The Conquistadors: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas 1518-1548

This is not a game that tidies up the conquest of the Americas. Wealth, glory, plunder and violence all sit plainly on the table. That suits a design which wants to give me freedom, rather than reassure me that I am one of the good people.

Each player runs one or more organised Spanish expeditions through an unexplored America in pursuit of wealth and glory. You can cultivate relationships with indigenous peoples, chase discoveries like a seventeenth-century Indiana Jones, or circle another expedition like a crow until the locals have battered it and there is something left to take. You decide how dreadful you are going to be.

There are plenty of rules, but they follow a sensible logic, so the rulebook gets a pass; the player aids do not. The serious irritation is the arbitrary dice switching: 2d6 for Diplomacy, 1d6 for Discovery, 1d6 for plunder, then 2d6 for plunder exhaustion. Across a four-hour game, “wrong dice” came up more than two hundred times, and there is no defensible reason for it. Then the cards bring merciless take-that, Forged in Steel style: hit someone, wait for them to fall over, then take what remains. Lovely. Less so for the person receiving it.

The Conquistadors has a genuinely compelling sandbox at its centre and player interaction with teeth, but it asks for patience with needless development friction. I want to play it again, which says a great deal; I just want to throw the wrong dice out of the window first.