Victors United Coupon
Victors United, still our favorite take on an a Risk Online game, is generously offering all Strategy Theatre readers a free month of their premium membership.
Thank you to Shane and the team for this generous offer!
All you need to do to use it is click this link, and follow the instructions at the bottom of the page:
Victors United FREE MONTH Coupon
Getting Started
Joining Victors United is simple.
Once you’re past the invite wall (you can get your invite on Twitter @victorsunited) you’ll see
Interface & Design
The first thing you’re likely to notice is how much more professional the site looks than some of its competitors. The design is clear, sleek, and easy to navigate. The many game and account options are set up in tabbed menus so it never becomes confusing. One nice design feature is that from your homepage you can see a selection of games that are waiting for players, so you can always jump right in and start playing (plus it makes it easier to keep tabs on your rivals).
Gameplay & Maps
Playing is a blast and the built in diplomacy feature takes the game to new heights. There are plenty of rule variants to keep you busy but real time games are hard to get going at this stage. A thoughtful gaming experience has left very few pain points.
There are only 15 maps but they are all gorgeous and well thought out. Each has a unique interactive layer to keep it interesting. They have a team of skilled map designers so expect more on the way.
Community
The community is small but engaged and growing quickly. However all the tools are in place to be a highly communal site. Forums seem small for now, but the user profiles have depth, and the scoreboard has many options to rank on. There is even a wiki and developer blog.
Overall
Still in beta, this multi-member team is highly talented and experienced. Updates and fixes are rapid and the developers are active in the community. It seems to be a professional operation dedicated to making it’s mark in Risk based gaming. I highly recommend you check out Victors United if you like Risk Games.
Conquest – Proxy studios
Conquest is an indie turn-based strategy, but unlike Risk games all the moves play out at the end of each turn.
Image from RockPaperShotgun
“The main ideas in Conquest are simple but solid enough. You have to use the terrain and the fog of war to outwit your opponent, while capturing enough citiesto out-produce him or her. When it comes to the actual fighting, you have to plan where your opponent will move and try to come out with a net advantage in attack power.”
The review over at Destructoid is pretty comprehensive, but it doesn’t answer the ancient question: squares or hexagons?
Terrible Swift Sword; or, Why We Play Strategy Games Online Now
I’m something of an aspiring Civil War buff (fortunately I have other qualities, as that would be a sad way to introduce myself at parties) and one of the things that interests me is the enormous selection of Civil War products. Books, movies, replica arms and uniforms – teddy bears. Things start to get fairly abstruse fairly quickly.
While you’re waiting for your Rebel teddy bear to arrive, you can keep yourself occupied playing a Civil War strategy game. The Civil War has been a popular subject for turn-based strategy. You can step into the shoes of Grant, Lee, and Jackson, and rewrite the battles you remember from history class. The Battleground series by TalonSoft included games of Shiloh, Antietam, and Chickamauga.
The next three days of your life.
But people have wanted to play Civil War games since before they had computers, and that’s where Terrible Swift Sword comes into the picture. The full title is Terrible Swift Sword: The Three Days of Gettysburg, and the game itself is as long as its name. Designed by Richard Berg, TSS is set at Gettysburg. Gameplay is designed to reenact as closely as possible the course of that three-day battle. The game includes 2,000 counters, an 8-foot map, 32 pages of rules, takes an hour to set up and up to 50 hours to play – which is longer than the Battle of Gettysburg took to fight.
And that’s why we play turn-based strategy games online now.
Review – LandGrab
Welcome to Strategy Theatre’s Risk Online reviews! There are lots of places to play Risk online – but some are better than others. That’s why we’re reviewing all the online Risk-style games we can find, so that you can spend more time playing Risk and less time, well – not playing Risk.
LandGrab.net offers lots of features and maps, giving players the opportunity to craft games to their liking, but the bloated and unwieldy interface may discourage all but the most determined.
Review: Strategy Game Network – Imperial Takeover
Welcome to Strategy Theatre’s Risk Online reviews! There are lots of places to play risk online – but some are better than others. That’s why we’re reviewing all the online Risk games we can find, so that you can maximize your fun.
First on the list is Strategy Game Network.
Realism in Online Gaming
Setting aside the difficulty of finding ‘realistic’ random dice rolls in online games like Risk, one of the most rehashed complaints of the gaming community is that these games stray heavily from what would be considered ‘realistic’ in actual real-war scenarios. For example, when playing Risk online it can be annoying that troops in Brazil can launch an invasion of North Africa (a distance of over 1,750 miles), and yet they’re not allowed to attack from Venezuela to Florida (a mere 1,000 miles). Other examples abound as to how the parameters of these games can limit our possibilities far short of what could actually be done in the real world. But is developing a ‘realistic’ war scenario the main goal of games like Risk or Axis and Allies when playing online? This article weighs the pros and cons of realism in online gaming by comparing three different games that can all be played online: Risk, Axis & Allies, and the most ‘realistic’ but little-known Squad Leader.
Oh, mighty Ukraine. If only it could be true!
Online Risk Strategy – Playing With Nukes
As a child growing up during the cold-war I used to have vivid nightmares of nuclear war. A mushroom cloud on the horizon often turned a cheerful dreamy adventure into a heavy nocturnal sweat. But such is the price for growing up with parents that liked to talk world-affairs, participate in protest rallies, and who didn’t keep the direness of the world situation hidden from their children. I like to think that I’ve grown up somewhat less naïve than many other children of my generation. But other than the world powers flexing muscles over Iran and North Korean nuclear ambitions, death by radiation hasn’t been in the headlines much in the past 20 years. Imagine my surprise when ‘nuke cards’ first made an appearance when playing online Risk. While the nightmares haven’t exactly returned, I still pause a moment before clicking the ‘trade-in’ button and think of the horrible symbolism of what I’m doing.
Online Risk – Strategies for Initial Set-up
It’s often said that the most important strategy consideration when playing risk online is how one goes about conducting the opening sequence of events. Indeed, there are several important things to consider when taking that first fateful turn. Ultimately it’s the first step towards victory or defeat. In light of this, there are courses of action for the first turn that are more likely to lead to more successful outcomes, while others can leave you struggling at an uphill battle for many turns to come. So what are the do’s and don’ts of a good initial set-up and first turn? Should you come out of the starting block like gang-busters, or is a more reserved approach more practical?
As usual, these questions have no simple answer, but instead depend on other considerations such as map-configuration, your proximity to an achievable goal such as winning a continent, how many troops you get to deploy, the positioning of your opponents, and whether or not there are cards involved in the game of online Risk. Lets look at each of these considerations to see how they lend to the strategic importance of the first move.
Stashing Troops: ‘The Hiding in The Bushes’ Strategy of Risk
If there’s one thing that is really frustrating in a game of Risk, it’s when halfway through your victory lap (the mop-up turn) you suddenly run into an unexpected surprise: a wad of enemy troops that is big enough to seriously wreck your empire. “What the hell? Where did that come from???” If you’re playing Risk online, then you can only imagine your opponent laughing as he sees you take a long pause before you inevitably cash in for a card. Game over. Insert coin. If this is the case, then your opponent has what it takes to succeed in climbing the ranks in the online Risk communities: a healthy dose of patience combined with a sinister plot. Everyone else got rooked by the guy hiding in the bushes. Sneaky bugger.
