Looked up a Risk variant: Ozymandia

January 18, 2025 | My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’ve been pondering the classic board game Risk for a bit, and wrote a few chunks of code to help evaluate the odds of dice rolling. Hey, it’s what I do for fun. It’s just how I roll. But I remembered that I had a book somewhere that described a somewhat simplified cousin of the game, but couldn’t immediately remember where. After a few minutes, of pondering, I remembered that it was probably in the book New Rules for Classic Games by R. Wayne Schmittberger. There was only one problem: I didn’t remember where the book was. After a few minutes scanning my shelves, I didn’t spot it. I suspected it was in the dozen banker’s boxes of books that I took from my office when I moved out back in July, but which I hadn’t had time to go through and organize.

I lucked out. It was in box three.

It pointed out a simplified variant that was described in the September/October 1981 issue of Games Magazine. Luckily, these old issues are archived on archive.org, and I was able to find the original. New Rules for Classic Games doesn’t actually talk about the bombardment rules (which seem a bit arbitrary to me, I’m not sure I think they add much to the strategic nature of the game) and I find the simplified diagram easier (but less pretty) than the artwork presented in the original magazine article. The major differences between Ozymandia and Risk are:

  • Ozymandia is a two player game, while Risk is typically played with six players.
  • Ozymandia has simultaneous movement: players craft their moves secretly, but they are revealed and resolved simultaneously.
  • The goal of Ozymandia is to control five cities. The map is significantly smaller, and makes a distinction between provinces and cities. I’m not sure I think this adds a lot to the game either.
  • There are no bonus armies from card draws in Ozymandia. People only get extra armies for controlling cities.
  • Combat is entirely deterministic, and is resolved without dice. The smaller side always loses. The larger side loses the same or less, until a two to one advantage is had, where the larger force will lose no units.

My thinking was that if I were to tinker around with writing code to play a strategy game, this might prove to be easier than full Risk. I doubt I’ll get around to it, but I archived this here just in case.

Write a comment