Godstorm
Risk: Godstorm is a marvelous game, perhaps even a bit better than Risk: 2210 AD. (Perhaps. If this is so, it's because a few very minor elements are handled with a bit more elegance in Godstorm. The plague-land rules are better than the nuclear wasteland rules, for example, and basically interchangeable with them.)
I placed second overall in the GenCon SoCal Godstorm tournament, after playing three games. I placed second in the first round, but the guy who beat me had already qualified for the semi-final in a previous game, so I was tapped to advance. I won my board in the second round, a game in which pretty much everything went according to plan. In the final round, I probably earned third place. I came in second only because at one point, I noticed that the guy who probably should have won had forgotten to place the new armies to which he was entitled before moving on to the next phase. In any home game, he would have been allowed to just put them on the board and move along. Heck, in most tournaments it would have been allowed, even prior rounds of this tournament. However, the organizers had made a big point at the beginning of the final round that the letter of the rule was going to be followed. Everyone was hurt by this in turn ó I lost a couple of card draws I forgot to take, a few others lost invasions automatically for rolling too many dice ó but this guy, who lost eleven armies for forgetting to place them, was by far the most hosed.
The greatest double-plus bonus to the existence of both Godstorm and 2210 AD in the same world is that now I can host a Risk day with pretty much any number of players less than a dozen. If a small number show, all can play one or the other, and if a large number descend, both can be played separately, each with a smaller number of players. Who's up for it?
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