Where to Play Risk Online

Risk is one of my favorite games, and I've searched for a long time for a good place to play Risk online. Unfortunately, most online Risk games require you to pay to play, or have a lousy interface. But I have finally found a great place to play Risk online for free.

It doesn't call itself Risk because the name Risk is copyrighted. It calls itself DominateGame. It can be found at dominategame.com.

The upsides of this version of Risk are numerous. Many Risk interfaces require you to distribute your armies one at a time between a conquered territory and the territory you conquered it from. If you have a lot of armies, this can take forever. DominateGame solves this problem by using a sliding bar. Just slide it back and forth to determine how many armies go in each territory. Another great feature is the "Do or Die" feature, which allows you to click between two territories once and attack until you either win or have no armies left. Repeated attacks between large sets of armies make Risk a long game. "Do or Die" prevents that.

When you play Risk online through DominateGame, you can select multiple features for your game. You can have each set of exchanged cards more valuable than the last (as in the official rules of Risk) or have each one the same value. You can play with capitols or without. In a game with capitols, you select a territory, and if an opponent conquers that territory, you are out and the conqueror gets all your territories. There are many, many other options, some that aren't even available in traditional Risk.

By far the most interesting type of game is a "blind map" game. In this game, the only territories you can see are your own and the ones adjacent to them. All others appear as gray, and you don't know who has them or how many armies are in them. Since Risk is a board game, "blind map" would be impossible with regular Risk. Just another thing that makes DominateGame so great. That's why I love to play Risk online.

A game can have up to 6 players. As any Risk player knows, 5 or 6 players is ideal.

There are a few downsides to DominateGame. For one, the chat feature has to be opened in a separate window, so many players ignore it. Any Risk player knows how important it is during a game to communicate with your opponents. Another downside is that, when there are too many players logged on to the system, it can stall. Since there's a timer on your turn, if it stalls during your turn, the timer could run out before you finish and you'll be kicked out of the game. This rarely happens, though.

In spite of the downsides, DominateGame is a great interface to play Risk online with. Sometimes I feel like I'll play Risk online forever and never go back to the board game.