Drums of War: Conquest
- Board's Eye View
- Oct 27
- 3 min read
If you've previously heard Eclipse sounding the Drums of War, that's because they published Drums of War: Enclave in 2023. Drums of War: Conquest then is a sequel. It's a standalone two-player and solitaire game, and you're at no disadvantage if you've never played Enclave, but if you have Enclave then you can combine the two games to create a three- and four-player game.
Drums of War is a fantasy wargame; in Conquest, it's combat between a Dwarf army and the army of the Undead. It's essentially a card game where each player has their own discrete deck but it comes with a battlefield board that's helpful in laying out cards that can be deployed to any of five positions, plus tokens to remind you of card effects that modify other cards' attack and defence stats.
Players start off by choosing their Hero. Each faction comes with four different Hero cards, adding to this game's replayability because each Hero has their own stats and abilities and so plays quite differently. The main way of winning Drums of War is by reducing to zero the health of your opponent's Hero. You do this by placing out attacking cards, but before they can target your enemy Hero they first have to eliminate any troops (cards) in their immediately opposing rank (hence each side's five battlefield positions).
This is very much a hand management game. Players have a hand of five cards and they take turns deploying a card; tho' you can pass if you are unwilling or unable to deploy all your cards. The majority of cards - including some of the Hero cards - have a cost to deploy them. That means to place out a card, you have to discard the requisite number of cards. Cards are usually discarded from your hand but certain cards require discards to be taken from the top of your draw deck. Cards that represent units defeated in battle go to a separate pile that can be recycled when your draw deck is exhausted but cards removed from play to pay for deployment are ordinarily out of the game - tho' some cards have the special ability of being able to recover a card from the removed pile. Card attrition has to be carefully managed because the other way of winning is if your opponent is unable to replenish their hand back up to five cards. We've had some exciting games where one player has gone all-in with an aggressive blitz in an attempt to overwhelm their opponent and kill their Hero, while the other player has focused instead primarily on defence and holding out for a card-attrition victory...
Eclipse, and designer Proyecto Enigma, have done a very good job with the production of Drums of War. The art from Lara Barón Ortega is suitably evocative, but we were particularly impressed by the clarity of the iconography. For example, a simple symbol on each military unit card shows at a glance whether the unit can direct their attack just straight ahead or whether it can attack units in adjacent ranks or those anywhere on the battlefield. It all feels intuitively obvious, so, refreshingly, this isn't a game where players will feel the need constantly to reference the rulebook during play.
Members of the Board's Eye View team have mostly played individual games of Drums of War but the rules suggest the option of playing as a campaign game using a different Hero each time...
