A six turn limit.

I have now played exactly one game of Risk : Transformers.

From a read through of the rules before playing I thought I had finally found a risk variant that would work for me.

My experience of risk has been the original version which simply drags on and on longer than a game of Talisman! The other verion I played was the awful Star Wars : Clone wars disaster, which was totally broken.

So how'd it go with this game? It went very well actually!

For a start the box is just the right size, The two other versions I mentioned are in larger boxes that take up too much space. This box fitted a hole on my shelf perfectly.

Inside we have a very colourful board, Robots (transformers) and tanks for playing pieces and a somewhat bizarre L shaped piece of plastic for each factions leader, The dice are good quality and heavy.

Another nice addition is the plastic scenery. There are two turntable areas that allow you to join or break connections between two areas. You get an army into the zone, only to have your opponent swivel it so it no longer goes where you want it to go. The other two plastic zones have a sliding area that can be moved to open a factory where extra units can be created.

So what we have are some good variation to the basic game.

1) Plastic terrain pieces that move
2) Strange L shaped leader pieces ( that also fight with D8s )
3) The game is only 6 turns long

STOP! WAIT! WHAT DID YOU SAY?!?

Yes that's right the game is exactly 6 turns long. And this fixes the biggest bugbear I have with Risk, that it goes on far far too long.

So all of the usual tactics are here, take over areas, earn cards, mass for attacks etc, except now it doesn't go on for 20 hours.

After 6 turns you just count who has the most areas occupied to see who's won. Frankly thats just enough for the repetitive Risk mechanics, but here it's even enhanced by the ability to use the plastic terrain pieces to your advantage.

So I reccomend this version of Risk.