Risk (game) - Equipment and Design

Equipment and Design

Each Risk game comes with a number of differently-colored tokens denoting armies (originally, one set each of black, blue, green, pink, red and yellow). In the first editions, the playing pieces were wooden cubes representing one army each and a few rounded triangular prisms representing ten armies each, but in later versions of the game these pieces were molded of plastic to reduce costs. In the 1980s, these were changed to pieces shaped into the Roman numerals I, III, V, and X. The 1993 edition introduced plastic Infantry tokens (representing a single unit), cavalry (representing five units), and artillery (representing ten units). The 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition contained the same troop pieces but made of metal rather than plastic. In the 2005 "bookcase" edition, playing pieces are once again wooden cubes. These token types are purely a convention for ease of representing a specific army size. If a player runs out of army pieces during the game, another color may be used to substitute, or another symbolic token to help keep track of armies. Standard equipment also include five (originally six) dice in two colors: two white dice for the defender and three red dice for the attacker.

Also included is a total of seventy-two Risk cards. Forty-two of these depict territories, in addition to a symbol of an infantry, cavalry, or artillery piece. One of these cards is awarded to a player at the end of each turn, if the player has successfully conquered at least one territory during that turn. No more than one card may be awarded per turn. If a player collects either three cards with the same symbol, or one of each, these cards may be traded in for reinforcements at the beginning of a player's turn. These cards can also be used for game set-up (see below for details). Also included are two wild cards that depict an infantry, cavalry, and artillery piece, as opposed to one of the three and a territory. Because these cards have all three symbols, they can match with any two other cards to form a set. Twenty-eight Mission cards also come with the game to be used in the Secret Mission Risk rule variant.

In the 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition the movement route between the territories of East Africa and Middle East was removed; this was later confirmed to be a manufacturing error, an error repeated in Risk II. Subsequent editions restored the missing route. While the European versions of Risk had included the variation Secret Mission Risk for some time, the U.S. version did not have this added until 1993.