I forgot to take a few snaps and upload them and it’s a pain so I won’t bother now… here’s an open gl (thanks anymation for showing me that) of my first serious animation attempt, though it is still simple. I doubt any of you saw it, but I had made a space yahtzee, and from there I decided to do space risk, so I did. I went with the classic wooden risk with wooden cubes for soldiers, I even textured them You can’t tell with open gl but they are on a risk board, in australia. The amimation will pretty much just be the camera going around the board, zooming in now and then, music in the background, and the animation will be a risk game being played. The pieces will magically multiply, morphing into multiple troops, and they will constantly be jumping on each other to get battle results.
the .avi downloadable file is at http://web.mac.com/lipton_lover/Site_3/Blank_3.html
It looks good except for a couple of things that are bugging me, first of all the file is very large for a 70 frame animation, you might want to make the screen smaller their is no need for it to be so big (like an half of the size should do it). Also I would “set solid” on the cubes, they look kinda funny the way they are. Finally when the first cube prepares to jump it sinks into the floor and so does another cube when it “dies”.
Other than that it looks good, the bouncing of the cubes looks really realistic, it’s a very interesting concept and should be cool when it’s done. Good luck 
p.s. if your going for a more cartoon look you might want to consider using lattices to animate the pieces so they could squash before jumping, a quick search on the forum should tell you all you need to know about those.
Thanks for the crit!
Since the current shot is only a corner of the board, the size of the vid may seem off. But when this is finished, the camera won’t be there, I just forgot to change camera size. I don’t know what you mean by setting them to solid, the cubes are perfectly solid. I did both of those on purpose, the first I don’t think is a problem but I was hoping someone would mention the second one, telling me if it doesn’t work. I’m not interested in a cartoony look, that’s why I took such trouble to get the pieces to look good, if I zoomed in you would be able to see that they really do look like blocks of wood.
This project is on hold for a little until I feel inspired to work on it again 
Right now the cubes are set to “smooth” rendering mode, which is an option used to break up shading differences along edges to make a surface look smooth even though it is actually composed of a mesh of flat triangles. To change to “solid” rendering mode, which is the default, select the cubes and, in the editing panel (the icon is a square with yellow vertices) click on “Set Solid.”