inconsequential ruminations

Three of us played Conquest of the Empire II on Saturday. I enjoyed myself, but it was an intense experience. Playing a confrontational game with two hypercompetitive programmers is not a recipe for a relaxed evening’s gaming.

It is a good game, but the rules are far too vague. We got five rules wrong:

1. Leaders can move with Barbarian at the Gates cards.
2. Allied troops never retreat from a combat, but stay in their original province.
3. Chaos points are cumulative. They are not discarded at the end of every campaign season. This makes Special Taxes more expensive and cities less valuable than we played them. This was our biggest mistake.
4. There should have been two auctions per campaign season – one for the first two positions and another for the third. (Seems like a waste of time with three players, but there you go.)
5. You cannot convert the influence token of an ally, even if he has no defenders in the province.

It is not really a complicated game, but it is unintuitive, so a few of these problems are understandable. The problem is that there are more than a few. At the time of writing, there are 81 threads in the Rules folder for this game at the Geek and 303 threads at the Eagle Games forums.

I found this so frustrating I trawled through both folders and put together an extended, revised FAQ. I hope the Eagle guys review and approve it, but in the meantime this should be useful to a lot of people.