Hoplomachus: Victorum Made Me Very Tired | Review

this is hoplomacus victorum a one player only game of gladiatorial combat where you try to outwit a computer made out of plastic marble and swimsuit material in a series of preposterous confrontations that ask you to come up with intensely complicated tactical Solutions only to be thwarted by a mechanism that I affectionately refer to as dice bullets Dozer I'm not gonna lie hypnocus victorum frustrated me it frustrated me so much I wanted to write a book called my poker chips have no mouth and they must scream but here's the thing hoblomacus is a game system that's been around since 2012 and the people who love it they really love it and if you're one of them that's great I can sort of see why I think but I don't think that it aged well and if you're new to this game and you get yourself a copy of this needlessly expensive box in all honesty you're probably gonna end up hating it so Vesuvius is erupting and historically that's not always been great but wait I've apparently we stopped it but I only made Pluto upset no not that Pluto not that one either I mean Hades the Hellenic god of roguelike video games and then Pluto said okay you've got one year after that I'll make it erupt even bigger or killing everyone in the world unless you kill all of my Luckys and then also me in which case I won't do it anymore if you think this story sounds like balls you would be right but we can't talk about that right now because it messes with the flow of the video first I have to tell you how the game works so how do we kill Pluto again not the dog well before we take on the big boy we need to beef up via a series of gladiator combats in various Arenas how many times do we need to combat good question there isn't like a set number but on average you will find goons for about 35 to 40 times which I guess is great if you really like this game I'm not going to sugarcoat it the structure and pacing of a plummikers is not its strongest suit the game is split into four acts each Act comprised of 12 weeks culminating in a boss battle and when I say boss battle I mean that three quarters of those boss battles aren't really boss battles on each week you will take this real gold metal token very classy and move it on this map printed on your neoprene playing board along barely perceptible travel lines because it turns out when you print something faint or neoprene you can barely see it who knew I did I knew that the locations you travel to will determine what kind of encounter you might have if you visit an opportunity location you don't have a fight you just grab an opportunity card that could later become something cool like a unique unit or a new ability if you fulfill its requirements if you travel to a Bloodshed event you have a good old-fashioned fight right where every move matters because what happens in Bloodshed stays in Bloodshed and what I mean by that is that if your units die then they get permanently killed and finally we have sport which is itself split into three more types of events sparring King of the Hill and Capture the Flag the Romans were really into Unreal Tournament it was a whole thing I do not like sport but also in this game sport is what we in England called a cheeky where it's all like look at me I'm like Bloodshed but no one dies it's easier everyone's having a nice time a spa what's wrong with a spa a convenient way to restock on some eggs if you ask me there's an irony to sporting events being non-lethal because it is through them that oblongachus trips over itself and falls down on its own sword let me show you what I mean let's pretend you're about to start a fight doesn't really matter whether it's Bloodshed or sport the first thing you need to do is determine your enemy's lineup which will most likely consist of a local unit like Steve from down the chip shop and some out of town is like Mary from Norwich because everyone around these parts knows Steve he has the Home Advantage what does that mean well remember moving that classy Camp token the map in hublomicus is split into regions what region your event is located in determines what arena you'll fight in and these are just zany if you're fighting in the Amazon home turf the entire Battlefield is littered with these swinging columns moving back and forth constantly displacing units fighting in this arena is like watching The Gladiator directed by Laurel and Hardy you set yourself up in advantageous positions just for the battlefield to completely rearrange yourself the next turn whereas if you're fighting in the arena of the new Argonauts you'll find weapon racks with bonus dice step on one of them and you're rolling an extra one of these what's so zany about that um did I mention that all of the units in this Arena start Shackled next to each other only able to move in a sort of swinging around on a short leash fashion playing in this arena is like dropping your remote into that gap between the wall and the sofa and trying to reach it without standing up if only you could just but you can't and oh then if one of the units in a pair dies then the other unit has to be immediately teleported back to the start to be Shackled up to the next partner that comes out but if you're all the enemies lineup contain local units they get advantages fighting in those Arenas Amazonian units for example get the flying ability gracefully gliding Through The Swinging columns whereas new Argonauts get perfect strike doubling their damage if all their dice come up as hits I hope I made it clear that each arena is a tactical puzzle you have a feature you have units figure out where to move them to get an advantage but that's just where the puzzle begins oh look a double-sided A4 sheet of rules with columns what's all this then oh nothing don't worry it's just a reference sheet for thousands and thousands of combinations of abilities your units could have and not just any abilities ability is not potentially interact with other unit abilities or the current Arena or any other Myriad of factors that come into play in hoblomacus during each fight units get deployed one by one first the enemy puts the top unit in the lineup into play when a unit is deployed they have a sort of Summoning Sickness to borrow a magic the Gathering term they can't move or attack or do anything then you pick a unit from your camp and deploy it after that the enemy deploys the second unit and then the first unit can move attack do all the things then you get to go again and so on let's pretend that we are in the atlanteans arena the big feature here is this trident chip placed in the middle whoever moves onto the chip first picks up the Trident then that unit instead of doing a regular attack can throw the frighten at anyone on the board dealing two damage I now have to get up and pick up that poker chip now let's say that the first enemy unit to come out is a reptilian a slow lumbering defensive scaly Beefcake first then they're just going to sit there second hand they'll inch one hex forward then third turn finally they'll reach the Trident except oops it's not even there anymore because on my first turn I choo choo chose a fast unit with the tactician ability which lets it move on the turn that it is deployed meaning it not only already has the Trident but it's already moved back with it ready to lob it at anyone's face if they dare come close now imagine that the first unit my enemy deployed was not the plodding Griptilian it was retiarius also a fast unit also has tactician that means that before anything else happens in this game red tiarius will casually stroll up to the Trident pick it up and then wait for me to deploy my first unit skewering it as soon as it appears which requires an entirely different set of tactics instead of deploying the tactician I might opt to go for a high hit point Defender a sacrificial unit that will hopefully shrug up some of those hits before my other units can get on the board and do their job or if I'm feeling a little bit cheeky I might deploy an Archer who has the first strike ability meaning that as soon as they appear on the board they can immediately shoot at range hopefully taking out the low hit point tactician in one attack and if that wasn't enough and bag units you're going to place in the lineup the first local enemy is always visible on the stack letting you know how the battle will start so if I'm fighting in lamosha I look to the motion stack I see the first unit is a Defender style unit and I know this won't be an aggressive start but whilst the first unit is drawn from the local unit stack the others are usually drawn from a bag and here honestly here literally Anything Can Happen the bag starts with a smattering of neutral chips basic archetypal units that aren't particularly threatening but each time you defeat an enemy and that's neutral or local you drop that enemy into the bag meaning that as the game goes on after every fight and remember I did say there's like 35 to 40 of them this bag grows and grows and grows a Katamari of colored poker chips each with abilities varied and claustrophobic making these fights an unpredictable assortment of the fact that you have to understand on an innate level to even begin to try to solve these puzzles so far I've been describing what I imagine sounds quite compelling right a carousel of randomly generated turn-based tactical combat puzzles much in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or into the bridge but I've been also this describing the platonic ideal of what this design wants to be the sales pitch rather than how this game actually plays out I know it's board game reviewer 101 to compare a tactical Arena game to chess but indulge me here just a little bit I'm only using chess as an analogy to make my point approachable so chess has a symmetrical board right the same board in every game it also has symmetrical armies always working by the same rules yet the number of strategy guides published on chess easily outnumbers the entire works of Shakespeare by like times a hundred people study just the opening moves for that game for their entire lives now randomized chess into eight different Arenas 50 different units I didn't even tell you that each event card adds rules for every fight now you begin to approach the depth that oblongus tries to create the rulebook for this unencumbered Indulgence numbers at 40 pages and that doesn't even contain the rules for all the unit abilities nor the rules for how each Arena Works your first experience after tackling this manual and then sitting down to play will look something like this you'll assemble your battle double triple check your enemy lineup and then you'll assemble the arena based on this brochure and you're like oh okay I just move attack what's so difficult about this and then you realize you didn't account for like six to nine different abilities all your units are dead from a rules red con to even begin to approach this platonic ideal you'll have to try fail Die Repeat you'll believe it's just to observe why everything is collapsing all of the time if playing solo games can feel a little bit like playing against the computer then playing hoploma because Victorian feels like watching two computers Pelt each other with poker chips and then come to an agreement that the meat computer loses because it doesn't know what it's doing then it's a question of endurance a complicated game well no I've played a lot of complicated games that are great remember don't expose I have just analogies is 101 then blaming it all on the dice is pretty much baby's first board game review but that's not gonna stop me the dice in this game really do what's a good word suck let's say you come to grips with the gargantuan volume of abilities and how they impact each Arena figure out good opening moves that might reward you or it might not matter at all I've had fights where I literally couldn't kill a single enemy unit because the way the dice work is that you look at the poker chip and then you roll the dice that are pictured on it and then any sword that comes up on them is a hit and that's it that's the dice mechanism no mitigation no rerolls no symbol to convert into a hit nothing any tactical decision you've pieced together has the potential to fall apart because you roll an oops what happens next again nothing your situation simply sucks these dice are a pass fail mechanism in a system that doesn't need a pass fail mechanism if this was an x-com like video game where the computer does all the rules and setup for you sure but in a system that asks you to understand it on such an intricate level I'm sort of flabbergasted by how uninteresting and punitive and random the resolution Works frankly it doesn't deserve a better criticism than these dies are stupid which begs the question why well it turns out that once you do understand what this game wants out of you once you learn all of the opening moves the these dice rolls are the only thing that give it any kind of variability or difficulty or these expansive rules and abilities are just set dressing for roller six win a cookie hi Mark and that begs another question Edgar you told me that there are people who love this game why do they love it then well I think this game appeals to people who like to observe things happen who like to delve into the convolution and that convolution produces story but as an active participant I'm not getting much out of it okay so you roll some dice they come up bad and so what then you just lose well no remember hey play in four acts true Roman tragedy to propel you along the vicissitudes of the Fates is your hero it doesn't matter how many of your units die as long as your hero survives you can keep going you can even call it quits on events if you feel like it's taking the turn for the worse and you don't even have to deploy your hero but unlike other units who just reset their health at the end of every fight your hero's health is tracked permanently meaning each hit smarts meaning that it's entirely plausible that your hero might start a fight with just their last hit point and immediately run away to hide in the corner and then spend the entire battle there so then you lose if your hero dies strangely no you start the game with Aid blessings each time your hero loses their last hit point simply erase a blessing and reset their health to full it's like starting the game with eight lives except if you save up your lives for the last boss fight you can then spend them to significantly impair it the more lives you didn't lose the easier the ultimate fight which finally brings us to Sport and the poker chip that broke the board game reviewers back like I mentioned sporting events are non-lethal if your unit dies they just go back to the camp ready for the next fight you are limited by the event as to how many units you can deploy but otherwise it's pretty low stakes except for the Tribune each sporting event you have to select one enemy unit as Tribune in sparring events it's the first unit in the lineup whereas in King of the Hill and capture the flag events you actually get to choose which of them gets this special chip the champion the Tribune is a special unit because the local crowd likes them they don't want you to hurt them so if you want to you can take them out but then your hero's health is immediately reduced to one even if they are not deployed make sense no it's complete gibberish first of all why do I get to select which unit is the Tribune imagine a crowd cheering wheel like we like who do we like I don't know that one yay wait who's that one again I get it if thematically sporting events were lethal like oh don't kill our champion or whatever but no you just have to pick someone who can't lose out of a random assortment that has no meaning to the crowd thematics aside this creates such stupid rules wrinkles in the game Let's Pretend You Picked a hero that has retaliate anytime they get hit the attacker suffers back one damage let's also Pretend We're Playing a king of the hill event where we have to land on the designated spots in the arena if our unit ends our turn there we score a point score six points we win the event how these battles shake out sometimes not always sometimes is that you dispatch all the non-tribune enemies and then you move your hero and park them in the scoring spot and then just sit there for six rounds whilst the Tribune hits your hero every turn you can't really attack them so you just roll dice to see how much you're gonna get hurt but if your hero or unit that's being attacked has retaliated remember I mentioned this ability before because it's present on like a quarter of these chips then by hitting that unit with retaliate the Tribune will literally defeat themselves and reduce your hero's Health to one making this entire rigmarole of not killing them pointless did we learn something sure we learned not to have a hero with retaliate or not to deploy the hero on these types of events or not to deploy units with retaliate in these types of events was it fun learning that this isn't even the most annoying thing that can happen to you in hopalama because arbitrary it's just the one that made me go enough but I suspect that if you get this play this persevere try and master it something will happen along the way in fight 20 30 35 that will just make you nope out of it is it a deep challenging intricate game sure the BGG buzzwords were never in question is it paste well structured well does it feel rewarding forget about it the entire campaign is so drawn out that the rewards feel meager beyond belief and thus you trundle from Arena to Arena ending each Act with a Primus fight that has a slightly more annoying enemy unit but otherwise feels exactly the same as the fights before it there are in fact eight actual bosses in the game the interesting fights but you pick only one as a reward for persevering with this for what 10 12 hours of mediocre fights it's like the structure came to accommodate the rules but people don't like rules they like good structure and even if you think this is the experience for you publishership Theory games who sent us this copy has a catalog of games that are just a Stones throw away from this design wise but so much more compelling both too many bones and Cloud Spire are better solo designs that literally do the same thing just battles with poker chips with the Myriad abilities too many bones is strikingly close in fact randomly composed battles changing rules but the advancement is compelling and the dice are actually interesting oblamicus victorum is great for precisely one group of people existing fans of oblongers for anybody else there is nothing here does look pretty though with its mountains of plastic marble colored plastic very Roman Chic I am kidding this actually does feel very convenient to play you usability is the one thing this game does great and that's the entire review for hoblomacus victorum at which point you might be saying Africa you didn't even mention that there's another game obnormack is remastered which can combine together with victorum this one's not solo that one's solo they both can join what about this one well you're gonna have to wait because we're gonna review it on our podcast called Talk cardboard so for now just type in tool cardboard into your podcast device and then just wait until that episode drops you might have to wait a little bit longer so why don't go support us on patreon that's what you could do right now now

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 52,905

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, susd, watch it played, dice tower, shut up and sit down, solo game, single player, solo, hoplomachus, victorum, remastered, chip theory games, plastic, poker chips, heavy, complicated, bad, hard, rules

Id: V8H6nzQh3GU

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023