Is Conquistador By Avalon Hill The Most Brutal Game Ever?

During the ‘80s a favorite game of mine was The Seven Cities Of Gold. Like all really good games I easily lost track of time while playing, and entire days would vanish with my exploration addiction. While overall a simplistic game (what can you expect from 48K of RAM?), it was the sense of discovery and open ended gameplay that really kept the midnight oil burning.

Around the same time as I was enjoying Seven Cities I would see Conquistador from Avalon Hill at my FLGS sitting on the shelf. Having been published in ’76 Conquistador was already a fairly old game by that time, but I had no knowledge of the game. I had not seen a review, nor did I know anyone who owned it or even had played it. But in my mind I imagined it would be just as enjoyable as Seven Cities but with the added bonus of opponents.

I never got around to buying Conquistador and over the years whenever I saw a copy I would think briefly on purchasing it but never did. Boy, did a dodge a bullet.

Tonight, after decades of conjuring up visions of how awesome Conquistador must be, I finally got a chance to play it. Okay, actually suffer through it would be more accurate. And even then, it was only five turns. I can only imagine what sitting through its full twenty-one turns would be like.

From one to four players (in our case, three) take on the role of the major powers at the time interested in the New World. Gameplay pretty much goes like this:

Roll for random events. Bad things happen and lots of your people die.

Spend gold to outfit expeditions. Sail expeditions to the New World. Roll some dice and watch lots of your people die.

Stroll around the New World. Roll some dice and watch lots of your people die.

Send ships back to the Old World. Roll some dice and watch lots of your people die.

I was playing Spain, the other players represented England and France. A typical turn would see the three of us building towering stacks of units, only to end the turn with not a unit in sight except for our ship counters. Next turn, we’d do it all over again, although we questioned why anyone would want to explore the New World after the second or third voyage. Let’s see, everyone who goes over dies. Finding gold is difficult, and when you do finally start to mine it you’ve spent so much to reach that point you’re basically taking a loss. All the natives hate you. There is no way to co-exist other than having so much military might in the area they won’t dare rise up.

Conquistador is absolutely brutal in its elimination of units to the point that there’s really no sense in even using the map board. Just keep a stack of units near you and roll some dice each turn, eliminating that many. That’s about as fair as the system in place.

Games with a high mortality rate, such as NetHack, negate that by constantly surprising the player with new things to see and experience, which is what drives the gamer. Conquistador gives you nothing. While players gain victory points for making certain discoveries, ninety percent of the discoveries can be easily achieved within two or three turns of the game starting. There are no surprises in the game, nothing to keep you driving across the New World. If ever a game cried out for a paragraph system or event cards, this is that game.

It’s a shame. The game I had envisioned in my head was a heck of a lot more fun. A remake is being done and what little information there is seems to indicate that a lot of the original mechanics are being completely replaced. Let’s hope that the new one remembers that a game about the Age of Exploration should make the act of exploration fun.