How to Conquer the World
One of my more popular tweets was when I calculated the ROICs of the various Monopoly properties. I think this was mostly because a lot of us are competitive nerds at heart, but it was also winter at the time and Covid and so it resonated.
More recently, I’ve gotten into playing Risk. We’ve long had Risk as a board game, but it was tedious to set up and took forever to play and so we didn’t. Those problems were solved, however, when a colleague got us a version that we could play on the Nintendo Switch while we were quarantined. The reason the video game version is so much better is because it sets up everything automatically and you can play at pace.
If you’re not familiar with Risk, here are the things you need to know for the rest of this to make sense:
You’re trying to take over the world by conquering countries.
You do that by placing armies in countries and attacking neighboring countries.
When you attack a neighboring country, you and your opponent roll the dice. If your number is higher, the opponent loses an army and vice versa but the number of dice one gets to roll depends on the number of armies one has. In other words, there is both skill (the number of armies attacking) and luck (the roll of the dice).
When you conquer a country, you get a card.
When you defeat a player (i.e., they have no more armies left anywhere), you get all of their cards.
You can trade cards in for more armies and the more cards you trade in the more armies you get.
As with anything, there’s more nuance than that, but that’s the gist. In playing so much Risk, three clear strategies have emerged:
You have to conquer a country on every turn to have a regular flow of cards.
If you have a chance to defeat a player who has cards, you should trade in your cards and take significant risk to do it.
If you don’t have a chance to defeat a player, you should wait to trade in your cards until you max out the number of armies you get in return.
There are real world applications of these. They are:
Always be creating optionality.
Invest in anything and everything that has positive expected value and rapid payback.
Absent rapid payback, do very little until there is maximum return potential.
You may still lose, but you’ll go down swinging.
— By Tim Hanson