Last night I played Risk with Amos, Gavin, and a couple of other guys I hardly know. The thing about Risk is that probability is a major aspect of the game (hence the name). I’m not kidding anybody when I say I never really understood how to calculate probabilty, but a few years ago I became terribly curious about the odds of winning a battle in Risk. I created a small program that generated random numbers and then averaged out the wins and losses finding out the best numbers to have when attacking, defending, and whether to defend with one or two dice. Needless to say it was very inefficient.
Anyway the point is that last night is the first time I’ve played Risk since making the program. I put my strategy into action since learning how substantially more effective it is to put at least two or three pieces on each territory and worry more about defense than offence. When it came to the game last night it’s true that I didn’t control any continents until the very end, but when I began to attack, I dominated the whole world. For the Risk players out there, rather than make your own program (like I did) here is a better way (not mine) to calculate odds of winning: the Risk Calculator.