Rethinking Risk Clone Wars

I bought this game a few months back, broke it out for a few plays and ended up dispointed and even disgusted with a game I claimed was broken.

Today I started a session of Risk - Star Wars: The Clone Wars Edition at work and I've started to see how it might not be quite as broken as I thought!

My problem has been that the Order 66 feature that allows the bad guys to take over anywhere from 10% to 90% of the good guys troops at some point during the game, the percentage varying with how long the bad guy decides to wait before doing it.

Today I started to see the balancing mechanism in its true light. Every turn the bad guy has to place a token on the board, if these get captured by the good guys they get extra cards every turn.

Up until today I hadn't actually realised how good a balance this is. Knowing that the Order 66 is coming means that the good player has to focus on getting those tokens. Those are going to keep paying out cards every turn. With a large number of cards you can buy ships, which allow you to have much better odds in combat, or use all of these cards for thier special abilities. Thats quite powerful.

We're only 1 hour into the game but I can suddenly see the what I've missed previously.