For the ilpast couple years, I’ve been playing a Risk clone with friends through GamesByEmail.com. It’s isn’t played in real-time, so you can enter moves whenever you have a moment and your friends don’t need to be online at the same time. It makes it easy to play with people in different time zone. I introduced Nettie and Peabody to the Risk this weekend, It was a short and frustrating game for Peabody as the yellow army quickly overran the blues and reds.
As busy high school kids we developed a quick way to get Risk played.
First, just distribute the cards in equal chunks. Those are your territories, such as they are. Second, regardless of how many armies you get at the beginning of each turn, you may NEVER leave more than one army per territory.
Results: (1) games finish relatively quickly. (2) everyone uses a blitzkreig style, so you don’t have 20 turns of someone building armies on Brazil to conquer Africa. (3) more fighting!
Might be a little less frustrating for Peabody because it moves faster and de-emphasizes strategy.