by: Michael Barnes

You will never, ever read a review of Conquest Gaming’s latest release WARLORDS OF EUROPE that does not contain the words “Milton Bradley Gamemaster games” or “RISK”. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise as the game is the issue of a company that has previously specialized in unofficial expansions for RISK and AXIS AND ALLIES. With its map of Europe, a couple of hundred plastic army men, dice, and poker chips, it’s pretty clear to any seasoned gamer what kind of game it is and how it’s going to play out. And unlike the revisionist “Dudes on a Map” games that have circulated over the past couple of years ranging from NEXUS OPS to TWILIGHT IMPERIUM 3rd EDITION, WARLORDS OF EUROPE sticks to its old school guns and offers practically nothing by way of innovation, progress, or streamlining. It is almost defiantly antiquated and plays out as if SETTLERS OF CATAN had never happened and the Gamemaster design idiom circa 1986 never faded into obsolescence.

The Gamemaster games (and RISK) covered a couple of different historical eras and settings, but oddly Medieval Europe never got the GM treatment. So in a sense, WARLORDS OF EUROPE’s 13th-century shenanigans are something new. Each player commands the armies of a feudal warlord with designs on becoming emperor of all of Europe. This is done by conquering and controlling the majority of castles on the board, which is of course going to require the control of many fiefdoms in order to raise money to build armies with which to savage all of Christendom. It’s also going to take a ton of dice rolling, and many tiny pikemen are going to be sent to plastic heaven over the course of the hours it is going to take to accomplish this goal.

The map is divided up into nine regions containing a number of fiefs. Each fief has a couple of cities in it, which indicates the number of peasants that have to be beaten into submission to claim the territory. Each fief also has a terrain type to which both defending units’ dice and income are keyed—mountains let the defenders roll the mighty D12, but they only produce a dollar. Once a player has cast the shadow of their rule over an entire region, then castles can be built in a two-turn process. Castles impart a huge economic and defensive boost, and they effectively turn fiefs into objectives for other players. The game supports two to four players but I found that the two player game was a little dull and the three player game outrageously unbalanced as the central player inevitably winds up in an unwinnable two front war. Four players is the way to go, but you’ll wish it had room for a fifth or even sixth player.

Three decks of cards add some much-needed variety and thematic flavor to the proceedings. Much like in RISK, if a player conquers a region they get to draw a card. In this case, it’s a Conquest card that may confer certain combat benefits, affect other player’s battlefield effectiveness, spawn new units, or perform other advantageous functions. After all players complete individual turns, a “Pope card” is drawn in a group phase and these can cause all kinds of interesting effects; in one game I played, the losing player somehow managed to keep drawing Pope cards that gave him more units, which kept him from slumping into an early elimination and kept him competitive throughout the game. Interestingly, many Pope cards that affect other players also offer the option for the targeted player to ignore the effect. This can be done three times, and each time it bars the player from drawing one of the card types. The third variety of card, Merchant, obviously favors economic effects and taxation abilities but they must be purchased for four gold.

The cards really add a lot to the game and made for some nice surprises when units betrayed their command, the Pope ordered that a player take control of a fief, or regions were flooded and produced no income for the turn. They gave the game a much more robust sense of setting that it would have otherwise. There’s also a neat mercenaries rule that lets you pay extra for soldiers in areas that have already met their stringent one-unit recruitment limit, but you’ve got to pay their rates every turn or they go home. Make no mistake, this isn’t something like WARRIOR KNIGHTS or MARE NOSTRUM that both have extremely strong contexts and richly varied and narrative gameplay—it’s still a very straightforward and fairly abstract advanced take on the RISK model, but it has at least as much of a sense of time and place as CONQUEST OF THE EMPIRE or SHOGUN and with less rules and clutter to boot.