Reviews - volsung84

I'll keep it short. Expeditions: Conquistador is an excellent but flawed game that blends exploration, tactical battles, resource management and text-driven narrative with believable role-playing elements.

The general idea consists of a Spanish conquistador (you) and his/her team of brave explorers, which the game lets you choose/recruit manually, undertaking a mission to explore/pillage/desecrate/pacify (up to you) part of the newly found lands in the Americas, namely Hispaniola (one of the first settlements in the Caribbean) and a tiny portion of Mexico. Each member of your expedition has a profession (medic, scout, hunter, ...) and personality traits (aggressive, altruistic, racist, etc.). These personality traits provide party reactivity to your choices as a leader, as they may agree or disagree depending their own views of the world. For example, a racist member will lose morale if you recruit a native, and a brave member will gain morale if you face combat and don't flee.

Gameplay wise, it's three games in one. First, you can move around the map exploring, gathering treasure and resources, and locating interactive areas such as towns, temples, ruins, caravans. Each day you can only move so many spaces and then have to set camp and rest, which brings out a mini game of sorts. During camp you must delegate tasks (guard, preserve meat or it will spoil, treat injuries, etc.) and semi random events may happen, like getting robbed/attacked. This demands careful resource management, especially assigning rations to each person and trying not to run out of food in the middle of the jungle. The last thing you want is a sick and hungry expedition. Battles are standard turn-based combat on a hex grid, nothing unusual but well done. Narrative and dialog is all text driven, but it provides lots of reactivity and it's very well written and exciting if you don't mind the style (think King of Dragon Pass).

Overall a fun and exciting game strategy and RPG fans should play.