In the second part of our look into the development of RISK II, Deep Red Games' Kevin Buckner talks about the initial problems the team faced.

As Clive Robert mentioned in the first part of this series, RISK is one of the truly great social board games. Entire evenings can be lost as a group of friends pit their wits against one another in an effort to dominate the board. The trouble with this, from our point of view at least, is that the social element is just about impossible to translate to a computer.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that computers are intrinsically serious things. Give a human being three or four opponents and a selection of 100 or so troops spread across a dozen territories and he or she will take a couple of minutes to decide upon their next course of action. Give a computer the same choice, however, and you may just find yourself having to bed down for the night while the artificial intelligence considers every option.

Obviously, a good designer and programmer will find ways to minimise this wait, but without the social distractions offered by other players sitting around a table, even a five-minute deliberation can seem to take forever. So, right from the off, we made a decision that we had to radically modify the very core of RISK itself; its turn-based gameplay.

To begin with, and for a very short time, we considered reinventing RISK as a Napoleonic real-time strategy game. However, apart from the fact that it's nigh-on impossible to do this without the resulting game resembling Command & Conquer with cannons and cavalry, such a change would have taken us too far away from the nature of the game which we all loved in the first place. And then, in a flash of inspiration, it came to us. Having rejected the turn-based nature of the original, and in preference to the real-time characteristics of point-and-click-style battle games, why not same-time gameplay?