The colors are assigned randomly at the beggining of a game, and the closest to black they have is some sort of grey.. but trust me, you would never even see the black pieces on a lot of the game boards.  : )

One of the great things about Conquer Club though is it has many
different rule settings you can play with. Spoils for instance can be
set to a flat rate return, escalating returns, and nuclear. The last one
destroys all armies on the territory the spoils card names.

Also,
many of the 100+ maps have all sorts of built in rules that can wildly
change the gameplay. One map named Oasis has a large desert that will
kill 1 troop on each space per turn. In the desert are a number of oasis
that are safe heavens from the troop loss rule. To win the map, you
have to take control of the central oasis, and hold it a whole round.
What ends up happening as soon as you take it is that everyone else tries
to kill you. Madness follows!

The game also allows for team
play. Anything from 2v2v2v2 to 4v4. You can reinforce your allies and
work together to take out the other teams.

As for a catch up
mechanic, what happens most games is the person who gains too strong a
hand early on tends to have to face all the other players, and quickly
get's knocked down a few pegs. This doesn't always happen, with like
ranked players, you tend to have large swings in the balance of power as
games progress.

And though you have the option of playing games
where you place the initial troops where you want, most games are played
with random start locations, which leads to some interesting gameplay.

Trust me, this ain't your old time RISK.