Avalon Hill DIA452334 Risk Legacy Game, Multicolor

This is one of the best board games I have ever played. You start out like most games of RISK, counting out and placing troops, trying to conquer territories to earn cards for more troops. One thing that makes this easier to whip out and play is that the victory conditions are not "destroy every other player" or even "play X rounds and add up points" but to obtain Red Star Tokens. You need four Red Stars to win a game, and there are different ways to earn and obtain these tokens. Every player also gets to choose one of the games factions, each with unique abilities and traits. Players don't need to remain the same faction after each game, but players will quickly have favorites. I really like this change because it adds another level of strategy to RISK Legacy - do you pick the defensive faction because you like to build up troops, or the aggressive faction because you like to attack more?Game set up is a lot easier than normal RISK because you plop your troops down and just expand into uncontested territory. It makes it easy and you feel like you're already playing the game instead of waiting for everyone to place their troops. However, learning the additional rules can take a while. I think we poured over the manual for thirty minutes before we played our first game.One of the really unique things is that you "unlock" extra rules, cards, and bonus factions as you meet certain conditions throughout the games. These additions can also permanently change the board. My group and I were able to add an entire new island to the board, that now connects Western Australia and Madagascar. When you win a game, you can also alter the board, placing a Major City that allows you, and only you to start there in future games, or if you held on, you can enhance resource cards or do other minor things to the board. Some of the unlock-able packs are hard to obtain - you will have to form alliances and work together with your fellow players if you want to unlock everything. We're 11 games in and still have one more envelope to unlock. We've done games with three, four, and five people, and the five person games are always the most fun.The 15 game campaign is just for the victory rewards. You can play the game past the 15 game "limit" you just can no longer modify the game board or resource cards. So with enough time, you can unlock everything no matter what.To sum up, many the pro's of RISK Legacy are: Easy set up, quick games (we always have time for two games, and sometimes three), unique factions, different every time you play, highly strategic, don't need the same people to play every game, unlock-able content and the game board changes.Con's of RISK Legacy are: Hard to remember every rule for the first couple games, getting all 5 people together doesn't always happen, there are some cards that really change the tide of the war!

As introduction: We're just a "4-family" as our daughter used to call us. We've always loved board games and 3 of us enjoyed playing Risk so we took a chance on this. We've only ever played with 4, friends have joined as team mates only.We've played 9 games so far, and this is one of our best family memory-makers. The 4th who didn't like Risk, loves this game! We've opened our last pouch of new game rules, twists, board markers, etc. and realize what our main board will look like now and how our games #16 and up will play. And it's great! We've even talked about how purchasing it again and replaying would change the outcome, but the "big" surprises would be spoiled, and even so it would still be fun to replay it from the start.We find it interesting to note how geography plays a huge role in troop build-up, deployment, conflicts, etc. and that the same real-world regions exhibit the same behaviors/outcomes. In fact, a lot of the game surprises have been inevitably played on similar real-world areas. Even though one surprise changed the geographical map.I will state we have different game approaches and that makes it interesting for our group to play. For instance, I'm risk-adverse but strategic, our daughter's highly defensive but risks it all at key points (and generally it works well for her!), my husband's steady onslaught is effective and our son's aggressiveness works well for him, although he tends to focus on his advances and forgets to protect his rear, leaving him vulnerable to surprise invasions. We've all won and all been eliminated once, but alliances have played a huge role in our parity. And as a family, we have strived to keep any "strongest" player from overly dominating the game. But wouldn't any group of gamers work similarly to stop an over-dominant player? I think that's also why it's so important to keep with the same set of players while the game evolves the first 15 games.We've tended towards favorites for our troop characters (oh yes, they're all different!) and HQ placements/areas of ops but then the game changes our strategy and our favorites no longer work for us, forcing us to change. So it remains interesting. But We're also looking forward to the 16th game, when the changes stop and then we can play around with the different characters and other choices to see how our games will play out with no more surprises. So we don't see this ending. It's fun! And what a great time the developers must have had with this. They did a good job.UPDATE: We just realized on our 11th game that we've been playing using the traditional Risk rules in that the aggressors upon winning a battle may only advance as many men that we fought the battle with. I.e., if 2 fought, only 2 may advance into the captured territory. This game does not restrict the advance though. As many men starting in the beginning terrotory may advance into each successively won territory, leaving one behind of course. Thus, entire massive armies may march across an entire continent and move quickly. This significantly changes the balance of the game and the strategy. Rather than expand quickly and leaving our interior territories relatively undefended, we now must focus on strengthening our territories as we go, to guard against an attacking battalion. Much more realistic.