how to play Conqueror [Archive] - Wizards Community

how to play Conqueror [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
Nihzlet
07-02-07, 02:33 AM hey all, i need a bit of help.

as you may(or may not) know, Conqueror is a chesslike board game reputedly invented by Karrn the Conqueror, as stated in Five Nations under "five things every Karrn knows". i swear to god somewhere in one of the Eberron books there are actual game mechanics on playing it--something to do with a knowledge(history) check if i recall correctly--but i cannot for the life of me find it. anybody know at least which book its in, if not what page?

thanks.
Bluebrush
07-02-07, 02:57 AM I think it's in a siderbar of the Explorer's handbook.
Nihzlet
07-02-07, 03:36 AM yes, you are correct, its on page 88, as an addendum to dealing with the captain of the crimson ship. thanks a lot!
Romulus LoneWolf
07-04-07, 11:25 PM yes, you are correct, its on page 88, as an addendum to dealing with the captain of the crimson ship. thanks a lot!

It doesn't describe the game's actual rules, but covers how to simulate the game while in play.

Personally, I imagine that, like most fancy board games, the rules are actually obscure to non-players, so you can get away with giving basic names to the pieces and describing moves using fanciful names; "Hmmm.. He took my Cavalier with a brilliantly plotted Argland Gambit.. But he probably doesn't realize the flaw in his Sattler defense..."
Need_A_Life
07-05-07, 10:59 AM I see it as being the nerdy version of Axis and Allies.

You produce different troops, make strategic movements and seize enemy territory BUT you do it referencing real-world battles.

Someone controlling Thranish forces would, for example, use "the Purge" when faced with a supernatural thread, whereas Cyre would use "the Mourning" as an absolute last way out, destroying all its current territory and any enemy trying to conquer it, and while this costs them direct victory their allies might still prevail.

Of course, I've spent about a day fleshing out a very elaborate ruleset based on a mix of Axis and Allies, Stratego and chess, complete with a mental picture of the board.

Should've written it down, though.
korcheck
07-05-07, 11:31 AM I see it as being the nerdy version of Axis and Allies.

You produce different troops, make strategic movements and seize enemy territory BUT you do it referencing real-world battles.

Someone controlling Thranish forces would, for example, use "the Purge" when faced with a supernatural thread, whereas Cyre would use "the Mourning" as an absolute last way out, destroying all its current territory and any enemy trying to conquer it, and while this costs them direct victory their allies might still prevail.

Of course, I've spent about a day fleshing out a very elaborate ruleset based on a mix of Axis and Allies, Stratego and chess, complete with a mental picture of the board.

Should've written it down, though.

Except the game was around long before the last war let alone the day of morning. also IIRC it has been around since the time of Karn so it would not involve a board with the current geopolitical layout of the continent.
Cifer
07-05-07, 05:10 PM Except the game was around long before the last war let alone the day of morning. also IIRC it has been around since the time of Karn so it would not involve a board with the current geopolitical layout of the continent.
Also, its played primarily in Karrnath, meaning there's about zero chance for the game ever to be changed...
Nevarre
07-05-07, 06:24 PM I'd be tempted to make it something like Go. Simple in overall concept, and board/pieces, and yet with deep strategy and a lifetime to master (apparently, I'm not a player myself but I understand the rules and have friends that play it)

The advantage of using something like Go is that you can easily integrate it in your game, it's cheap to buy or make, and not as 'obvious' as using Chess. Like Chess it's a game of pure strategy.

Just a thought.
korcheck
07-05-07, 06:32 PM There is a chinese version of chess that would work as well. again not obvious but easy to use etc.
SirPudding
07-05-07, 09:44 PM I recall seeing an ancient form of medieval chess that is played by up to four people, one on each side of the board. There is also one played on a circular board with one player on the outside and another on the inside. I am assuming the regular modern/Indian chess exists in Eberron. If you're looking for other interesting ways of playing chess the Great Terry Pratchett has two discworld varieties called assassins chess and Thud from the novel of the same name. I don't know if anyone has published rules for either someone can be the first.
Just my :twocents:
ArcTan
07-06-07, 01:55 AM I see it as being the nerdy version of Axis and Allies.

You produce different troops, make strategic movements and seize enemy territory BUT you do it referencing real-world battles.

Sounds unlikely for a game that was invented long before the actual battles you're talking about happened.

Most long-lasting classic board games like chess get to be long-lasting by eschewing the complex rules of modern strategy games for geeks -- if they don't start out that way, they end up that way as the extraneous rules get stripped over time through evolution.

I don't picture a game as universal and long-lasting as Conqueror being any more complicated than Chess. Probably it's more like Go.
ryanroyce
07-06-07, 12:05 PM I like to use Byzantine Chess, an ancient precursor version of traditional chess, to represent Conquerer. It's exotic enough to not be "just chess", but also familiar enough that it can be actually played.

Here's a link:
http://www.chessvariants.com/historic.dir/byzantine.html
Need_A_Life
07-06-07, 06:22 PM How can you use the "a lot of those battles hadn't happened yet when the game was invented, so it doesn't work" as an argument?

It's not as if modern chess is completely unchanged from its original roots, now is it?

Besides, Karrn the Conqueror would've created plenty of moves, creating hundreds, if not thousands of valid moves, which would be factored into the game (probably through some formula of some kind including unit size, geographical advantages and unit composition) and later battles would've added even more moves making this a game only for very high academics.

The best players would reference almost unheard of battles to surprise their opponent, who presumably wouldn't have heard of the strategy and therefore be unable to use a proper counter for the move.
Macrovore
07-06-07, 11:27 PM That makes the game really complicated. It's supposed to be simple to learn, but nigh impossible to master.
Need_A_Life
07-09-07, 05:47 PM Can you really claim you don't know the strategies behind:

D-day? Waterloo? Gulf War I & II? Afghanistan? Opium Wars?

Whether overtly military in nature or not, most everyone knows enough about history to make an interesting game. A person who has studied Khovarian Warfare would of course be much better at the game... but since that'd be represented by Knowledge (history) that's no problem.

Once I get Forge of War myself (only glanced at a friend's copy) I'll use the dates in there to make a rough out-line of an actual game, and once I work out the kinks I might even post it here.
ArcTan
07-09-07, 10:09 PM How can you use the "a lot of those battles hadn't happened yet when the game was invented, so it doesn't work" as an argument?

It's not as if modern chess is completely unchanged from its original roots, now is it?

Besides, Karrn the Conqueror would've created plenty of moves, creating hundreds, if not thousands of valid moves, which would be factored into the game (probably through some formula of some kind including unit size, geographical advantages and unit composition) and later battles would've added even more moves making this a game only for very high academics.

The best players would reference almost unheard of battles to surprise their opponent, who presumably wouldn't have heard of the strategy and therefore be unable to use a proper counter for the move.

People who *directly* try to reference some real-life military situation when playing a board game tend to be doing one of three things:

1) spouting nonsense and not actually knowing what they're talking about,

2) making a really elaborate metaphor based on a very simple parallel that could work for a dozen other things (like saying that any situation where one side overcommits resources for an action is a "Stalingrad"); closely related to 1), but often borne of show-offy pretension rather than simple ignorance

3) actually playing a wargame with ridiculously complex rules allowing it to *actually* closely mimic the events of D-Day or Pickett's Charge or whatever

The actual mechanics of any realistic popular board game cannot "include" "moves" that literally correspond to actual battles. This would make no sense. Think about how that would make no sense in real life -- how, in real life, would it make any kind of simulationistic sense for me to "play" an Operation Overlord on you and have you respond to it with the Siege of Masada and then have me turn around and play the First Battle of Bull Run on you?

I mean, all it makes me think of is Magic: the Gathering, which is firstly a layer of abstraction so high that Magic: the Gathering does not and cannot have an actual story to the game being played in any meaningful sense (as WotC finally admitted after the clusterf*** that was the "story-based" print run based on the Weatherlight), and secondly because it's a collectible card game with really specific game elements that have to be constantly bought and replaced, is *not* a classic game that has been around for hundreds of years, or is likely to be.

If Conqueror is a simple, classic board game like chess, then the *moves* of Conqueror will be very simple, like chess or go. Allusions to real-life events will be rare and only made on the meta-level, as personal pet names or scholarly names for *strategems* and *situations* that occur in Conqueror, like the name for the Sicilian Defense or the Scotch Game.

But none of the funky names you hear for things that happen in chess are actually *rules of chess* -- they're things that people who play chess use to describe things that happen in chess, and any one person who plays chess as a hobby can happily ignore the scholarship behind chess and just play a fun and skillful game based on the knowledge of how pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, queens and kings move.
ArcTan
07-09-07, 10:16 PM Can you really claim you don't know the strategies behind:

D-day? Waterloo? Gulf War I & II? Afghanistan? Opium Wars?

Whether overtly military in nature or not, most everyone knows enough about history to make an interesting game. A person who has studied Khovarian Warfare would of course be much better at the game... but since that'd be represented by Knowledge (history) that's no problem.

Once I get Forge of War myself (only glanced at a friend's copy) I'll use the dates in there to make a rough out-line of an actual game, and once I work out the kinks I might even post it here.

The only board games where actually having an in-depth knowledge of military history would help you win the board game would be a wargaming geek's highly simulationistic wargame (the kind where each turn takes ten minutes and you play with a zillion different pieces on a super-complex hex grid). Even then it's questionable.

That's just it. I *don't* actually know that much about D-Day, Waterloo, the Battle of Baghdad, or the Opium Wars. Hell, I'm not even sure my friends who are into military history know *that* much about them -- how much can you actually know from reading books?

I *do* know how to play chess. My knowledge of chess is actually quite a bit better than my knowledge of real-life warfare, since my knowledge of chess is based on firsthand experience. If I were to make some comparison between a game of chess and some real-life situation -- like developing a knight into a well-supported outpost deep in my opponent's kingside and calling it a "Cuban Missile Crisis" -- I'm doing nothing but making a cute poetic reference to make my chess playing seem more interesting.

In no way did knowing what the Cuban Missile Crisis was actually help me make that move. It's the *opposite* -- I know how chess works so I knew that would be a good move, and then there was a dramatic event in history that appears superficially similar to that move that let me quote it.

But there's no one-to-one mapping between the chess game and real life history that makes that comparison *useful*. In fact, crappy stupid newbies at games are the ones who try to quote maxims from Sun Tzu's The Art of War (one of the most woefully misunderstood books in history) or "lessons from World War II" to generate "universal strategic maxims" that they try to use to play games well and miserably fail -- because there *is* no such thing as a universal strategic maxim and games are fundamentally different from real life. (I mean, as an example, does my little "Cuban Missile Crisis" then require a John Kennedy-like response from my opponent? What would that even entail? Would he put pressure on my knight hoping I would withdraw it? In many chess situations, that would be exactly the wrong thing to do, because unlike the Cold War, I have no reason, in a chess match, to want to do anything but try to win the game.)
ArcTan
07-09-07, 10:21 PM By the way, just as a tidbit, in real life Napoleon Bonaparte loved playing chess, but was widely known to be terrible at it.
Need_A_Life
07-10-07, 07:33 AM I guess we disagree...

I see conqueror as a game that commoners might understand the basic principles of, but where only academics would have a chance at playing a decent game.

I am getting pictures of a group of Rekkenmark students contesting against a group of Zilargo gnomes, each with one of their number having their noses buried in books throughout the entire game, pointing out little-heard of tactics to their teamleader.
ArcTan
07-10-07, 06:03 PM I guess we disagree...

I see conqueror as a game that commoners might understand the basic principles of, but where only academics would have a chance at playing a decent game.

I am getting pictures of a group of Rekkenmark students contesting against a group of Zilargo gnomes, each with one of their number having their noses buried in books throughout the entire game, pointing out little-heard of tactics to their teamleader.

It's not the game being hard I object to, it's that the game's rules have any sort of one-to-one correspondence to real military events.

Chess isn't really an easy game. To play a game that's truly "decent" -- no obvious errors -- you need to spend a lot of time playing it. To actually play a game against someone who's studied the game and have any chance of winning you must study the game yourself.

However, chess is still a game where what you have to understand in order to play chess is chess itself. Chess is not a game where knowing real-life things about military history is of any direct value whatsoever when playing chess. There's no such thing as a game where real-life knowledge of military history is somehow useful in playing the game, unless the game is Trivial Pursuit: Military History Edition.
Darth Syntax
07-11-07, 02:28 AM I agree with ArcTan than Conqueror should be a game in the style of our own classic abstract strategy games (Chess, Go, Pente, Chaturanga, and the like) rather than something in the manner of a war game. Given the name of the game, I imagine that there is an element of territorial control (a bit like Go) but we also have references to pieces that are physically different (like in chess) so what Conqueror might be, conceptually, is the love-child of European Chess and Go. I've been trying to work out the rules for such a game (as well as the pieces) but I've not gotten very far as of yet.
Need_A_Life
07-11-07, 04:10 PM ...and why were we discussing this again?

We clearly disagree and neither you people or I am likely to back down, so let's just agree to disagree, shall we?

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Nihzlet 07-02-07, 02:33 AM	hey all, i need a bit of help. as you may(or may not) know, Conqueror is a chesslike board game reputedly invented by Karrn the Conqueror, as stated in Five Nations under "five things every Karrn knows". i swear to god somewhere in one of the Eberron books there are actual game mechanics on playing it--something to do with a knowledge(history) check if i recall correctly--but i cannot for the life of me find it. anybody know at least which book its in, if not what page? thanks.
Bluebrush 07-02-07, 02:57 AM	I think it's in a siderbar of the Explorer's handbook.
Nihzlet 07-02-07, 03:36 AM	yes, you are correct, its on page 88, as an addendum to dealing with the captain of the crimson ship. thanks a lot!
Romulus LoneWolf 07-04-07, 11:25 PM	yes, you are correct, its on page 88, as an addendum to dealing with the captain of the crimson ship. thanks a lot! It doesn't describe the game's actual rules, but covers how to simulate the game while in play. Personally, I imagine that, like most fancy board games, the rules are actually obscure to non-players, so you can get away with giving basic names to the pieces and describing moves using fanciful names; "Hmmm.. He took my Cavalier with a brilliantly plotted Argland Gambit.. But he probably doesn't realize the flaw in his Sattler defense..."
Need_A_Life 07-05-07, 10:59 AM	I see it as being the nerdy version of Axis and Allies. You produce different troops, make strategic movements and seize enemy territory BUT you do it referencing real-world battles. Someone controlling Thranish forces would, for example, use "the Purge" when faced with a supernatural thread, whereas Cyre would use "the Mourning" as an absolute last way out, destroying all its current territory and any enemy trying to conquer it, and while this costs them direct victory their allies might still prevail. Of course, I've spent about a day fleshing out a very elaborate ruleset based on a mix of Axis and Allies, Stratego and chess, complete with a mental picture of the board. Should've written it down, though.
korcheck 07-05-07, 11:31 AM	I see it as being the nerdy version of Axis and Allies. You produce different troops, make strategic movements and seize enemy territory BUT you do it referencing real-world battles. Someone controlling Thranish forces would, for example, use "the Purge" when faced with a supernatural thread, whereas Cyre would use "the Mourning" as an absolute last way out, destroying all its current territory and any enemy trying to conquer it, and while this costs them direct victory their allies might still prevail. Of course, I've spent about a day fleshing out a very elaborate ruleset based on a mix of Axis and Allies, Stratego and chess, complete with a mental picture of the board. Should've written it down, though. Except the game was around long before the last war let alone the day of morning. also IIRC it has been around since the time of Karn so it would not involve a board with the current geopolitical layout of the continent.
Cifer 07-05-07, 05:10 PM	Except the game was around long before the last war let alone the day of morning. also IIRC it has been around since the time of Karn so it would not involve a board with the current geopolitical layout of the continent. Also, its played primarily in Karrnath, meaning there's about zero chance for the game ever to be changed...
Nevarre 07-05-07, 06:24 PM	I'd be tempted to make it something like Go. Simple in overall concept, and board/pieces, and yet with deep strategy and a lifetime to master (apparently, I'm not a player myself but I understand the rules and have friends that play it) The advantage of using something like Go is that you can easily integrate it in your game, it's cheap to buy or make, and not as 'obvious' as using Chess. Like Chess it's a game of pure strategy. Just a thought.
korcheck 07-05-07, 06:32 PM	There is a chinese version of chess that would work as well. again not obvious but easy to use etc.
SirPudding 07-05-07, 09:44 PM	I recall seeing an ancient form of medieval chess that is played by up to four people, one on each side of the board. There is also one played on a circular board with one player on the outside and another on the inside. I am assuming the regular modern/Indian chess exists in Eberron. If you're looking for other interesting ways of playing chess the Great Terry Pratchett has two discworld varieties called assassins chess and Thud from the novel of the same name. I don't know if anyone has published rules for either someone can be the first. Just my :twocents:
ArcTan 07-06-07, 01:55 AM	I see it as being the nerdy version of Axis and Allies. You produce different troops, make strategic movements and seize enemy territory BUT you do it referencing real-world battles. Sounds unlikely for a game that was invented long before the actual battles you're talking about happened. Most long-lasting classic board games like chess get to be long-lasting by eschewing the complex rules of modern strategy games for geeks -- if they don't start out that way, they end up that way as the extraneous rules get stripped over time through evolution. I don't picture a game as universal and long-lasting as Conqueror being any more complicated than Chess. Probably it's more like Go.
ryanroyce 07-06-07, 12:05 PM	I like to use Byzantine Chess, an ancient precursor version of traditional chess, to represent Conquerer. It's exotic enough to not be "just chess", but also familiar enough that it can be actually played. Here's a link: http://www.chessvariants.com/historic.dir/byzantine.html
Need_A_Life 07-06-07, 06:22 PM	How can you use the "a lot of those battles hadn't happened yet when the game was invented, so it doesn't work" as an argument? It's not as if modern chess is completely unchanged from its original roots, now is it? Besides, Karrn the Conqueror would've created plenty of moves, creating hundreds, if not thousands of valid moves, which would be factored into the game (probably through some formula of some kind including unit size, geographical advantages and unit composition) and later battles would've added even more moves making this a game only for very high academics. The best players would reference almost unheard of battles to surprise their opponent, who presumably wouldn't have heard of the strategy and therefore be unable to use a proper counter for the move.
Macrovore 07-06-07, 11:27 PM	That makes the game really complicated. It's supposed to be simple to learn, but nigh impossible to master.
Need_A_Life 07-09-07, 05:47 PM	Can you really claim you don't know the strategies behind: D-day? Waterloo? Gulf War I & II? Afghanistan? Opium Wars? Whether overtly military in nature or not, most everyone knows enough about history to make an interesting game. A person who has studied Khovarian Warfare would of course be much better at the game... but since that'd be represented by Knowledge (history) that's no problem. Once I get Forge of War myself (only glanced at a friend's copy) I'll use the dates in there to make a rough out-line of an actual game, and once I work out the kinks I might even post it here.
ArcTan 07-09-07, 10:09 PM	How can you use the "a lot of those battles hadn't happened yet when the game was invented, so it doesn't work" as an argument? It's not as if modern chess is completely unchanged from its original roots, now is it? Besides, Karrn the Conqueror would've created plenty of moves, creating hundreds, if not thousands of valid moves, which would be factored into the game (probably through some formula of some kind including unit size, geographical advantages and unit composition) and later battles would've added even more moves making this a game only for very high academics. The best players would reference almost unheard of battles to surprise their opponent, who presumably wouldn't have heard of the strategy and therefore be unable to use a proper counter for the move. People who directly try to reference some real-life military situation when playing a board game tend to be doing one of three things: 1) spouting nonsense and not actually knowing what they're talking about, 2) making a really elaborate metaphor based on a very simple parallel that could work for a dozen other things (like saying that any situation where one side overcommits resources for an action is a "Stalingrad"); closely related to 1), but often borne of show-offy pretension rather than simple ignorance 3) actually playing a wargame with ridiculously complex rules allowing it to actually closely mimic the events of D-Day or Pickett's Charge or whatever The actual mechanics of any realistic popular board game cannot "include" "moves" that literally correspond to actual battles. This would make no sense. Think about how that would make no sense in real life -- how, in real life, would it make any kind of simulationistic sense for me to "play" an Operation Overlord on you and have you respond to it with the Siege of Masada and then have me turn around and play the First Battle of Bull Run on you? I mean, all it makes me think of is Magic: the Gathering, which is firstly a layer of abstraction so high that Magic: the Gathering does not and cannot have an actual story to the game being played in any meaningful sense (as WotC finally admitted after the clusterf*** that was the "story-based" print run based on the Weatherlight), and secondly because it's a collectible card game with really specific game elements that have to be constantly bought and replaced, is not a classic game that has been around for hundreds of years, or is likely to be. If Conqueror is a simple, classic board game like chess, then the moves of Conqueror will be very simple, like chess or go. Allusions to real-life events will be rare and only made on the meta-level, as personal pet names or scholarly names for strategems and situations that occur in Conqueror, like the name for the Sicilian Defense or the Scotch Game. But none of the funky names you hear for things that happen in chess are actually rules of chess -- they're things that people who play chess use to describe things that happen in chess, and any one person who plays chess as a hobby can happily ignore the scholarship behind chess and just play a fun and skillful game based on the knowledge of how pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, queens and kings move.
ArcTan 07-09-07, 10:16 PM	Can you really claim you don't know the strategies behind: D-day? Waterloo? Gulf War I & II? Afghanistan? Opium Wars? Whether overtly military in nature or not, most everyone knows enough about history to make an interesting game. A person who has studied Khovarian Warfare would of course be much better at the game... but since that'd be represented by Knowledge (history) that's no problem. Once I get Forge of War myself (only glanced at a friend's copy) I'll use the dates in there to make a rough out-line of an actual game, and once I work out the kinks I might even post it here. The only board games where actually having an in-depth knowledge of military history would help you win the board game would be a wargaming geek's highly simulationistic wargame (the kind where each turn takes ten minutes and you play with a zillion different pieces on a super-complex hex grid). Even then it's questionable. That's just it. I don't actually know that much about D-Day, Waterloo, the Battle of Baghdad, or the Opium Wars. Hell, I'm not even sure my friends who are into military history know that much about them -- how much can you actually know from reading books? I do know how to play chess. My knowledge of chess is actually quite a bit better than my knowledge of real-life warfare, since my knowledge of chess is based on firsthand experience. If I were to make some comparison between a game of chess and some real-life situation -- like developing a knight into a well-supported outpost deep in my opponent's kingside and calling it a "Cuban Missile Crisis" -- I'm doing nothing but making a cute poetic reference to make my chess playing seem more interesting. In no way did knowing what the Cuban Missile Crisis was actually help me make that move. It's the opposite -- I know how chess works so I knew that would be a good move, and then there was a dramatic event in history that appears superficially similar to that move that let me quote it. But there's no one-to-one mapping between the chess game and real life history that makes that comparison useful. In fact, crappy stupid newbies at games are the ones who try to quote maxims from Sun Tzu's The Art of War (one of the most woefully misunderstood books in history) or "lessons from World War II" to generate "universal strategic maxims" that they try to use to play games well and miserably fail -- because there is no such thing as a universal strategic maxim and games are fundamentally different from real life. (I mean, as an example, does my little "Cuban Missile Crisis" then require a John Kennedy-like response from my opponent? What would that even entail? Would he put pressure on my knight hoping I would withdraw it? In many chess situations, that would be exactly the wrong thing to do, because unlike the Cold War, I have no reason, in a chess match, to want to do anything but try to win the game.)
ArcTan 07-09-07, 10:21 PM	By the way, just as a tidbit, in real life Napoleon Bonaparte loved playing chess, but was widely known to be terrible at it.
Need_A_Life 07-10-07, 07:33 AM	I guess we disagree... I see conqueror as a game that commoners might understand the basic principles of, but where only academics would have a chance at playing a decent game. I am getting pictures of a group of Rekkenmark students contesting against a group of Zilargo gnomes, each with one of their number having their noses buried in books throughout the entire game, pointing out little-heard of tactics to their teamleader.
ArcTan 07-10-07, 06:03 PM	I guess we disagree... I see conqueror as a game that commoners might understand the basic principles of, but where only academics would have a chance at playing a decent game. I am getting pictures of a group of Rekkenmark students contesting against a group of Zilargo gnomes, each with one of their number having their noses buried in books throughout the entire game, pointing out little-heard of tactics to their teamleader. It's not the game being hard I object to, it's that the game's rules have any sort of one-to-one correspondence to real military events. Chess isn't really an easy game. To play a game that's truly "decent" -- no obvious errors -- you need to spend a lot of time playing it. To actually play a game against someone who's studied the game and have any chance of winning you must study the game yourself. However, chess is still a game where what you have to understand in order to play chess is chess itself. Chess is not a game where knowing real-life things about military history is of any direct value whatsoever when playing chess. There's no such thing as a game where real-life knowledge of military history is somehow useful in playing the game, unless the game is Trivial Pursuit: Military History Edition.
Darth Syntax 07-11-07, 02:28 AM	I agree with ArcTan than Conqueror should be a game in the style of our own classic abstract strategy games (Chess, Go, Pente, Chaturanga, and the like) rather than something in the manner of a war game. Given the name of the game, I imagine that there is an element of territorial control (a bit like Go) but we also have references to pieces that are physically different (like in chess) so what Conqueror might be, conceptually, is the love-child of European Chess and Go. I've been trying to work out the rules for such a game (as well as the pieces) but I've not gotten very far as of yet.
Need_A_Life 07-11-07, 04:10 PM	...and why were we discussing this again? We clearly disagree and neither you people or I am likely to back down, so let's just agree to disagree, shall we?