Conquest & Consequence

I love Triumph & Tragedy as a serious three-player game, so its larger sibling — with Russia, Japan and America — felt like an appointment I was always going to keep. On paper it has more pressure: carriers at sea, China already boiling over, and no one having to wait politely for the war to begin.

The fighting starts at once, through the Chinese civil war and Japan's pressure on China. Where Triumph & Tragedy initially leaves room for diplomacy and only limited skirmishes, this one gets to the honest violence early. Then there is the carrier hunt at sea, giving the conflict a second, twitchy front.

That should be the good bit: watching your opponent, judging the threat, deciding where to pin them down. Instead, the rules blur it all. The rulebook earns a hasty D-minus; it is written worse than SCO Unix man pages. In our first game, rather than hunting each other across the map, we were hunting interpretations.

I absolutely want to play it again and dig through the rules threads, because I suspect my first impression is unfair to a game with a genuinely strong foundation. But if you have not already played Triumph & Tragedy, do not go near Conquest & Consequence yet.