Hoplomachus: Victorum BGG ↗

Hoplomachus: Victorum · English edition, first printing · (2022)

Your rating: 7.0

My BGG Comment

I love the arenas. I hate the dice. I want to like this game. I want to very much. It is quite beautiful and has great production (except for the little camp map at the bottom where paths are not always clearly visible). In this game you play a campaign over 4 acts. Fighting your way through opponents to get to 3 chapter bosses and one final boss. You get to choose where you go and you upgrade your character, your army and your dice over the course of the 4 games (I played each act as a single game). Each arena is sufficiently different to make it exciting to discover new tactics. The opponents have interesting abilities and trying to evade them also makes for interesting decisions. And this would be a great game if not for the empty die faces. No matter what dice I roll there always seems to be a majority of empty faces coming up especially when I roll dice for me and not the opponent. The game also has quite the difficulty level. It might have helped if I had chosen to play with an easier hero for the first game. (It was actually my 2nd attempt at finishing a campaign). It might have helped if my first "boss" wasn't at the opposite end of the map more or less. It might have helped if I had checked for some tactics on the forums first (that helped from act III onwards). But I cheated my way through this first campaign, rerolling until fewer empty faces showed. I will try again with a different hero. And I will probably just choose the champions I will face until I get better at it, because then I can make the path through the map a little less restrictive and the game should be easier. I may try to figure out some houserule where I count the empty faces I roll and every 10 or 20 I may give myself and the opponent a small bonus or something. Because otherwise the frustration of rolling nothing just ruins my fun. I rarely houserule anything because most of the time the games are not worth changing the rules: if it is not fun I usually just don't play them. This is a special case, I want to play this game because I think if I can take away the desire to see something other than empty faces, there is a really great tactical fighting game here. And maybe if I get there I will get good enough at it that I don't need any crutches. (But I doubt it, this is too involved to play often enough, but it would be nice.) PS: I should really have got the deluxe health chips the plastic ones are cheap and slippery. I have been using my own pokerchips instead.