Conquest & Consequence

If you have been reading this nominally-a-blog for a while, you know how highly I rate Triumph & Tragedy as a serious recommendation for three players. Conquest & Consequence, its bigger sibling focused on the Pacific and the conflict between Russia, Japan, and America, was something I had been eagerly awaiting. On paper, it looks like the more powerful version of that idea: more tension, more active fronts, and less waiting around before things get difficult.

The core experience is the conflict between those powers in the Pacific, with the chase at sea and the aircraft carriers giving the game a dimension that Triumph & Tragedy does not have. At the same time, the Chinese civil war is already present from the beginning, so Japan and the Chinese are not limited to threats and stares across the map: proper fighting starts immediately.

That also changes how the players confront one another. Where the opening of Triumph & Tragedy is defined mostly by diplomacy and very limited skirmishes, here confrontation appears to begin right away, both on land and at sea. As an idea, I find it enormously appealing: the promise is a game that does not have to wait for war to gain momentum, because the war is already there.

And then the rules arrive. In my first encounter, their presentation was so poor that it managed to trip up an experience I very much wanted to love—worse than SCO Unix man pages, and I mean that as a compliment to the man pages. I absolutely want to play it again and spend some time with the rules threads on BGG and wherever else is needed, because I suspect my current impression may be doing it an injustice. For now, though, if you have not played Triumph & Tragedy first, do not go near it.