Today, P and I spent several pockets of the day playing Risk, for 2 players. We took turns placing our armies and later applying new armies and attacking. Adding is required a lot (P referred to it as a counting game!), and then we consulted a chart we created to determine what the total number of added countries we each controlled was when divided by 3 and rounded up (such that 1, 2, 3 = 1; 4, 5, 6 = 2; 7, 8, 9 = 3; etc.).
Strategy is the point of the game, and that was used to determine whether or not to attack an opponent. Comparisons of army totals (for example, 5 armies on Congo is greater than 3 armies on North Africa, and therefore more likely to succeed) and learning the Roman numerals (I, III, V, X) for the pieces representing the army numbers also was used. Figuring out how to win an entire continent to get the bonus number of armies as well as matching up cards to get more armies was another aspect of the game.
Although we did modify a few of the rules (like the increasing value of the cards), P was very amenable to the rule modification from the sample run with Jeff the day before. P quickly controlled Australia, and my attempts to maintain South America were repeatedly assaulted by P taking over North Africa and attacking from there. I had him read/sound-out/say all the country names, which is hard when Irkutsk is one of them! Near the end, I briefly held North America before he invaded from Asia, and he had Europe for a while before I took out Western Europe and swept through from there. We ended up stopping the game because it was very late, and he definitely was well within a position to completely win.
