🃏 Classic1959Parker BrothersHARDRisk rebuild deck
HARD
The map is a graph and combat is a dice table you can look up, so the rules land in a weekend — then you discover the game is four hours long, an AI that cannot evaluate a continent is a coin flip with extra steps, and resolving a 40-army attack one roll at a time is unusable.
You will get the loop working. Then the real work starts.
The weekend gets you a working game. What separates it from every other Risk clone is the odds readout and blitz mode — the physical game hides the maths behind dice and the digital version has no reason to. Build the combat resolver as a pure function of (attackers, defenders) returning a distribution, then use the same function for both the simulation and the display, so the number you show is provably the number you roll against.
- Difficulty
- HARD · 3 of 5
- First playable
- A weekend
- The original
- 1 team-years
- Released
- 1959 · Classic
- Genre
- Strategy
Build a Risk-style world conquest game, hot-seat plus AI opponents. Vanilla JS or React, SVG map. Requirements: - 42 territories across six continents as an SVG map with an adjacency graph. Continent bonuses, reinforcement equal to territories divided by three with a minimum of three, card sets that escalate. - Combat: attacker rolls up to three dice, defender up to two, highest against highest, defender wins ties. Get this exactly right — it is the one rule everyone half-remembers. - Do NOT make the player click through every roll. Offer three modes: single roll, blitz until one side cannot continue, and a pre-attack odds readout showing the probability of taking the territory with the armies committed. The odds readout is the single biggest improvement over the physical game. - AI that evaluates position, not just adjacency. Score each territory by continent completion progress, border length after capture, and the threat from neighbouring stacks. It should reinforce borders rather than spreading evenly, and it should finish a continent it is one territory from owning even at a poor ratio. - Difficulty by lookahead depth and by how much risk the bot will accept, not by giving it extra armies. A bot that cheats is obvious within two turns. - End-of-turn summary: territories gained and lost, armies spent, and a small map thumbnail per turn so the game has a visible history. Definition of done: the odds readout matches an actual simulation of 10,000 battles at the same army counts, and a bot refuses an attack I thought was good.
- The diplomacy — the pacts, the betrayals and the two players who agree to gang up on the leader, which is most of what makes a session memorable
- Session length as a feature; four hours is fine around a table and unbearable alone against bots
- An AI that is genuinely good, because Risk's branching factor is enormous and a shallow search plays like an aggressive idiot
Show the odds before the commitment, not the result after it
Any game with dice hides its maths, and players build superstitions in the gap. Compute the actual distribution for the decision in front of them and put it on the button — 71% to take it, expected 3 armies lost — and the game changes from gambling to risk management. Notably it does not make the game easier, because everyone gets the same information; it just moves the skill from remembering the odds to deciding what to do about them.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Build a combat odds calculator as a single self-contained HTML file. No dependencies. - Two number inputs: attacking armies and defending armies. - Compute the exact probability that the attacker takes the territory, using dynamic programming over the state (attackers, defenders) with the per-round outcome probabilities for three-versus-two dice. Do not simulate — solve it. - Show the win probability, the expected surviving attackers, and the full distribution of outcomes as a bar chart. - Beside it, run a Monte Carlo of 10,000 battles for the same inputs and display both results together, so the exact answer and the sampled one are visibly the same. - A heatmap grid of win probability for attackers 1-20 against defenders 1-20. Definition of done: the exact and simulated numbers agree to within a percentage point across the whole grid, and the heatmap makes the three-to-one rule of thumb visibly wrong at low army counts.
Not a clone — Risk re-themed and cut down to something you can finish. The angle is the important reel: it is what turns a project into a weekend. 5,880 ways to land.
Olympian Same Sofa
Risk, but local split-screen instead of online, set in Greek myth. Rendered in risograph two-colour print.
Build a browser game called "Olympian Same Sofa". The pitch in one line: a strategy in the spirit of Risk, but local split-screen instead of online, set in Greek myth. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Risk — its core loop, and whatever makes that loop good — and rebuild it as your own game in a different world at a smaller scope. Use your own names, art and audio, which you want anyway: a reskin of somebody else's game is less interesting than a new one that works the same way. THE ANGLE — this is the important constraint, honour it above everything else Local split-screen instead of online. Two players, one keyboard or two gamepads, one screen. All the multiplayer fun, none of the distributed systems. This is what makes the project finishable. If a decision would push the scope back towards the original's, take the smaller option every time. THE THEME Greek myth. Gods, hubris and monsters that are each a design problem. Bronze, marble and wine-dark colour. The theme is not a coat of paint. Let it change what the mechanics mean — a reload, a health pack and a locked door should all be things that make sense in this world and nowhere else. LOOK Risograph two-colour print. Two spot inks with visible misregistration, halftone dot shading, and paper texture showing through every fill. REQUIREMENTS - Runs in a browser with no build step. Canvas 2D unless the angle genuinely requires 3D, in which case three.js. - Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so it behaves the same at 60Hz and 144Hz. - Every tuning constant in one CONFIG object at the top, exposed as live sliders in a debug panel. You will find the feel by dragging those, not by prompting. - All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic. - Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files. - Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax. BUILD ORDER 1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles, at the reduced scope the angle demands. No theme, no art, no audio. Make it fun as rectangles first. 2. The angle's consequences. Cutting to bots, or to turn-based, or to one level changes the design rather than just shrinking it — find out how and rewrite step 1. 3. The theme, as content and data. 4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works. Start by writing a one-page plan: the core loop, what the angle removes and what that frees you to do properly, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.
Half the time one of these already does what you wanted, and the other half it saves you a week of solving a problem someone documented in 1997.
One count per game. No account — it is tied to a salted hash of your IP, which is not stored in a form anyone can reverse. Every build adds 1 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Risk to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Risk is HARD (3 of 5). You will get the loop working. Then the real work starts. The map is a graph and combat is a dice table you can look up, so the rules land in a weekend — then you discover the game is four hours long, an AI that cannot evaluate a continent is a coin flip with extra steps, and resolving a 40-army attack one roll at a time is unusable. Reckon on a weekend to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 1 team-years Parker Brothers spent.
What makes Risk hard to rebuild?
The map is a graph and combat is a dice table you can look up, so the rules land in a weekend — then you discover the game is four hours long, an AI that cannot evaluate a continent is a coin flip with extra steps, and resolving a 40-army attack one roll at a time is unusable. That is why it sits at HARD rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is show the odds before the commitment, not the result after it — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a Risk clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Risk — the original took Parker Brothers on the order of 1 team-years, released in 1959 on Classic. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about a weekend, and then keep going for as long as it stays interesting. Any figure that claims otherwise is measuring a prototype and calling it a game.
What do I lose by building my own Risk?
The diplomacy — the pacts, the betrayals and the two players who agree to gang up on the leader, which is most of what makes a session memorable. Session length as a feature; four hours is fine around a table and unbearable alone against bots. An AI that is genuinely good, because Risk's branching factor is enormous and a shallow search plays like an aggressive idiot. Those are the parts a prompt will not hand you.
Which AI coding agent should I use to build it?
Any of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will handle this prompt. Paste it as your first message, let the agent scaffold the project, then iterate on feel — the second, third and tenth prompts are where a game actually gets good. Work in an empty folder or a fresh git branch so you can throw it away cheaply.
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