A filmmaker’s map game, renamed for America.

Risk began in France as La Conquête du Monde — “The Conquest of the World.” The Strong museum in Rochester, New York, says the French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse designed the game in 1957, and Gizmodo, in a history of the game published in March 2012, says it was released that year by the French game company Miro. Lamorisse is better known as a director of short films, among them The Red Balloon; Gizmodo says he created the board game on a family holiday in Holland, and that he described it as a game that would take about ninety minutes to play.

The idea was simple to state. Players command armies of tokens on a board printed with a political map of the world, attack neighbouring territories and settle each battle with dice, with the aim of occupying the whole map and eliminating everyone else. The Strong describes the result as a game with simple rules but complex interactions, and notes that more than two players may compete. English Wikipedia adds that players may form and dissolve alliances during the game, and that European editions are built around a limited secret objective for each player.

The American name came two years later. The Strong says Parker Brothers, the American games publisher, bought the rights and published the game with a few small changes as Risk in 1959. English Wikipedia gives the full title of that edition as Risk: The Continental Game, a name that pointed to the six continents into which the board is grouped, and says the subtitle changed in 1975 to Risk: The Game of Global Domination. Gizmodo calls Lamorisse’s French title “eerily descriptive” beside the shorter English one Parker Brothers chose.

The two traditions did not stay identical. Gizmodo says players in Europe had a secret-mission variant from the game’s release, in which each player draws a card with a limited objective that shortens the game; Parker Brothers added those rules to the North American edition in 1993, the article says. In 2021 Risk was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong, which published its citation on 15 September that year.

Parker Brothers, Hasbro and Avalon Hill.

Risk now belongs to a larger American games company. English Wikipedia says Hasbro acquired the Parker Brothers brand in 1991 and that Risk was later presented under the “Hasbro Gaming” name. By 2022 the trade magazine strategy was describing Risk as one of the games of Avalon Hill, which it called Hasbro’s strategy-gaming brand, alongside titles such as Axis & Allies, Betrayal at House on the Hill and HeroQuest.

The game has been reissued and reworked many times. Gizmodo dates Castle Risk, a version set among European strongholds of the 18th century rather than on a map of the world, to 1986, and describes Risk 2210 A.D., a futuristic edition that added underwater territories and wastelands to the board. English Wikipedia says that edition was published in 2001 by Hasbro’s Avalon Hill division, after a limited French edition of 1999 marking the Napoleonic era, and that from 2002 versions themed on film and television franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Transformers followed, sometimes several in a single year.

Older editions have been revived as objects in their own right. Wikipedia says a collector’s edition of classic Risk in a bookshelf-format wooden box was issued in 2005 in the Parker Brothers Vintage Game series, sold through Target stores, and that in 2008 the Hasbro licensee Winning Moves introduced 1959 Risk, a reproduction of the original Parker Brothers edition with its original artwork, wooden playing pieces and rules.

English Wikipedia describes the standard equipment as a board showing a political map of the world, with its territories grouped into continents by colour; sets of coloured army tokens; a deck of Risk cards, awarded to a player who conquers at least one territory in a turn; and red dice for the attacker and white or blue dice for the defender. The Strong lists Risk variants tied to historical periods and battles, to science fiction and fantasy, and to video games.

Design and documentation.

A board game reaches its players as a box before it is ever a set of rules, and the box lid usually does more of the identity work than any single piece inside. The lid carries the name, the logo and often a photograph or illustration chosen to show who the game is for, and that image can be redrawn many times over the years while the name stays the same.

Inside the box, the identity continues in physical form. Moulded plastic pegs, discs, frames and trays, printed boards, cards and rule sheets each carry colours and shapes that players come to recognise, and a change of supplier, licence holder or market can quietly change all of them at once.

Each guide in this group looks at a game brand through those layers: who devised the game and when, which companies have made and sold it, how its name and box art have been handled, and what its components look like. It separates what independent, dated sources record from what a publisher says about its own history, and treats the palette shown here as our own interpretation rather than an official specification.

Wooden cubes, a horse and a mark pushing to the centre.

Much of Risk’s look lives in its pieces. English Wikipedia says the early editions used wooden cubes in six colours, each standing for one troop, with a few rounded triangular prisms standing for ten; later these were moulded in plastic, in the 1980s they took the shape of the Roman numerals I, III, V and X, and the 1993 edition introduced plastic infantry, cavalry and artillery figures. An anniversary collector’s edition cast the same figures in metal, and the 2005 bookshelf edition went back to wooden cubes.

In September 2022 strategy reported that the Toronto creative and design agency Quake had been asked to rework the iconography of Risk and of Avalon Hill. Barry Quinn, the agency’s founder and chief creative, told the magazine that the older Risk identity was “not super consistent”: “A lot of people know Risk with the horse,” he said, “but there are other versions that have more militaristic logos.” The new mark was meant to work across many contexts and sizes and to have “the notion of conflict built right into it,” with “all of the energy in the mark pushing toward the centre,” while not depicting conflict in any specific way — so that the same logo could sit on a box about cavemen or a box set in space.

The Avalon Hill emblem was redrawn in the same project: strategy describes a simple red or white stylised “A” whose top takes the jagged shape of a mountain peak, replacing an older flag icon, and designed to work on printed packaging and game inserts as well as online and on mobile, and to stay readable on top of complex, graphic backgrounds. Both marks, the magazine said, had launched in full at the Gen Con tabletop-gaming convention that year.

For a design guide, Risk shows how a game brand can keep a single word, a world map and a box of coloured armies constant while its pieces, subtitles and logos change around them under several owners. Compare Monopoly, another Hasbro family-game brand, and Stratego, the Dutch game of hidden ranks. For this guide we use conquest red, map gold and atlas cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Risk’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.