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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers.

I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.

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As an Australian, I have the suspicion that the decline of industry in the last couple of decades has done a lot of damage to that capability.

We've lost oil refineries, steelworks, consumer car manufacturing, and we lack much shipbuilding and aerospace. We have a lot of mines, which curse us with success: it's not economically efficient to smelt ore when you could be digging up even more of it instead.

Reminds me of how I used to play Risk (which I now consider to be one of the worst designed games in a similar fashion to Monopoly) when I'd sit in Australia and just keep building troops until other players weaken themselves with fighting. Of course it helps that there's just a single position to defend Australia and as it's the smallest continent, people usually aim to attack elsewhere.

“Modern” risk boards have Australia with 3 borders to defend including the normal and addingcross-map Argentina to New Zealand and Japan to Philippines (I believe this map comes from a risk computer game)

Have they re-balanced the continental rewards etc? IIRC North America had three borders, but was worth a lot more.

However, I have no desire to play Risk again as the dice mechanic is infuriating and it's almost the opposite of a euro-game i.e. Players can get eliminated a long time before the end of the game and the game length can be arbitrarily long. Also, if a player falls too far behind the other players, it's very unlikely that they can turn things around (excepting the infuriating dice mechanic which can let a single soldier defeat hordes of invaders).

Another major feature of Risk (more or less whatever side rules you're playing with around alliances and so forth) is the role of the cards which pretty much dominate everything else in the endgame.

Yep, and the endgame can last for hours longer than the rest of the game. That's when the remaining players get to argue and hate each other,

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