I've mentioned this before, but wanted to revisit it. It's Hasbro's latest version of Risk, but they're doing things differently this time. It's a specially designed version on which you will play 15 games; throughout the process the landscape will be forever changed by your actions. Territories become permanently scarred, making them harder (or easier) to defend. Cities will be founded. The board gets written on and marked, and cards get torn up and thrown out.

I was excited about it when I first heard about it, and last night got to play my first game. It is as fun as I had hoped. The setup of the first game gets you engaged from the beginning; each of the 5 factions has to be assigned 1 out of 2 possible starting powers. The other power gets torn up and thrown out, never to be used in the game. Powers to choose from included (minor spoilers from herein):

- Use your 1 fortify to fortify to any non-connected territory vs Use your 1 fortify at any time during your turn

- Get +1 to your highest die for all attacks on the first territory you attack each turn vs If you roll a natural triple when attacking and kill at least one unit, kill all defending units in that territory. 

and others that I don't quite remember; you get the gist. The game starts with each player getting 8 units on an HQ, with the rest of the territories being 0 unit neutrals. You don't have to conquer the world to win. Instead, you win by getting 4 red stars, which can be acquired in a number of ways. In early games most people start with one token which counts for one, and each HQ (everyone starts with one) counts for one as well. You can get more by taking over others' HQs, or by trading in resource cards for the tokens (I believe more ways to acquire them come into play later). Throughout the 15 games, certain things will happen that allow you to open packets in the game box that describe new changes to the world. One that we got to open in our first game was by eliminating a player (players that lose all their units ("knocked out") have the opportunity to come back on their next turn as long as there is a legal place to start... they are only eliminated if they can't come back on that first turn after being knocked out). This gave us new scars to use in future games, as well as new powers to put on each faction (but only once they've been knocked out in a future game!). 

Overall, it's a really fun game that is definitely still Risk but with fun new twists. I recommend it highly for anyone who has a regular gaming group (I don't think it'd be quite as good with new people each time). 

I got it for Christmas and it looks pretty cool. I'm looking forward to playing it with my gamer buddies.

If you roll a natural triple when attacking and kill at least one unit, kill all defending units in that territory. 

 We use to play this 30+ years ago when I played in college.  We called it a nuclear bomb.. We also had a related rule where if you rolled trip aces, you lost all of the armies in your attacking territory but 1.. We called it famine.