Welcome to the Game Night Blog Carnival for August! You can get more information about the carnival at the main Game Night site.
Do you like collectible card games? Do you also like tactical wargames? If so, you’ll love Conquest Tactics. It is a combination of a card game like Magic: The Gathering and a simple grid-based wargame. You play the game similarly to a card game except that your troop cards are deployed onto a 5 x 5 grid and then most move around to position themselves for attacks against your opponent’s troops. This adds a bit of extra depth to the game and is a nice change from other games that I’ve played before.
The game is set in the fictional world of Yen Shen where three factions are vying for control of the Fire Continent. The mighty Kaborha, who resemble rhino people, have powerful soldiers and gladiators but only limited access to magic. The resurgent Humans have a wide variety of troop types but are individually less powerful than the Kaborha. Finally, the extradimensional Malice are fast and have a powerful offensive punch, but they have less staying power than the other two factions.
During initial setup, you deploy your base and 20 points of troop, skill, and spell cards. You also set aside special victory condition and trophy cards. The rest of your deck is then shuffled and used to fill your hand each turn so that you can play new skills and deploy reinforcements. The skills and spells are interesting because they remain in play and can be used once per round as long as the player has enough tactical points and a troop capable of using the skill or spell.
Rather than needing cards to generate resources, you get an increasing number of tactical points each turn. This escalating resource supply helps speed up the game and enables more powerful troops as the game progresses without requiring players to include resource cards in their decks. In the games that I’ve played, the increasing number of tactical points has worked very well to ratchet up the action as the game progresses.
Another innovative mechanic is that Conquest Tactics uses is that each player picks their own victory condition cards and the first player to achieve 3 victories wins the game. This means that you can build your deck around certain objectives which opens up a lot more possibilities for deck-building rather than always needing to be able to achieve the same goal in a game. For example, a deck built around mobility could take a victory condition that requires them to get troops into their opponent’s deployment zone.
The game was first funded with a successful campaign on Kickstarter and has since been picked up for wider distribution and is also available on Amazon. The base game includes the game board, tokens, and three pre-constructed decks. Each of the decks is built around one of the game’s factions. Those faction decks are also available individually. Zeitgeyser also has a free print-to-play demo available.
Zeitgeyser is currently running a kickstarter for the first Conquest Tactics expansion. If you’re interested in the game, it’s a great opportunity to buy the core set and help ensure the expansion is printed. So far I’ve only played a few games with the starter box, but I’ve enjoyed them enough to put in a pledge for the expansion.
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