I've never ceased to be shocked by the vituperative nature of the views of some towards Risk. I can remember one game shop owner and group runner saying "...but we don't play stuff like Risk" in a tone of voice that I had hitherto only ever heard my racist uncle use when referring to immigrants.

Sure, there's a lot of better games out there, but I would not be suprised if Risk wasn't a part of most gamer's early development. I bet there's more than a few Puerto Rico fiends who first learnt about strategy by consolidating Australia, and a significant number of Tigris and Euphrates lovers who spent many a Sunday afternoon as nine year olds mispronouncing Kamchatka and Yakutsk.

So to any potential lynch mobs oput there, I implore you to put aside your scythes, pitchforks and flaming torches, and approach Risk Express with an open mind and remember that, however you dress it up, taking over the world ought to be fun.

The box (once you've spent 20 minutes extricating it from the cardboard packaging, ok so maybe you do need that scythe) is the same compact, round, sturdy plastic bowl-and-lid affair from Monopoly Express. Inside you have seven dice (put the pitchfork down...) and tucked away in the lid a rules booklet and a deck of 14 round country cards.

The good quality dice are exactly what you would expect if Days of Wonder did a Napoleonics-era Memoir 44. Once face each for calvary, artillery and a leader, and three faces with infantry. Each card represents a region, displaying a map, a point value and set of the same symbols found on the dice. The regions form sets which represent the continents.

Gameplay is a riff on Yahtzee (step away from the torches...). Each region has a different set of symbols, arranged into Battle Lines. On each throw of the dice you have to fully match a Battle Line, or put a dice aside. The turn ends when all Battle Lines are matched, conquering the region, or there aren't enough dice left to fill the remaining lines. Points are scored for each card, with a bonus for capturing a whole continent.

Initially all the cards are unclaimed, but as the game progresses it becomes possible, and necessary to try to take regions from your opponents, especially if you want the continental bonus. The game ends and points are added up once the last card is claimed. The winner is the player with the most points.

The game is designed to be a light, fast, dicefest that plays easily and quickly. But I'm not at all convinced that it does. The cards take up a lot of space, especially when compared to the compactness of Monopoly Express, which makes the whole thing feel somewhat unwieldy and clumsy. Four players would need as large a playing space as for the original game. And I've either been very unlucky, or the Battle Lines required to conquer a card are not as easy as they should be. Near misses are part of the frustration and fun of dice games, but have too many compared to the number of near successes, and what was fun for 15 minutes becomes irritating after 30.

I know this is a cometic issue, but I feel that not naming the regions takes away a part of the theme. You are no longer conquering Asia or Africa, but collecting the Red cards and the Yellow cards. It may seem unimportant, but when everything else is stripped down, and the main selling point is the theme, surely it's wiser to keep as much theme as possible?

Is this a "gamer's game"? Of course it isn't. In many repsects hardcore hobby gamers are the last people the designers would be expecting to buy this. Is it a good "mass appeal" game, then? I'm going to have to say no. It's too fiddly to be quick and success is too rare to be satisfying. Adults will get bored because there's nothing to do, and kids will get bored because what there is to do, is too hard.

A shame then, the nice bits deserve something better. A system with just a bit more thought behind it could have made this a very entertaining 20 minute diversion. I said at the start that conquering the world is always fun. I stand by that. Unfortunately Risk Express doesn't feel like conquering the world.