred. Modern games, by contrast, start with players being able to do a few things inefficiently, but allow for a building up of options and powers (engine building) till by the end the game is a clash of titans. And, because games now give multiple ways to 'level up', each players 'engine' will look and behave differently.  

Risk is also repetitive in the context in which actions are taken- very often territories remain with a given player throughout, while others are fought over, over and over and over. Games such as Rising Sun, by contrast, incentivise dynamic play by awarding points for having won battles across multiple areas. Others build more obviously towards a conclusion, for instance the climatic battles for Ygdrassil in Blood Rage. 

Between these innovations, engine building and dynamic battles, the modern successors of Risk have what it lacks- a narrative arc. When I say this I don't mean that they have bits of text to read out, but when you finish one of these games your brain will naturally form a story from what everyone attempted and achieved. The experience is rendered, in practice as well as in retrospect, all the richer. 

3. Ganging up and limited negotiation. TOAM games are mainly multi-player, with a few exceptions. They also both require players to share board space, and allow them to choose whom they interact with. This creates an incentive for ganging up on players who are momentarily weaker, so that stronger players can fight over the spoils. And this isn't fun, especially for the ganged up on. 

In truth, even modern iterations can call victim to ganging up, but efforts have been made to minimise this:

•  Blood rage alters the incentives of battle so sometimes it's better to lose, other times it's the ferocity of the fighting that's most important. 

• In Cyclades, wins can come so quickly that you don't have time to worry about crushing the person who's doing badly, because if you do, someone else will grab a win. 

• Inis makes combat voluntary, and prioritises negotiation and alliances.

All of these result in far more nuanced and complex decision making around precisely who to smite, where, and when. But smiting usually results…

4. Mechanical, dull combat. I’ve alluded to this above: in Risk, the only decisions you make are where to fight and how many armies to commit (as an attacker). The result is then determined by a series of dice rolls, during which you have literally no agency. Dice have not been banished from modern gaming, but combat has gone one of two ways. It's either over very quickly indeed, as in Cyclades, or it can to some extent be influenced by cards or other powers held by players. In Blood Rage, for instance, each player plays a card face down and this will influence the final battle score, along with the troops committed by each side. This allows for trickery and surprise while keeping combat short. 

   

So the problems inherent in Risk have been, to a greater or lesser extent, solved by modern TOAM games. But I'm aware that I've spent 1000 words telling you why these games are not bad. Time to tell you why they are so good. 

The simple answer is that they feel epic in a way that no other genre manages. There is an element of power fantasy here, no question- who doesn't get something of a kick from deploying a magnificent gold dragon in Rising Sun, or leading your Vikings into war as Beowulf in Ragnarok. The problem of course is that your power fantasies are always butting up against those of the other players, but of course from this friction comes the spark of narrative that, as I've said, is the special sauce of this kind of game. 

They are forbidding and expensive. They have long rulebooks and longer playtimes. But they are not serious- at least when I play. Your best laid plans can be laid to waste and it all serves the narrative of this epic clash.  TOAM games are to gaming what hair metal is to music: if you like Van Halen's 'Jump' then I'll wager there's a good chance you could get into these. 

As well as refining and rejuvenating the pleasures of conquest and diplomacy through TOAM games, the designers who have led this field have also influenced other genres, and TOAM-adjacent games are among the very best in the hobby. 

Ramp up the engine building, add an exploratory component and make the threat of combat more important than the fighting, and you're in Scythe territory. Lean into the assymetry between player powers, take a lot of design insight from war games, play it out in a forest, and you are looking at my #1 game of all time, Root. 

These games still have problems and flaws- but that's the fascination: what will people try next to deal with these problems, and will it work?

So. If you're a non-gamer, maybe this has given you some insight into what might be going on around these tables, and maybe just nudged you into having a go. I would love any comments from anyone, with whatever level of experience. Comments are just crowd-sourced references, after all.