In the third part of our look at the development of RISK II, the Deep Red team explain the dilemma with dice...

RISK, like every great board game ever invented, is a game of skill. But, like all games of skill, it needs that element of chance - the occasional spanner thrown in the works - to add a little spice to the proceedings. Despite the best efforts of some of the world's greatest minds over many hundreds of years, mankind has still found no greater way to introduce chance into any game than the introduction of those six-sided wonders, the dice.

Here at Deep Red we are, of course, in complete agreement with the world's greatest minds. However...

The major problem which we encountered when we first attempted to use standard RISK dice when playtesting the all-new same-time RISK (see last week's diary) was that, on occasion, we found the board thrown into total chaos by up to seven people rolling dice simultaneously, which could mean up to 20 dice rolling across the game surface. Clearly something had to change.

To counter this problem, we analysed the way that the dice work in RISK. We boiled down the relationships between attacking and defending dice and came up with a model which we think retains the essence of the original, but only uses one dice per player.

The model that we've chosen uses 12-sided dice, which have been used in board-based role-playing games for some time, but have rarely been seen in the more 'commercial' board games on the market.

Following our six months of playtesting, we've settled on a system where each player enters combat with one of five individually coloured dice. They range from the weakest, white dice that has four of its 12 sides populated with ones, through the yellow, orange and red dice, to the all-conquering black dice that's biased in favour of sixes. It's important to understand, though, that even a lowly white dice can defeat the powerful black dice... it's just not very likely.