Jump straight to the reviews:
Hoplomachus: Remastered
Pandora’s Wake

Review copies of Hoplomachus: Remastered and Pandora’s Wake were kindly provided by Chip Theory Games.

Hoplomachus: Remastered

Let’s do the important bit first so you don’t need to jump to Google straight away. A Hoplomachus was a type of ancient Roman gladiator, which explains the picture on the front of the box, and gives you a good idea what to expect when you play it. Hoplomachus: Remastered takes Chip Theory Games’ original titles – Hoplomachus: Rise of Rome and The Lost Cities – and gives them a quality of life update. New graphic design, streamlined rules and a lot of variety stuffed into a single (very long) box. It’s a skirmish game somewhere between the scale of Too Many Bones and Cloudspire (you can read my reviews of those games here – Too Many Bones Review, Cloudspire Review), and it’s excellent.

In Hoplomachus, you take the role of a faction of combatants, somewhat based in reality, but with plenty of fantasy thrown in. You get dropped into one of the game’s two arenas (on a very nice, double-sided neoprene playmat) and forced to fight in one of the included game modes. As I mentioned above, it’s a skirmish game, which means we’re talking about close-quarters combat. Your units are outrageously tactile poker chips with a lovely weight and heft to them. They’re stacked on top of a number of red or blue chips to represent their health, and they move from hex to hex on the battlefield trying to strategically position themselves in range of opponent units.

That’s the game in a nutshell. Move about, attack the enemies, and with any luck, win. What is best in life, Conan?

It’s not just a free-for-all bunfight, though. Our friends, strategy and tactics have come along for the ride. Hoplomachus, being a Chip Theory game, has a load of status, action and effect keywords, and planning how best to stick a status sticker on your opponent’s forehead is a key part of the game. Happily, the keywords in this seem more manageable than some of their games I’ve played before. For a start, there are only 31 of them to manage, compared to something like 64 in Too Many Bones, and additionally, the keywords themselves are mostly obvious too.

This stuff really matters to me. I hate feeling like I’m drowning in keywords and have to have a reference sheet superglued to one hand for every other turn. It’s no small part of why, even though I really do like TMB, it’s my least-played of the Chip Theory games. The strategy isn’t too thick either, which helps bring newcomers into the game. You know what your units can do, you know what your opponents can do, whether they’re AI-controlled or another human, and nothing feels too convoluted to wrap your head around, or to figure out how to get your faction’s units to work together.

Chip off the old block

I know some people who are put off by CTG’s games just because they use poker-style chips for everything. Once you’ve played a game like Hoplomachus using them though, you start to see why they work perfectly if you compare them to plastic minis, for example. For a start, everything you need to know about any unit in play is right there in front of you. The number of chips under it shows you its health points, its power, defence, range and movement are all right there, written on the chip. You don’t need to refer to anything external (except maybe the keywords on some while you’re learning the game).

There are times when I was playing Cloudspire that I got frustrated with the small print on some of the chips, and when I look at pictures of the original Hoplomachus (which I never played), I think I’d feel the same. The graphic design refresh is fantastic and goes a long way towards fixing my biggest gripe with the poker chips. Compare the two images below. The first is from the original, the second is from Remastered. There’s nothing wrong with the first as such, but the better legibility in the second shows what I’m talking about.

Given that I prefer to talk about what makes a game fun rather than what the components are like, I feel like I’ve prattled on here for a while. This stuff really matters in this style of game though. There’s no player board with iconography to go by, no small player aid book each. The intention of the game’s designers, and what they’ve succeeded in doing, is making a game you don’t need to take your eyes off. And trust me, you want to keep your eyes on the game, because your planning can all come undone in an instant if you don’t notice another player’s move.

While I’m off on this presentation tangent, I want to draw attention to the playmat too. I felt, and still feel, that some of the tiles in Cloudspire look a bit dark and murky. They do a job, but it feels like an inherent drawback of using neoprene. But then you look at Hoplo’s arenas and you see that neoprene printing can be bright and colourful, and full of energy and theme. The orange of the blood-soaked dirt of the arena floors really adds some warmth to the game’s table presence.

Choices, choices

If you only played Hoplomachus’ Ascension mode on the Colosseum side of the mat, fighting Titans and varying your faction each time, you’d get a lot of plays out of it before you got bored. This is where CTG have outdone themselves, though. Alongside Ascension mode, which plays solo or two-player co-op, you also have (deep breath now…) Onslaught (1 or 2 players, Pozzuoli arena), Skirmish (two-player vs mode) on either side, Pandemonium mode (3-4 players) on the Pozzuoli arena, and finally Alliance mode, where four players fight in two teams against one another. These aren’t just a case of it being exactly the same game with slight differences, like an enemy sprite palette shift in an 8-bit fighting game. The arenas work differently and have different layouts. Fighting titans and immortals is very different. A Co-op game plays out very differently from a solo game, and the competitive games feel different too.

It’s pretty cool because if you have a regular board game night but don’t know if you’re going to have one, two or three people turn up, you can cover all scenarios. If no one shows, because that week there’s a Wurzel’s concert in town or something, you can still play solo. All of the options available work, and all of them work well. In my opinion, there’s no weak link in there. Pandemonium really can be crazy, and it can lack some of the strategic refinement of the other modes, but it’s still a load of fun.

By far one of Hoplomachus’ biggest strengths though, is its brevity. You can play through a full game in an hour and not feel like you’ve played a filler game by any stretch of the imagination. The full hour is packed with decision, strategy, and fun gameplay. Drop into the arena, fight the battles, get out again. It gives the game so many more opportunities to get played than a lot of other games. You can play at the beginning and end of a games night, as a quick game when you’re waiting for another to start at a convention, or even if you just have a lunch hour to fill, Hoplomachus fills that hole with aplomb. That’s right, I said aplomb.

That brevity joyously extends to setup and teardown, too. Roll out the arena mat, drop the chip trays on the table, pick a faction and get playing. Once you know the game, setup from opening the box to taking a first turn can genuinely be done in ten minutes. This makes me so freaking happy. I have a tendency to prefer meaty games, and having one which I can decide to play and be playing fifteen minutes later is just wonderful.

Final thoughts

I have a weird relationship with skirmish games. I played some in the past that felt too by-the-numbers with nothing to really make me want to play them again. So when the opportunity to cover one falls into my lap, I’m happy to do it, but with a due sense of trepidation. That trepidation was tempered a little, knowing that this is the remastered version of the game, but I was still surprised by just how much I enjoy Hoplomachus. Everything about it feels refined, and by boiling it down with the new graphic design Chip Theory have extracted the essence of what makes a good skirmish game.

The game ticks along at a decent pace, and I really like how the different arenas affect the gameplay. Controlling the platforms in Puzzuoli is a totally different experience to the central pit and surrounding areas in the arena. The way that crowd favour transfers into rewards is great, unlocking new heroes to join the fray, or bolstering your existing units with tactics chips. This is going to sound like a weird comparison to make but I play a lot of Overwatch, and since they introduced the perk system, Hoplomachus gives me a similar feeling. Landing damage on my opponents to build up to more powerful abilities, using cover and range, working as a team to absorb and deal damage. Take out a lynchpin and the damage you can do is huge.

Don’t get me wrong. If you absolutely hate skirmish-type games, Hoplo isn’t the silver bullet that’ll suddenly cure and convert you. You’re not going to have a good time with it. If you’re on the fence, or love this type of game, then you’ll love it. I mean, there’ll be some for whom the gladiator theme doesn’t do anything, but when you’re playing a game where you can literally fight Mars (the god, not the chocolate bar)… I mean, c’mon. Oh and the other annoying thing is the shape of the box. It’s long and thin and won’t play nicely with your Kallax, if you’re that way inclined.

I want to give special mention to the rulebook and player aids too. Trying to learn a Chip Theory game straight from the rulebook isn’t always the easiest thing, but the Hoplomachus: Remastered rulebook is outstanding. Clear sections explaining how your own and how your rivals’ turns take place. Well-illustrated examples for just about every action available to you. Clearly delineated sections at the back explaining how to setup and then play each of the different versions. There’s a great keyword glossary at the back of the book (absolutely brilliant while you’re learning the game), and to top it off the round structure for all game modes are on the back of the book, so you can just put it on the table next to you.

I like Hoplomachus: Remastered much more than I expected to. The game is superb.

---

Pandora’s Wake

Given that Hoplomachus is a game about different factions beating the snot out of each other in different arenas, you might expect that the expansion for Hoplomachus: Remastered – Pandora’s Wake – is just more of the same. And you’d be right! This is a good thing.

In the box you’ll find a whole set of faction chips, a new playmat, and some awesome little boats. We’ll come back to those. First up is one side of the mat with a revisited arena from the original game, the Fa Mel Prison. I’d love to be that person who goes “Woo, yeah! Fa Mel is back!”, but I never played the original, so it’s new to me. It’s pretty cool though, and very different to the game modes. Each player has a prisoner (a wretch) which they need to escort to the opposite side of the arena.

I really like this mode because instead of having a normal faction to work with, you draw elite heroes from a bag. Draw two, keep one, the opponent gets the other one. And so on until you have five elites each. It’s a really different feel to the base game modes, and has a couple of arena guardians in the middle to contend with too.

Come in number five, your time is up

The other side of the mat has a new arena, the flooded colosseum, and this is where you get to play with the ship minis in the box in the Naumachia mode. This mode is the biggest escape from the original, and it makes me wonder if the designers have plans for a naval battle game, or shoe-horned it into this expansion. Either way, it’s very different again and sees your units slotted into the ships, crewing them. You’ve got to fight your opponents, who are a new Sailors of the Dead faction in the solo mode (very cool), as well as crocodiles! Actual crocodiles trying to take a bite of you while you bimble about the water in your boats!

New modes and arenas are all well and good, but you also get a new faction in the box, too. The Vesuvians join the fray. You can use them in the expansion or the base game, and while they don’t do anything otherworldly different to the existing factions, they feel unique enough to make you want to play with them and see how they compare to your favourite.

Final thoughts

The big question you probably have is “Do I need Pandora’s Wake?”. It’s not an easy question to answer, as it depends on a few different things.

Firstly, do you regularly play three or four players, or is it usually solo or two-player? If your answer is three or four, then you probably don’t need Pandora’s Wake. Both of the new included arenas and game modes only work with one or two players, which means the only thing you’re likely to use is the new Vesuvian faction. When you consider it costs around £50, it’s a lot to pay for just one new faction.

If solo and PvP are your thing though, Pandora’s Wake is great. The new game modes are really different and definitely breathe a bit of life into the base game. Plus, you get to use the new faction in the base game, too. It’s not cheap, for sure, but if you love Hoplomachus, more Hoplomachus is always a good thing.