Avalon Hill Risk Godstorm Game

Risk Godstorm is one of the awesome games from Avalon Hill. The pieces are very detailed, and the game-play is a bit different from classic Risk but the new inclusions are indeed worth it! The use of the underworld, miracle cards, temples,plagues, faith, and gods indeed brings huge twists in the game, and use of such things can easily sway the balance of power in the game from one player to another. Also, the fact that the rules even encourage table-talk, alliances, coercion, back-stabbing, threats, etc. makes the game all the more fun (and besides your going to do it anyway!). Even though this game is typically more than classic Risk, it certainly is worth the money, and its a good edition of the game to play with friends who enjoy such games! The only thing I'd say is they should have made a better holder for the game pieces than a cardboard holder that you put together yourself.

I am a borderline fanatical Risk player. I own all editions of Risk, including 2010 and classic. This game is incredibly enjoyable. The addition of the underworld is a pleasant surprise. Now you can take those dead armies and make something happen with them! Battling for control of the underworld is a fun new feature. And the new world board is also set up well. With the plagues, you can potentially have entire routes effectively cut off, so each time you play it is different. If you are the type of person who likes to set up an intense, involved game, and battle your friends for hours (and I mean HOURS) then Risk Godstorm is for you. I rated it a 5 stars for educational value, because you can learn the Mythology of the various civilizations as you play. Sure, it's not as educational as reading a book, but can you get that from playing checkers? Buy this game and invite me over.

Is this a super-strategic game on par with Chess? No. Anyone who's familiar with Risk knows it's basically Monopoly, but far more belligerent. Risk: Godstorm adds gods, temples, plagues relics, and miracles to throw a monkey-wrench into standard Risk strategies. This has the potential to make it far more enjoyable. However, if you play with the rules as they are, you'll encounter some problems. 1. Generally, the defenders win ties unless there's a God of War(GoW) involved in the battle. Conveniently, your GoW is the only god on the board there at the start of play according to standard rules. When you're rolling six-sided dice, winning ties is a huge advantage and the attackers get to roll 3 dice to the defender's 2. Needless to say if you pair up the GoW with a decent sized army, all those advantages will allow you to go on a decent killing spree unless you're very unlucky. The standard strategy (especially in the opening round when no one has Sky cards, the game's defensive "gotcha" cards) for the first couple of players is to supply your GoW with all your reinforcements (and maybe even a god by his side) and cut a swath of destruction until you run low on men. In a 2-player game, this is of little consequence, but in a 5-player game, it's not uncommon for the last person to pretty much be out of the game before she even starts since the first four players took 3/4 of her territories collectively and she had few defensive countermeasures. We found that if you started the game with more cards and gods in play and made it easier for a god to defend a territory that was being attacked, the turn order mattered much less and the game was much funner from the very beginning. We also tried using d8s instead of d6s - we're on the fence about that change. You're slightly less likely to roll ties or 1s so it weakens the defensive benefit of the Goddess of Magic (and makes it harder to roll triples) and temples as well as the offensive bonus of the God of War, but made the God of the Sky a bit stronger. 2. The "Sea is your Tomb" card is a bit unbalancing as it removes 4 specific territories, the continent of Atlantis, from play for the remainder of the game and destroys/banishes everything that was on them for a mere 3 faith. If you get the card, Atlantis will probably be yours since you won't play it against yourself (unless Pandora's Box doesn't give you a choice) and no one will put up much of a fight to defend/invade territories that could be permanently removed from play. There's only about 17 Death cards. Getting a death card for free only entails owning one or more crypts in hell at the end of your turn (there are 4), the Pandora's Box relic gives you one for free each turn plus you can buy death cards for 2 faith each. So someone will likely get the card at some point during the game if there's more than 2 players. The concept is cool in theory, but not great in practice. If it was one card out of 50+, I probably wouldn't mind as much since you wouldn't even see it every game, but one of 17 means Atlantis WILL sink unless the cardholder doesn't want it to. That's too much power for one card that only costs 3 faith and the destruction is far too surgical and precise for a Death card. We changed it so that you draw a random territory card and then destroy all troops, plagues, temples, gods, etc. on that territory and EVERY adjacent territory. Highly random with nuke-like destructive power, but worth it if you got little to lose. Now NOTHING is safe and it can be played multiple times if we want to ignore the normal 5-round turn limit for a standard game. We also had to drop Atlantis' continent bonus to 2. 3. Mortals have too much impact on a godswar. The rules state that gods only fight other gods since fighting mortals directly is beneath them. Mortals only fight other mortals as they can't hurt gods directly. Nevertheless, in a godswar, you get a hefty bonus for local mortal troops on your side... as if the gods fight better if there are enough nearby mortals cheering them on. So if the defending territory has 2 troops and the god of war while the attacking territory shows up with 12 troops and the goddess of magic, the defending territory's god will roll 3 six-sided dice and add 2. The attacking goddess will roll 3 six-sided dice and add 12 so she's almost guaranteed to win. Loser pays, winner stays. I realize this is nitpicking, but it is a bit strange that the nearby troops make such a huge difference whereas possessing Mjolnir, Thor's hammer, only gives you a +3 bonus and having 10 temples throughout the continent gives no bonus whatsoever. 4. The Egyptians and the Norse have colors that are a bit close. Not terribly, but play in low light and get enough of them on the board when you're trying to count territories, it can become a problem. So I hope in the future they make the Norse a bold red instead of orange. Or maybe the Egyptians can be silver instead of sandy yellow. There's other little things, but those are the main ones I didn't like. If you're a hardcore boardgamer and you're willing to make some house rules, this is easily a 5-star product. Otherwise, I'd say it's closer to 3-1/2 stars.

this game has everything and more that a risk game should provide. the integration of the God system makes the game much more involved than classic risk. these Gods add complexity to the battling system as well as adding modifiers to perks and soldiers. the Gods use cards that correspond to their respective strategies which cost faith, which is the currency used in the game. for those who do not like using the underworld, my friends and i completely cut that out of the game. there is really no point to the underworld, and the few god cards that use the underworld we rewrote.

This is a game that has the potential to be really wonderful, but the rulebook is so badly written that the game verges on unplayable. Be prepared to Google rules clarifications and take votes frequently at the table regarding how to interpret the rules. Extremely frustrating, even when playing with people who get along well. In a very competitive environment, this thing will ruin your game night. My game set had two Greek gods of war, and no goddess of magic, but I have written to Avalon Hill, and I expect they'll ship out the correct piece soon. We just put a sticker on top of the second god of war to "make" him the goddess of magic, and we played. Only a mild irritation.

Super fun for hardcore strategists.

Risk Godstorm is an awesome variation on the classic board game. Set in a mythic prehistoric version of the real world, it's not the world as it once was but the world as it should have been. The decision to make each player faction a real-life civilization allows the game to dive into five exciting mythologies. Even if the different Norse, Egyptian, Greek, Babylonian, and Celtic Gods are shoehorned a bit into roles they don't always fit perfectly, the concept of adding special magic cards to the game (some of them are really nasty!) makes this a great update.

The condition was reported as good. The box is in very rough shape and the board is torn in half. The game is missing all of the cards that are needed to play the game.