Thursday 6 October 2011

Risk, It's All About The Magic, Shazam

Just my thought of the day after playing Risk with a group of friends in a board game extravaganza of an evening. What really are the odds to consider when attacking someone? Well, in any given 1 on 1 there are 36 combinations that can be rolled e.g. one die for each player. This results in a win percentage for the defender an average 58.3% of the time with a remaining 41.7% chance of a win for the aggressor.

So when considering that 15 out of 36 attempts by the attacker will be successful and 21 will be won by the defender we need to balance the odds. To get to our magic 50% we need 18 of our 36 rolls to be winners! Thus we need 3 more rolls than we are currently achieving, 3/15 gives us the extra number of rolls we require to win, a nice 0.2 which means I need 1.2 dice to be on equal terms with the defender.

Aha "you can't have 0.2 of a dice" I hear you say, which sadly is true so all in all I've wasted 2 minutes typing this up! Stick to the rule of two to one when attacking and you'll be dandy although the above doesn't account for SOD's law which appears to apply to me in this game more than anyone else. Damn you Mike-"Genghis"-Croft!