Deep Red Games continue their diary charting the development of RISK II...

As I mentioned in last week's piece, the area which caused the most heated debate in the entire development of RISK II was the addition of new territories and territory connections to the game board.

If you play RISK with a group of friends on a semi-regular basis, you'll see how deeply the arrangement of the board affects players' strategies, whether knowingly or otherwise. Some players like to hole up in Australia or South America, both of which are relatively easy to defend, and watch the game progress around them, while others like to hold positions of power, straddling, but not occupying, more than one continent.

You can see, therefore, why any attempt to tweak the arrangement of the board is met with deep suspicion. We knew from our experiences with the development of the original RISK CD-ROM that any attempt to tamper with the board's global nature would be a disaster. We also knew that, while we wanted to make some changes, anything that we did alter would have to enhance the essence of RISK, rather than dilute it.

After much deliberation and heated debate, we eventually settled upon the addition of six extra territories, each of which can be used or not, depending on the players' preferences. The default settings are that no extra territories are used in the Classic game and all are used in the Same-Time game.

The six new additions are:

Oikiqtaluk
This one is part of the North American continent, comprising all of those raggedy islands that used to be part of Greenland. It makes no difference to the defence of the continent, but it does make it slightly more difficult to occupy in the first place.

Hawaii
Also part of North America, Hawaii connects the Western United States to Japan, thereby giving North America one more border to defend. Interestingly, Hawaii doesn't appear on the Classic RISK board, not even as a graphical flourish.