Addicting Game

Short post. Busy day. Having found this great flash game doesn't help, either. It's called Dice Wars, and it's a simplified version of Risk. The rules are pretty straightforward, actually. When you attack another space, both sides roll dice and the greater sum wins. At the end of your turn, you are randomly distributed a number of dice equal to the largest number of connected territories you have. Simple.

The game is really conducive to learning simple battle strategies and game theory. Because there's so much benefit to keep territories connected, you start fighting to have one continuous blob of purple on the map. After playing a few games, I found it easier not to look at the individual territories so much, but rather to look at the whole board to see the shapes of the colors and the control of the field.

Another thing to do is to envision the board to be a map of a battlefield, much like one is supposed to do when playing Go. You start imagining capital cities and supply lines, and you might start anthropomorphizing the colors. One could almost cheer when Purple overtakes a critical Green bastion in the heat of skirmish.

My best game so far was going from two dice on one territory in an 8-player game, to end up eventually winning the game. It was a happy day for the people of Purple.