wswingley

Very simple advice: take your time… especially on solitaire.

What I mean by taking it slow is moving slowly across the map. Running ahead and trying to explore everything tends to leave you weaker when you run into cities, dragons, and the like. Spending a lot of movement to get back to the weaker enemies takes too much time, so I recommend crawling across the map, defeating everything as you go.

On solitaire this is especially true. The dummy player rarely presses you for time, so take it slow and build your level up before you reach those massive cities.

Using a technique I call the turtle has won me 3 out of my first 4 games of Risk Legacy (all but the one loss were 5 player games).

The turtle is a slow build-up leaving the center relatively weak, but always keeping strong outer territories. If an opponent does break through the shell, they are often too weakened to do much internal damage. For the turtle, starting in an “edge” territory is key, demanding that only 2-3 territories form the hard shell.

One major advantage of the turtle is that it is slow. You tend to battle only single players each turn, while others are fighting back and forth over territories, you slowly ooze across the map and before you know it, you’ve got 1 or 2 continents.

Selecting mercenary sites, or factions with bonus troop counts helps the turtle technique just as much as the faction bonus giving +1 to dice rolls on the first attack each turn, as you’ll likely only attack 1 or 2 territories per turn.

I’ll reiterate what many have said before me… Farmers are the key to success. Play a farmer early and build the land around him to maximize castle scoring. You may trail behind during the game, but if you can keep a farmer supplying the majority of completed castles, you’ll rocket past everyone at the end.

One of the coolest things about LoW is the choice between going for “cool” quests with great rewards, or holding out for only those quests that give you an endgame bonus (through your lord).

I’ve found that insisting on selecting only those two quest types that give a bonus is a nearly unbeatable strategy. If you are lucky enough to get one of the bonus vp plot quest cards (ie. all Skullduggery quests give 2 bonus vp), get them ASAP. My common play partner generally tries to complete high value quests (not necessarily of her type)… she keeps up during the game, but I usually blow her away with the endgame bonus.

Naturally, the one exception to this rule is the Lieutenant… ****** him up quick if he shows up!

Allow players to either draft or randomly select one advanced action from the advanced action deck at the beginning of the game. It will make a huge difference in getting the game rolling. For further help you may also try to add an artifact or spell.