the timboucher experience

I grew up on a strict diet of strategy games with my dad and brother. We didn’t really play sports or anything, but we frequently duked it out in ancient China, feudal Japan, and of course Europe throughout the ages. I read Sun Tzu and Clausewitz in fifth grade. I remember long afternoons, days & weeks spent playing computer and board games of empire-building. One of my favorites was always Risk though. It’s such a simple game and yet can be very flexible and complex at the same time. Everyone has their own particular approach to this game, and in my experience, you can generally learn a lot about a person by how they execute battle strategies.

In Risk (the “classic” version of Risk, anyway), my strategy almost always involves securing the Australian continent before anything else. Since there’s only one land-bridge in, I secure that, and then set up a few stronghold states and a buffer zone on the Asian continent. This not only ensure the safety of my Australian bonus armies each turn, but it also prevents any other player from capturing Asia early on, which would spell certain victory.

South America is an obvious next step, and depending on the game and the players involved, I may take it. I find it to be dangerous though, because of it’s being a pathway between other areas. You’ll frequently see a player taking over North America or Africa, and then setting up their buffer zones (as described above) on the South American continent. This can make it especially hard to hold onto. Sometimes, for that very reason, I’ll skip it altogether, and try to move into North America via Asia over the Kamchatka land bridge, while simultaneously coming in from Europe through Iceland. This fits into my strategy of disallowing other players to amass entire continents, and the bonus armies that would earn them.

Besides that, I have one classic tactic which I use in more or less every strategy game I play. In order to overcome a much larger and better equipped opponent, you have to keep things very fluid. The natural tendency in this situation is for armies to be amassed along a common border, with weaker territories just inside that line of defense. So what you want to do is make sure the border regions are in a constant state of flux. The best way to do this is to suddenly remove your armies from a previously well-defended border territory.

The expansionist opponent will almost certainly attempt to grab this formerly coveted spot. You’ll lose a few armies in the process, but at the same time, their forces will be split in half between their newly acquired territory and the place they originally embarked from. At this point, it’s important to attack the more interior of the two territories with everything you have. You’ve gotta break the line, and then flood through it into their weak tender undefended homeland territories. At this point, your goal is not to secure these territories forever. It is to set up a suicide expeditionary force who will penetrate as deeply into enemy controlled regions & gaining as many territories in one quick swipe as possible. This will throw your enemy into a state of rapid, poorly thought out defensive manuevering to regain territories it originally held, and to prevent you from securing a strong foothold that deep behind its lines. Troops from all over will be diverted and repositioned, weakening their strongly held front-lines immensely.

In Risk, this strategy is best employed in Asia - and at the end of the game. The goal is not to have one protracted conflict, but to continually harry your enemy’s lines in such a way as to keep them constantly on the defensive. This strategy is also especially effective against a much larger army than your own, allowing you to gradually grind down an opponent up to about four times as large.

To recap, the main strategies which I employ are:

1. Secure a small stronghold. The smaller it is, the less chance an opponent will want to risk massive casualties to capture it from you.
2. Prevent opponents from taking total uncontested control of any region.
3. Maintain fluid borders using a combination of feigned weakness and suicide expeditionary forces.

These tactics work especially well in “classic” Risk, but I’ve found them to be successful in many strategy games across the board. Not only that, I tend to see this as an apt metaphor for how I often find myself approaching creative work and research, and life in general.

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