Catacombs Conquest

EvEvanstar5,9

Catacombs proper is an evening length dungeon crawl game that is definitely one of my favorite dungeon crawlers, because the driving mechanism to it is flicking discs. The adventurers are discs, the monsters are discs and the range attacks are discs. Damage is done by flicking discs into each other, and it's got a fantastic feeling of excitement and immediacy that I never could get from a descent style game. That being said, the length of catacombs does keep it from the table most nights. Generally when people want to do a crawler, they want something meatier like Gloomhaven. Along comes Catacombs and Castles, which uses all the art and the flicking from Catacombs proper but turns it into a full team vs team arena game, and pulls down the playtime to a more manageable 90 min or so. I was pretty happy owning both games. Then along comes conquest. Conquest again simplifies the game, reducing the time to more like 30 min. Instead of specific characters with specific abilities, you now have a hand of cards which have the various flicking shots listed on them. Each turn you draw a card, play a card, carry out your flicks, and then it's your opponent's turn. Very simple, very smooth, although we did find in this first play that the player who drew more armor cards, which are used to negate damage and the effects of the card that damaged you had a substantial advantage. More plays needed, especially to get a better understanding of if I really need three variations of more or less the same flicking game.