The board for Hasbro's Risk: Black Ops. Photo by Gamers With Jobs

Last August, Electronic Arts announced that it had entered into a long-term agreement with Hasbro, allowing its EA Casual division to develop and publish the videogame versions of such classics as Monopoly, Yahtzee, Nerf, Tonka and Scrabble, the latter title making headlines recently because of brewing legal battles over the successful copyright infringing knockoff Scrabulous. The deal was even a reunion of sorts, with former EA exec Mark Blecher, now a Hasbro senior vice president, put in charge of that Hasbro's digital gaming initiatives, opposite EA vet Chip Lange, who was named vice president and general manager of EA's Hasbro games operation. And as we wait to see what will emerge from the agreement, a tantalizing possibility has reared its head in recent days. Gamers With Jobs revealed last week that an updated version of Risk, titled Risk: Black Ops, would be coming to store shelves this year.

The re-envisioned Risk isn't simply cosmetic, though we do like its new artistic direction, as shown in the photo above. Designer Rob Daviau has added a new resource system based around Capitals and Cities, which give the player that holds them additional troops. But the core of the revamp, according to Gamers With Jobs, is its new Objectives system, which not only adds variety to the gameplay, but also streamlines the duration of individual gameplay sessions. Here's how Gamers With Jobs described it:

Objectives are missions varying in difficulty, from Minor Objectives like "Control Europe" to Major Objectives like "Take Over Ten Territories in One Turn". There are twelve in all, although in a given game, you only play with eight randomly selected ones (four Major and four Minor).

Under the revamped rules, players only need to complete three Objectives to win the game. No more endless two-player tango: Just three Objectives, and you're done.

Each Objective also offers a randomly drawn Reward for its completion, which varies in value depending on the Objective's difficulty. Minor Rewards (for the Minor Objectives) bestow benefits like additional troop maneuvers or guaranteed cards, while Major Rewards (guess which ones those are for) offer juicy bonuses like an extra die for attack or defense.

What's great about the Objective system is that you still get all the things that made the original Risk worth playing--strategy, alliances, wholesale military destruction, etc.--but with a shorter time commitment. Now, instead of taking six hours, a game of Risk only takes one or two. For example, my group completed two games, one in one and a half hours, and the other in just fifty minutes.

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If correct, this would make Risk: Black Ops an excellent addition to EA's Pogo casual games Web site, not to mention Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network and the Wii Virtual Console. A fifty minute game session would fit perfectly into an hour long lunch break; during evening and weekends, it could serve as an appetizer before an entree of Halo 3 or Burnout Paradise. The carefully chosen elements of the artistic redesign, which fall somewhere between the visual iconography of Call of Duty 4 and Metal Gear Portable Ops, seem inherently appealing to the modern male gamer; given that Pogo's audience has generally been about 55-60 percent female, Risk: Black Ops could boost its appeal to men. Since Risk is turn-based, it would also be well-suited to the asynchronous nature of social networking sites like Facebook. For its part, The Level Up staff has a particular interest in seeing EA bring Risk to PCs and consoles, seeing as its presence on the Macs in our college dorm computer lab contributed greatly to the dissoluteness of our freshman year. The combination of wistful nostalgia, slick creative direction and focused gameplay make this irresistible to us and a no-brainer for EA Casual.