Warhammer 40k: Conquest

[Bacchus]

I have been playing this a bit recently with some enjoyment and wondered whether anyone else at the site has come across, given that there is usually quite a bit of interest towards card games here.

Not a particularly high-profile game, released in 2014 (or was it end of 2013?), but an interesting one. A lot of subtle mechanics on one hand, a fairly streamlined gameplay process on the other. In contrast to most card games, rather than beating down each other's faces (capitals, servers, houses), here the players aim to win control over planets, all neutral at start, by winning battles at them. The game proceeds over a maximum of 7 turns, and each turn one planet comes up for a decisive battle — whoever wins the battle, wins the planet. Effectively, one planet is one round, and the race is to win three rounds, but then you have a lot of novelties which make this first-to-three process a bit more dynamic:

1. Capturing a planet yields up to 1 victory points in each of three different victory categories, the win condition is to have 3 VP in the same category. The are 10 planets in total, only 7 come out in each particular game, and there are only three planets which give a VP in each of the three categories, three more planets give a VP in two categories and four planets give a VP in a sole category. In other words, if the first four planets are: (red), (blue), (green), (red, blue, green); then winning the fourth planet is as good, in terms of VP only, as winning all the previous three.

2. Each turn one battle will happen at one planet that is decisive -- with the winner of the battle capturing the planet and getting the appropriate VP, but battles can also happen at other planets in the same turn. These battles won't lead to planet capture, but can be instigated tactically, for example to trigger a confrontation whilst you still have an edge, to destroy troops in advance of the decisive battle.

3. The mechanism for deciding where the battles are fought is neat and tied into other key game aspects in an elegant way. Each player has a warlord, a special unit which starts play on the board and is quite powerful, usually with some colourful ability, like this:



Warlords "live" in a player's headquarters area, and each turn the player must commit the warlord to some available planet. Wherever at least one warlord commits, a battle happens. Where no warlord commits, even if there are troops of opposing sides present, there is no battles. If a battle does happen, it will proceed until troops of only one side are left at the planet. Unusually, this doesn't mean that the losing side's troops will necessarily be destroyed, they can also retreat to headquarters. Any troops that do end up in headquarters, will commit to a planet next turn together with the Warlord. Warlords themselves return to HQ every turn, but troops tend to stick to the planets they are sent to, at least until a battle happens there.

All of the above creates a nice strategic framework for an otherwise fairly straightforward card game -- units deal damage to each other, there are card effects which manipulate the game state in various ways, etc.

Resource generation in the game is also quite neat. There is a basic income of 4 resources (mana) each player gets per turn, and a basic draw of two cards. Additional stuff is yielded by planets, through exerting command over them. Command is exerted by units, but through a separate command rating, which is independent of their combat stats. You get something like an RWS dynamic in that players are driven to deploy command units to planets to gain income, but that motivates the opponent to deploy battle specialists and trigger a battle to kill off the command specialists, which in turn frees up the other player's battle units to concentrate on the decisive battle and capture this turn's planet for VP, and so on.

The game is fairly reasonably priced, and there is an active community on OCTGN, a sandbox card game engine, which has an appropriate module.