At the 2004 Independent Gamers Conference in Eugene, Oregon, I stumbled upon the latest flavor of Risk to grace my desktop. Amid all the fanfare, lectures, success stories, and playable demos available, I became entranced with Lux. As I was practicing yet another variation of the Australia Strategy, Dustin Sacks, the only full-time Sillysoft employee, sat down next to me and gave me a few pointers. His vague accent revealed that he had, indeed, traveled all the way from Montreal to attend the show.

For anyone who might briefly tire (shudder) of the classic Risk board, Lux offers dozens of layout variations. Some are as simplistic as abstract, colored continents, while others depict England divided into counties. One variant used two opposing fish in a kind of stylized yin-yang constellation. There is a free editor available to create your own abstraction, and clever users post new derivatives all the time.

If you're unfamiliar with Risk, it is the original turn-based world domination board game. The game starts by selecting countries one army at a time, although a randomizer can speed up this step. You then reinforce countries you intend to keep. Your goal is to control the board by conquering entire continents until the whole world turns your color.

Invasion success is slightly random, based on the roll of dice. There is a built-in advantage in numbers for offense balanced against a built-in advantage for defense (ties go to the attacked). There is just enough chance involved that nothing can be taken for granted; you may watch your sure-thing, 13-5 advantage go up in smoke as you fail to invade North Africa from Brazil.

Before each turn, players are awarded armies based on a formula that counts total countries and also any continents controlled. Big continents like Asia count more. You'll always get three armies, no matter how tenuous your grip on life. Whenever you successfully invade another country, you take a card at the end of that turn. Cards are in three suits, with a wild card. You cash in cards for armies when you have three of a kind or all three different. If you take over a player's last country, you get his cards when you start your next turn.

One variation from the standard board game is the number of armies awarded when cashing in cards. In Classic Risk, the number goes up each time cards are cashed, and there is a tendency to want to wait. In the Preferences menu you can change this, but by default the most you'll get is five armies per set of cards, so you may as well use them if you have them.

A feature I appreciated was the computer's ability to sort through the 20+ cards I once accumulated when I took over four players who were all holding five cards each, which is the max. The computer assembled each three-card set from the chaos, and didn't leave any cards left over. And it did it fast.

One strategy you quickly learn is the value of the garrison. It only takes about 12 armies to occupy the whole continent of North America, for example, but if you don't have extra armies at the invasion points, and serving as backup scattered throughout the realm, you can be swept off the map like dust in the wind. So you have to plunk down reinforcements in your most valuable real estate.

You also learn invasion routes. North America has only three ways in, so it can be guarded by heavy garrisons in Alaska, Greenland, and Mexico. South America has only two invasion routes – Columbia, connecting to North America, and Brazil, connecting to Africa. And Australia only has the single choke point of Burma.

Provided nobody knocked over the board (or threw up on it) the bane of the dorm-party Risk game was the dice. Dice would roll under the sofa, wind up in drinks, and go home in pockets. You could argue over leaners, strays, cheaters – it could drive you nuts. Managing dice was always a big problem, but the computer does it all for you, and it does it fast.

A nice addition to Lux is the insertion of battle sounds and explosions, approximating the fog of war. Say you have 155 armies in China, and your opponent has 130 armies defending India. Using a board game, you could mount a complete beer run in the time it would take to play off those combatants. The computer, naturally, does it in seconds. But in Lux, it also adds explosions and clouds of smoke. You can begin to approximate the angst of a general – you can hear the fighting, and you can see the smoke. But the designers let the fog linger, and it takes a second or two to clear. It adds a nice bit of uncertainty.

Purists will be happy to play the familiar Milton-Bradley board layout, although my current favorite shows Antarctica linked to Australia and South America. It puts a nice wrinkle on the familiar idea of starting small. I guess at this point I'll reveal something I like about computer versions of Risk – I like playing computers better.

Humans whine and quit, making excuses or just plain disappearing. Even in the old days they might nuke the board with an ill-timed sweep of the arm. Online, it's just as bad. Right before my coup de grace, the human can fold up and run away. But the computer has to hang on, stubbornly. Lux lets you play five other "entities" with 11 different play patterns, ranging from really, really hard to out-and-out dumb. There is also an editor to let you fine-tune the behavior of computer opponents.

They say only humans and cats play with their food before consuming it, but what I've done is blatantly beyond the Geneva Conventions. Oh, I justify it in the name of testing. For example, once the enemy is down to one country with three units, arrayed against my 350 men earning 36 new reinforcements each turn, he'll quit, if he's human. If he's a silicon approximation, he hangs on until I am good and ready. I'm free to continue to add units with each round, blanketing the earth with my minions. Can you count to 1,000? Good. How about 10,000? Let's just see. I don't know what the top end is, but while I'm trying to find it, round after round, the computer sits there adding his three men per round and looking for an escape. Sucker.

I found some mod keys that help with army placement and movement. While placing armies you can hold down the control key to place 5 armies at a time, hold down the option/alt key to place 10 at a time, or hold down the shift key or click the right mouse button to place all your armies in a country. Similarly, while attacking you can hold down the option/alt key to switch your 'Attacks per click' setting between 'once' and 'till dead'. You can hold down the shift key or click the right mouse button to toggle between manual and automatic move-in.

I also found that I could do just a little bit more using the Lux version of ‘fortify'. You still can't move an army across more than one country, as in classic Risk, but you can make fortification moves in multiple countries. That was a nice addition.

There is also a constantly-changing color bar with the color for each player represented as a ratio of the whole. What I really liked was the player info table, which told at a glance how many cards a player has, how many armies they had spread out over how many countries, and what their "income" will be for the start of each turn. That came in real handy when choosing whose army was going down this turn. The table also lets you move columns around so you can customize it to just barely peek out from behind the map.

Logging on and finding a net game was easy. I only like to play one game at a time, generally, but I like to come back in ten minutes, so I'm not a good online partner.

Installation is simple, but you'll need a newer version of the Java engine, which is a free download and handled for you during the install. My new Microsoft Anti-Spam Beta 1 software got excited about running the Lux.bat file for the first time, but that's apparently because the beta spyware blocker doesn't trust batch files, period. I was able to resolve that easily.

There are some Lux subtleties that I should note. You'll know when you take a player's last country because the hard drive chirps briefly. When you finish off the world, you get a satisfying siren and a random quip. You can customize the colors for you or your opponents using a huge palette. The tutorial is excellent.

The only bug I found was a subtle one. If you start up the Lux engine you get an options box with a "play" button to get you started. But as that loads, you might get a notice that there are either updates to the software or new plug-ins available. If you hit the play button too soon, that availability dialog box is swamped by the start of the game, locked out of action. The result is a stalemate and you have to unload the engine from Task Manager.

Industry attention will probably follow as Lux takes on more and more polish. Lux was selected as a finalist in the 2005 Independent Games Festival for the Web/Downloadable category. The award ceremony will take place in March 2005 at the Game Developers Conference, and Lux will be on display there.

The demo version is available free at SillySoft, but if you play the game all the way through the 20-day trial, consider upgrading for $20. You're supporting a good cause - underground, independent, non-affiliated gamers dedicated to making good games, hoping good money will follow. They deserve your support.