www.Tobold.com
Tobold@GMail.com
A blog with my thoughts regarding games I am playing and other stuff in life. Please read my Terms of Service
RSS Feed
Wednesday, October 12, 2022
Hoplomachus: Victorum
Crossposted from BGG
Essentials:
Hoplomachus: Victorum is a solo campaign game of gladiatorial combat. Your hero travels through a mythological version of classical antiquity with a small squad of combat units. The campaign is divided into 4 acts of 12 weeks each, and in most weeks you will use your hero and squad to fight tactical arena combats. The rewards will increase the power of your hero and give you better units, so that at the end of acts one to three you can face a mini-boss, and the final boss at the end of act four. There is a small amount of flavor text and story, but at its core this is a game with a series of small tactical combat encounters.Components:
Well, this is Chip Theory Games, and thus the quality of the components is top-notch. All boards are neoprene, units are poker chips, and the cards are plasticized. If you spill your drink over the game, you can rinse it off, dry it, and keep playing. Just two minor niggles with Victorum: On the world map, printed on neoprene, some paths in the lighter colored regions of the world are not easy to make out; and the stadium seating holds only 12 dice out of the 20 that come with the game. Kudos for including the red die, which has 6 identical faces and thus isn’t strictly necessary, but it is fun when you like throwing a lot of dice at once.
The rulebook is quite well written and clear. It doesn’t have an index, but the list of Key Terms at the back answered most of the questions I had during the game. The back of the rulebook also serves as a quick reference during play. The only misleading information is the “90 minutes per act” playing time printed on the box. In reality that is more likely to be twice that, even more on your first playthrough. It is probably better to think of this as a 12+-hour campaign game, but you can save the game easily enough between shorter sessions. This is not a light, casual game, but you probably already noticed that from the price tag and weight of the box.
Gameplay - The Good:
Every combat event in Hoplomachus: Victorum is different. That is mostly due to the event cards imposing different conditions, but also to there being 8 different arenas with different local rules, and the random composition of the enemy squad. Even your own squad evolves over the length of the campaign. And a new campaign brings a new hero, new mini-bosses, and a new final boss to beat. So the game has a lot of replayability. And most of the time combat is an interesting enough puzzle, with a mix of foreseeable enemy unit actions and random dice rolls.
Within the limitation that Hoplomachus: Victorum is only playable solo, for me it is a better solo game than Too Many Bones. The rules are a bit less complicated, and the variety between fights is better. The hex grid of the 8 different arenas allows for a bit more tactical gameplay than the 4x4 squares of Too Many Bones. On the downside, there are less options to upgrade your hero. Your mileage may vary.
One important consideration with tactical games like this is the role that luck plays. Combat dice have between 2 and 6 “hit” faces, and the rest are “miss” faces. With every single die having at least a one in three chance to hit, and you usually rolling several dice at once, the overall outcome doesn’t feel too random. For example if you throw three blue dice with 3 hit faces each, the chance to have 1 or 2 hits is 75%, while the chances to get 0 or 3 hits are only 12.5% each. Yes, extreme results can happen, but the statistics of rolling several dice at once favor average results. The hero can also upgrade his dice, and thus achieve more reliable results for his own attacks. So, yes, dice mean some amount of luck, but I still felt that my tactical decisions were more important to the outcome of a battle than the luck factor.
Gameplay - The Bad:
Enemy units in Hoplomachus: Victorum follow a very simple AI script, following a list of priorities, which can be different from one arena to another. There are no random AI cards or similar more advanced systems. The enemy moves are predictable, and when there are two equivalent options, the player can choose the one that is better for him. So, there is a certain aspect of playing the enemies deliberately badly against yourself, and the occasional opportunity to cheese.
Over the length of the campaign, the biggest problem is game balance: The combination of random event cards, arena special rules, and random enemy units can sometimes be very easy, and sometimes very hard. For example my very first fight was with an event card that made all attacks work only at range 1, and by chance the first two enemy units were ranged units, who were significantly hampered by that. But the game rewards you with more power if you win, and punishes you with disadvantages when you surrender. The challenge goes up from act to act, so if you have a series of bad luck encounters in the first act, you’ll never make it to the end of the campaign. There are no “failing forward” or “catching up” mechanics anywhere. You can find yourself in a death spiral and have to start the campaign over, or you could have a lucky easy run.
Theme:
Hoplomachus: Victorum is not a heavily thematic game with a lot of story or story choices. There is half a page of introductory story, and at the end of the campaign the epilogues booklet has one paragraph for every possible hero/scion combination. There is a small section of flavor text on every event card, and that is it. However, the gameplay is very consistent with the theme, and does feel like gladiatorial combat.
Overall:
I am playing the retail version of Hoplomachus: Victorum, as sold in Essen at the Spiel 2022, and I am writing this after playing through one campaign. While it is hard to predict how many campaigns the fun will last, I am certainly not yet bored with the game, and am looking forward to trying a different hero against different bosses.
Whether this game is for you depends mostly on whether you can see yourself playing a medium-to-heavy complexity tactical game against yourself for 12+ hours. For me, I rate it at 8 out of 10, “very good - enjoy playing and would suggest it”.
Labels: Board Games
- posted by Tobold @ 12:10 PM Permanent Link
Comments:
<< Home
Newer› ‹Older
Is this your first piece there? - congratulations, if so! I don't remember any similar crossposts before.
Actually I just got a “badge” on BGG for 5 accepted reviews. I just didn’t crosspost the others. But then I remembered that one of the original motivations of this blog was to preserve stuff that I had written, after having lost a lot of text when some forum was closed. So from now on I will put a copy of my reviews here.
Post a Comment
<< Home
