Saving...
Hey folks, Stone here. You know, at our house we are huge fans of strategy games. We have Risk Godstorm, Risk 2210, Risk Star Wars Clone Wars, Axis and Allies. And the list goes on. You get the idea. I have been out looking at board games for a long time and I noticed Dungeons and dragons had some, and I couldn’t quite figure out why. D&D is a pen and paper game, so I never thought much about it. Then the great people at Wizards of the Coast sent me their upcoming D&D board game Conquest of Nerath which hits shelves on June 21st 2011. I was kind of excited looking at it cause it looked like Risk, but then we played it and realized this was the strategy game we really wanted.
And the pretty horses did such a furious battle the sky turned blue.
If you have played risk or any of those other types of games like that, then you get the general idea. But what Conquest does it add D&D flavor to it. There are four sides – The Dark Empire of Keroth, a band of warlocks, and their ally the Iron Circle – who are goblins. And the good guys are The Valin alliance – elves, and their allies the Nethran League – dwarves. You have to play with all four, so the game it for 2 to four players. And you can play free for all or teams. We opted for teams to start out with, and it was a great time.
The board is the world, and each side starts with specific territories and each territory has icons on it so you know what pieces to place on them. Each piece has different powers, dice to roll and movement stats. You can board boats, have naval combat, and all sorts of fun. Each side has event cards to keep even the best strategy random! And I really, really liked that each side had unique models. It’s not just different colored plastic, its unique looking pieces. That was a nice touch.
The World Is Yours
What really got me were the dungeon spaces. These are door tiles you flip over during gameplay that reveal a monster to beat for treasure. Only heroes can go into a dungeon (which are your wizards, knights and monsters) and once a dungeon is beat, two new door tiles take its place. So they progressively get harder! I loved this aspect. It was so much fun to see what was going to be on one of the many regions dungeon tiles.
The gameplay is very straight forward. We had the turn sequence down after two rounds. And battle is easy. Anything over a 6 is a hit. Dragons are the only things with more than one hit point. So fights became a breeze. It got to be that we started spending all our money on the larger items and forgot all about the weak foot soldiers that only roll 1d6 to attack. There was one battle in particular that was quite funny between a bunch of foot soldiers. We couldn’t roll any 6′s to save our lives!
Good thing we have tree huggers on our side boys.
Conquest of Nerath is a brilliant game. It is like Super Risk. We were surprised by how much we enjoyed it. We did alter some rules for house rules though. To win the game, you earn a certain amount of victory points. You would think that earning 13 victory points would be pretty easy, but it’s not. We set a lower number for our team game. We also made it so your allies could board your boats as well, and that boats can fight pieces along a coast. Oh, you will also want to stock up on extra dice. You get a good variety here, but you will quickly find yourself needing an army of D20′s. Other than that, the rules are straightforward and easy to get. When you sit down to play this game, expect to be playing for a few hours. It is not a sit down and play quickly game. But you don’t notice the time. We had no idea it had been 2 and a half hours of gaming. It actually cut into our Axis And Allies game time. But it was all good cause Conquest of Nerath is a phenomenal game. I highly, highly recommend it to everyone, even if you are not into D&D. This is a great step forward for the basic strategy game and we will definitely be playing it more often. Trust me,
