You are here for chucking dice and clicking poker chips. Perhaps because it plays so quickly, the solo game does give off a definite whiff of hollowness. The difficulty curve can feel swingy, but overall, a player shouldn’t have much trouble finding match ups that tune to their preferred difficulty. Assuming you have the rules down pat, you can churn through the solo game in not quite half the time it would take you to play a pvp game. Solo games are fairly quick and easy to set up and get rolling. The relatively simple bones in this game make is a great candidate for solo play. Hoplomachus FEELS like it could have been a tactical RPG released on the Sony Playstation in the late 1990’s and anyone who has played such a game before will find it easy to settle in with Hoplomachus. Unless you have a player who is prone to AP, turns should progress smoothly and quickly once players have given up on studying their cheat sheet with all the abilities. Do yourself a favor and have at least 2 sets of summaries available so you don’t have to constantly trade the cheat sheet back and forth.ĭespite not bringing very many new game design ideas to the table, there is something to be said for how easy it is to teach and jump into a game of Hoplomachus. Casual players are going to be overwhelmed if not annoyed by the volume of crazy abilities out there. On the other hand, the list of abilities runs 4 pages long in 10 point script. The end result is that the factions do feel different and require skill to squeeze the most out of. Your abilities can drive both your tactical choices and your strategic ones. On the one hand, the designers have done an admiral job of creating significant variety in the abilities units have. Its the glut of special abilities that makes Hoplomachus stand out mechanically. Spice things up along the way with any number of special abilities and secondary attacks that your units can use.
Move units (that don’t have “summoning sickness”). Rounds of play feel familiar to anyone who has played a tactical skirmish game in the past 30 years (including video games like Final Fantasy Tactics, or any number of games it directly inspired). Hoplomachus as a game offers almost nothing new. There are a few additional small box expansions that offer players more units to expand the variety of teams they get to field. Finally, in “ Origins” the base game is edited down to its most basic core ideas and spread over 3 small maps that allows players for fast and furious skirmishes. In “ Rise of Rome” play focuses on another large map with rules that encourage combat. In the “ Lost Cities” base set, players are given a large map with rules that favor holding specific objective points and a lackluster co-op mode. Each large box expansion is defined, not by its chip based combatants, but rather by its unique maps.
Each successive expansion works as a stand alone game (that is fully backwards compatible) yet builds upon the lessons learned and mistakes made from its prior incarnations. One can’t really call Hoplomachus a game, so much as it is a game system.
Hoplomachus is gorgeous anachronism of dice based carnage on a grid map. Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire – A Hoplomachus Review